Josh's Weblog

Cuss-o-meter

Created by OnePlusYou

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Tuesday, Apr 1 2008 02:20 PM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

The Long and Short of It (Jakob Nielsen on Article Length)

Jakob Nielsen has done some interesting research and modeling on how users read websites in his latest article, “Long vs. Short Articles as Content Strategy.” The hypothesis is that a mix of long and short content on a website is more interesting to a reader than articles of all the same size, long or short.

I wonder how this may relate to the latest trend of microblogging such as the twitter feed I have put in my profile box on the right. Now all the items I might consider that were one-liners I put there and I save longer issues for blog entries. Upshot is that I send out updates a little more often but full blog posts are likely to come more slowly.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Thursday, Nov 15 2007 06:36 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Reading Level

I ran my blog through the program over at Critics Rant, and this is what I got:

Just like the folks at Outside the Beltway (hat tip!), I'm not sure what to make of that.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Thursday, Nov 8 2007 02:58 PM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

New MT, New Host

This is a test to see if MT 4.01 is working, and to see if I'm up and going at Dreamhost.

Update: Looks like we got it working. There may be some more bumps in the road when we move DNS over later, but the blog is up. Yes, I know commenting and trackbacks are broken, but I will approve comments and trackbacks that look right. The error page discourages spammers.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Tuesday, Oct 30 2007 02:06 PM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Upgraded to MT-3.35

Another release of Movable Type, but the bug fixes are pretty cosmetic. They really rolled a release because of a template change? This template issue also only affects Internet Explorer, which I seldom if ever use. C'est la vie, I bumped it up.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Thursday, Apr 19 2007 09:59 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Upgraded to MT-3.34

While I did not experience any XSS attacks, I have upgraded to MovableType 3.34 to avoid them in the future. There doesn't seem to be much more in this new version other than some extra plugins in the package.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Thursday, Jan 18 2007 12:02 PM  |  Permalink  |  2 comments  |  No trackbacks

Dancing Cowboy Ads Revisited

According to the New York Times, we actually like the dancing cowboy ads. I disagree. They attract our attention, but I don't think we like them.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Thursday, Jan 18 2007 10:02 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Snap Preview Anywhere

I added the Snap Preview Anywhere script to my pages here today. It's a great Javascript thumbnailer for external links.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Thursday, Dec 7 2006 09:35 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

min-width, max-width, and IE7

I made max-width on main entries 45em, min-width big enough for my ads at the bottom, and got rid of the Javascript to make IE support these css attributes now that IE7 is ready for the general public.

Please upgrade to IE7 if you haven't. (And Firefox 2 for that matter.)

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Wednesday, Oct 25 2006 10:26 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Dancing Cowboy Mortgage Ad

It looks as though I'm not the only one that hates the dancing cowboy mortgage ad. Like the X10 ads that made sure I would never buy their product because of the obvious voyeurism intended with X10 cameras, I would never refinance my mortgage with an organization that pushes ads with this obnoxious technique. Popovers and page peels are also on my hate list.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Wednesday, Oct 25 2006 07:43 AM  |  Permalink  |  4 comments  |  No trackbacks

Dumped Individual Technorati Link

Technorati, which gets pinged by me for every post as required, with a valid embed below, thinks this blog hasn't been updated in over 100 days. I've dumped the individual entry link from each entry. Maybe now it will think I'm a good boy and recognize my updates.

I even did the rel="bookmark" for permalinks they suggested!

--jrp

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Monday, Oct 16 2006 12:28 PM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Fixing Site Styles

Tired of this site looking like crap in Internet Explorer, I figured out how to force IE to put rounded corners and support CSS max-width. It was more effort than I'd like to admit. As my copyright box now says, I have two sources to thank:

I have a few things to tweak still, but the core work is done. Of course, you have to have Javascript enabled to see the effects of these two scripts, but it degrades nicely if you don't trust it.

Update: Misty says I should do a “cut off” corner style in honor of Battlestar Galactica. Hrm.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Thursday, Oct 12 2006 10:54 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Honey Traps for Bloggers

The steps.

1. Set up a nice little blog.
2. Break the comments submission portion of the pages so it cannot successfully post a comment.
3. Wait for the script kiddies to figure out the name of your submission script and post directly.
4. Automatically ban, junk, sue, or otherwise cajole any poster that manages to send you a comment, because they cheated.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Thursday, Oct 12 2006 09:24 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Style changes

Yes, I changed the style of pun.org again. I am trying to keep the main articles from being more than three alphabets wide. Since I let people scale fonts it's been a bit of a challenge. Here's a guideline:

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

As you can see, I actually went a little wider than this at “60em” for a entry.

Update: 60em was still too wide, so I went to 50. Feels a little funny to me, but I surf at 1600x1200.

Another update: Yes, I know the CSS property “max-width” doesn't work with Microsoft Internet Explorer. Standards compatibility is not something I expect from that browser. The hard part was making sure my style changes degraded gracefully for “differently abled” browsers.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Saturday, Sep 30 2006 12:07 PM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Bumped to MT 3.32

Rolled up to Movable Type 3.32, which fixes a bunch of bugs that I don't recall running into myself.

Been away from blogging lately, although there's been plenty I should have talked about. However, other people have had the time to go into more depth. For example, HotAir has covered the bogus ambulances in Lebanon story, people are tracking down the secret hold on a bill requiring Congress to have a publicly searchable online database of spending bills, the two kidnapped journalists in Palestine were released after a gunpoint conversion to Islam, a reversed position on planets leading to the demotion of Pluto and the failed apotheosis of Ceres, Charon, and Xena, and a giant storm in the blogosphere over fauxtography.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Tuesday, Aug 29 2006 06:56 AM  |  Permalink  |  1 comment  |  No trackbacks

Movable Type 3.31

I've bumped up to MovableType 3.31. I need to update my templates (in a big, big way) to take advantage of the new features (like tags), but I have it running well enough to survive right now.

Before I upgraded I needed to trim my list of plugins and in the process I think I correct some nagging problems with junk postings getting published. Maybe that will help my spam situation a little.

My biggest change to the content will involve moving all postings to single categories and expanding the use of tags. Also, the search capabilities here need a boost, especially as I near 900 entries in the blog.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Tuesday, Jul 18 2006 12:39 PM  |  Permalink  |  1 comment  |  No trackbacks

Carnivals

Carnival of Cordite #60 is up at Resistance is futile!

Carnival of the Cats #114 is up at Niobium.

Carnival of Liberty #47 is up at New World Man.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Tuesday, May 30 2006 07:31 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Movable Type 3.3 Beta Coming Next Week

The beta test for Movable Type 3.3 is expected next week, and today the folks at Six Apart released a feature list.

The feature that interests me the most is adding templates to search results. I have long despaired that my search results page looks very little like my other pages.

What I'm surprised not to see is a comprehensive spam control solution. Everyone on the web is dealing with spam in a variety of forms (and this blog gets plenty of comment and trackback spam attempts) and anything that MT can do to remove the daily drudgery of deleting the more astute attempts would be great. I think my provider would appreciate it too.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Friday, May 26 2006 11:47 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Template Changes, Icons

So today I did a little tweaking.

First, there was a deal on blogging icons at IconBuffet so I have integrated those into my design.

Also, I found the new Calibri font online (as part of a WindowBlinds theme!), so I have enabled its use in the blog. If you don't have it the CSS should fall back to Arial or Helvetica. It's a little smaller than the Helvetica, so the right side strip metadata uses a little less space.

Update: I also got rid of a potentially annoying performance-sucking JavaScript issue.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Wednesday, May 24 2006 09:15 AM  |  Permalink  |  1 comment  |  No trackbacks

Carnival of the Cats #113

Carnival of the Cats #113 is up at IMAO.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Monday, May 22 2006 07:12 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Carnival of Cordite #59

Carnival of Cordite #59 is up at Resistance is futile!

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Monday, May 15 2006 03:31 PM  |  Permalink  |  1 comment  |  No trackbacks

Carnival of the Cats #112

Carnival of the Cats #112 is up at sbpoet's Watermark.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Sunday, May 14 2006 07:14 PM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Carnival of the Cats #111

Carnival of the Cats #111 is up at pages turned.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Monday, May 8 2006 07:58 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Time To Stop Using A9

Over the weekend, Amazon's A9 search engine switched from using Google to Microsoft's search.

While I enjoyed the Amazon.com discounts because I used A9, I guess I need to stop now. For one thing, I lost image search. For another, I like Google and dislike Microsoft (as underscored by my recent beta tests of Office Live and Google-hosted email—the Microsoft solution stinks on ice).

I had noticed a difference earlier today, but assumed that the Google interface was broken temporarily. As far as strategic decisions go, I don't fathom this one.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Monday, May 1 2006 04:35 PM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Carnival of the Cats #110

Carnival of the Cats #110 is up at Furry Paws.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Monday, May 1 2006 07:49 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

F-shaped Reading Pattern

Jakob Neilsen has posted research results on the reading patterns of web users confirming something I suspected from my own use of the web, and justifies much of the design I've made for this blog and my web pages.

People who browse the web (and, in my experience, those who browse emails) quickly scan the first two paragraphs horizontally, followed by a quick vertical scan of the left. This must be why I was bothered by having the strip on the side of my content on the left. I lke it much better on the right. On the left it was distracting. For web applications it makes sense to have the toolbar on the left, but most of the time I'd like the margin to be clean.

Also, when I reply to an email I prefer to have a single paragraph of what came before with my response, preferably in a single paragraph, below it. Some people think I'm terse and gruff, but I like to think my email style is quick and to the point. I also don't go for elaborate signatures and I like to trim away as much as possible of previous emails in the thread, reducing my missive to the relevant context.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Thursday, Apr 20 2006 07:25 AM  |  Permalink  |  1 comment  |  No trackbacks

100,000

Late yesterday we passed 100,000 visitors here at my weblog. I'm not sure what the milestone really means, but I guess I should recognize it.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Monday, Feb 20 2006 09:30 AM  |  Permalink  |  1 comment  |  No trackbacks

Carnival of Cordite .45

The Carnival of Cordite .45 is up at Resistance is Futile!

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Friday, Jan 27 2006 05:35 PM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Gun Pictures Are Popular

I get a lot of hits on my website looking for gun pictures, even more than cat pictures or my commentary. Here's a little more for the folks that come here looking for guns!

John McEnroe took the picture, but it's my hands and my Wilson Combat Protector (a very nice 1911, if I say so myself). Notice all the wear and tear on the poor thing as it's my day-to-day carry piece.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging, Guns, Pictures” Tuesday, Jan 24 2006 06:23 PM  |  Permalink  |  5 comments  |  1 trackback

WSJ Launches Law Blog

The Wall Street Journal has launched a law blog. I'll add it to Groklaw, Professor Bainbridge, and the Volokh Conspiracy as a regular source on law and business.

The WSJ law blog is already darn prolific. There's a ton of articles on there from the past few days. Peter Lattman's “Welcome” posting gives an idea of what they will try to do:

Looks like I have more reading to do.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Wednesday, Jan 4 2006 10:54 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

New Category: Business

I looked through my articles and realized I have a theme going, so I've created a “Business” category and moved a few articles to it.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Thursday, Dec 8 2005 10:30 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Carnival of the Cats

The Carnival of the Cats is up at IMAO.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Monday, Nov 28 2005 09:56 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Open?

Compare my copyright (it's at the bottom of the sidebar) with the one from Open Source Media and tell me which one you think is “open.”

(Hat tip to The Modulator who pointed out the OSM copyright.)

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Thursday, Nov 17 2005 05:20 PM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

I missed the Carnival of the Cats

I messed up and missed the Carnival of the Cats this week. Whoops!

That's what I get for being busy.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Monday, Oct 31 2005 12:26 PM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Carnival of the Cats #80

Carnival of the Cats #80 is up at Music and Cats. Church and Snowball got top billing in Sergei's selections.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Sunday, Oct 2 2005 06:59 PM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Memeorandum

Memeorandum has had a interface upgrade, and they added a tech version as well. This particular tool makes it pretty easy to see what people are blogging about. I'm sure I'll look more closely at the tech stuff now.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Tuesday, Sep 13 2005 02:35 PM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

The Interdictor

The Interdictor is blogging from his data center in New Orleans. It's a war zone and it's a good read. It certainly puts the minor troubles of your own life into perspective.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Thursday, Sep 1 2005 04:11 PM  |  Permalink  |  1 comment  |  No trackbacks

What I Don't Like About Podcasts

I love content. I collect books, music, DVDs, and I have a massive list of RSS feeds I look at on a semi-regular basis in my reader. However, I don't have a big pile of podcasts. Podcasts are like blogs, they put out real-time interesting information from a giant variety of diverse sources. However, podcasts are not like web pages, RSS feeds, CDs or books. It's hard to jump to the parts you like or branch out to the parts that you want to dig into. Instead you are stuck to your headphones or listening position to work through the 'cast.

For example, there's a podcast called The Cubicle Escape Pod that I enjoy, but in every episode there are parts I'd like to skip, like the explanation of what the Podcast is, “earbud worthy music” and various other things Tufte would call noise. I work my way through it, but I suspect the episodes don't need to be a half hour or more long. Sure, there's a minor amount of advertisements—I'm willing to suffer through that for good content—but there's other noise that can be trimmed away. Also, I'd sure like to be able to click somewhere and visit a link they're talking about while they're talking about it.

There are other problems with podcasts that are designed poorly. For example, Harvard Business Review puts audio files that are over an hour long. There's less “noise” but there's no way to easily jump to an article you would like to hear, unlike when you read the magazine. I listen to audio books because I have an evil commute, but I only listen to books I like. Why should I have to read all of the articles in HBR? It's impossible to search an audio file for the start of an article you like with an iPod, by the way.

Both of these problems could be mitigated by breaking up the podcasts, I suppose, but sooner or later you have an audio file management problem. Sure, you can arrange multiple things into a playlist, or an album, but multiple files don't download and get integrated into iTunes very well. Heck, I often need to tweak the information associated with files because one week the genre will be “Speech” and another they'll be “Podcast”.

So, Podcasts are young. I hope they clean it up soon. For now they are not as nice as books, magazines, and the web. What I think I'd like is web-based random-access presentations that I can download as a single package and play back on my iPod, my computer, or whatever. Imagine, now, that talk radio gets involved in this so you have real-time, but replay-capable, content-enhanced podcasts, with indexes and time codes so you can tell when it went out over the air. That would be a lot more like blogging and would be a lot more enjoyable for me.

Amazon.com links:

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Sunday, Aug 28 2005 08:53 AM  |  Permalink  |  6 comments  |  No trackbacks

Movable Type 3.2

I just upgraded to Movable Type 3.2 and it was the easiest upgrade yet! The folks at Six Apart are certainly hearing the pain of the users. As for the new features, I'll have to poke around a bit before I start using them.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Friday, Aug 26 2005 10:05 AM  |  Permalink  |  1 comment  |  No trackbacks

Over a year!

Well, I let the anniversary pass earlier this month without noting it, but I should point out that this blog has been around for over a year now. While I've drawn a few flames and a few spammers, I've also drawn some good comments and some interesting readers. I guess I would mark it as a qualified success.

Lately I've lost a lot of steam. I've been buried with things to do with school and work, among other things. I guess I've been on a sort of extended vacation, not posting every day like before.

In celebration of the anniversary, I've updated the style of the site again. I wanted to remove some of the noise from the page and drive focus at the content. Let me know how's it's working out.

Thanks to all my readers. I'm looking forward to another year.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Thursday, Aug 18 2005 08:43 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Poker Spammers Redux

Obviously the the Poker Spammers use google, because they keep trying to post to my previous entry on poker spammers. I get to harvest tones of more patterns to filter and no one gets to suffer here.

I hope that newer versions of MT and Spamlookup continue to up the ante on these jerks, because I have better things to do than filter out their trash.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Friday, Aug 12 2005 02:32 PM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Poker Spammers Return

I don't know if it's because I've been on a hiatus, but the Poker Spammers woke up last night and tried to attack this blog. I'm deleting unapproved moderated comments from these guys about once every ten minutes. I don't know why they use such obviously fake email addresses and try to only comment on old postings. That will never work with the moderation settings I've enabled here.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Thursday, Jun 9 2005 07:53 AM  |  Permalink  |  1 comment  |  No trackbacks

John Hawkins's 25 Pieces of Advice for Bloggers

John Hawkins has posted “25 Pieces of Advice for Bloggers” over at Right Wing News. My favorite is #10:

If you're going to talk about something that everybody else in the blogosphere seems to be talking about, at least try to say something original about it. If you sound just like everybody else, why should anyone come back?

So what's my advice? Learn how to use “cite” and “title” tags, which give relevant information to search engines. Since these are so poorly used on the net a little bit of work can go a long way.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Tuesday, May 10 2005 08:59 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Google Web Accelerator Problems

Google's Web Accelerator, now a closed beta, apparemtly caused problems for a bunch of people recently. The folks over at Geek News Central are upset:

Well you all stepped in a big pile of Horse dung and the flies are following you into the house. Your introduction of WebAccelerator is costing me time, money and valuable statistical data. Where do I sent the bill.

The folks at 37signals are also annoyed:

The accelerator scours a page and prefetches the content behind each link. This gives the illusion of pages loading faster (since they’ve already been pre-loaded behind the scenes). Here’s the problem: Google is essentially clicking every link on the page—including links like “delete this” or “cancel that.” And to make matters worse, Google ignores the Javascript confirmations. So, if you have a “Are you sure you want to delete this?” Javascript confirmation behind that “delete” link, Google ignores it and performs the action anyway.

While there is some debate over the technical merits of whether actions that change the state of things should be done with GET versus POST commands in the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) side of the house, that's besides the point. Other webcrawlers, including Google's own search engine, don't have this problem because they don't surf with the permissions of a trusted user. When someone surfs with Web Accelerator every GET link on their VISA card's web page is surfed while they check their balance and make a web payment.

Most forms are done with POST but what are the chances that someone just used a GET for something simple? Do you want to take that chance?

Google now has a lot of work to do to regain trust from a lot of influencers in the web application side of the world.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Sunday, May 8 2005 08:11 AM  |  Permalink  |  3 comments  |  No trackbacks

Filtering “holdem”

I give up. 50 spams a day with “holdem” in them, so I'm going to block any comment or trackback with that in it, no questions asked.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Tuesday, May 3 2005 07:22 AM  |  Permalink  |  2 comments  |  No trackbacks

Carnivals

The latest carnivals are up:

• Carnival of Cordite (#10 at Resistance is Futile! this week after some hotmail problems with submissions),
• Friday Ark (at The Modulator),
• Carnival of the Cats (#58 at Running Scared and commenting on my “Evil Atticus”) and
• Carnival of the Dogs (at On Dragon's Wing featuring my latest Bingo picture).

Today we hear about a new carnival, the Carnival of Tomorrow. Finally a place for Futurists to congregate! I'll have to think of applying anything forward-looking to them in, ha ha, the future.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Monday, May 2 2005 11:12 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

How Readable Is Josh's Weblog?

Let's test it's readability with the Readability Test from Juicy Studio:

My Fog index falls into the “Most popular novels” category.

My Gunning Fox index indicates an eighth to ninth grade required reading level.

My Flesch Reading Ease falls into the recommended 60 to 70 score.

However, my Flesch-Kincaid reading level is fifth grade!

That's an awful lot of variation. I'll have to look into the statistics behind the numbers…

(Hat tip to Ann Althouse.)

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Saturday, Apr 23 2005 10:18 PM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Blog of the Day

Today Josh's Weblog has been featured as the Blog of the Day.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Thursday, Apr 21 2005 06:35 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Movable Type 3.16 and SpamLookup

I've upgraded to Movable Type 3.16. So far I don't see much that's changed, and I did pull out the “nofollow” plugin immediately. The two changes that interest me the most are

• Made significant improvements to the posting interfaces including numerous bug fixes with QuickPost and hierarchical display of categories
• Implemented better error checking and data validation throughout the program leading to fewer dead-ends and cryptic error messages

I've also heard that there were more security fixes in this latest upgrade. I've certaily been nervous about the security of pun.org running all of this unknown code, but so far things hve been pretty benign, except for the notification hijack we experienced. So changes went into the email notification code on this release, because the patch they released with 3.15 broke a few people.

What's even more exciting to me is my recent installation of SpamLookup. Even Jay Allen has turned off MT-Blacklist and switched. I also turned off MT-DBSL. So far this new tool appears to be working well. Maybe Kira will quit complaining about the server load of my comments script. SpamLookup uses MT-Moderate, so I left that installed.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Monday, Apr 18 2005 05:27 PM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Status Report

Task: Post every day

Current Status:

• April 8
• April 9
• April 10
• April 11
• April 12
• April 13
• April 14

Resolution: Get done with MST 573 work, transition from one job to another at IBM, and get more sleep.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Thursday, Apr 14 2005 11:41 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Spammers are Attacking

I slow down my posting for a few days and the spammers come out of the woodwork. They've been trying pretty hard to get just a single post on here advocating their mortgage broker, or worse.

I've changed what I do at work. Instead of managing a team I'm now managing projects for a much larger team. This is actually a lateral promotion more than increased responsibilty since I don't have to do the “people” thing anymore. My old team has been split across two other managers.

As you might expect, this has made me extremely busy and it cuts down on my opportunities to post. I haven't even read the news in a couple days, let alone seen something worth commenting on. I know my stock price is down and that gas prices are ugly, but that's about it.

However, I haven't let a spam comment or trackback onto the site. They've certainly been trying, hundreds of times a day.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Wednesday, Apr 13 2005 08:41 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

500th Post, Full of Miscellany

I was going to say something pithy or prophetic for my 500th post, and I ended up not posting all weekend. Whoops!

I was pretty heads down getting a lot of work done for school this past weekend. I want MST 573 work to be over now, thank you. Wrote a paper, submitted the draft. Worked on the team project for MST 523. Got my week's worth of work submitted for MST 520 (now all I have to do is keep up with the online conversation).

Far various still-private reasons I did a lot of soul-searching this past weekend, and Misty was a great supporter of my ego. I suspect I was not fun to be around. If there was any doubt, I love you Misty.

At this point I am focused on deadlines, milestones and end dates. My father Barry reminded me that the family needs a "low oil" plan by 2012. We have a windmill but we haven't set it up. The house relies heavily on natural gas now, which, so far, isn't saving us as much as we hoped. Better insulation is required in the attic.

I've been using Basecamp to manage my various little projects around the house and at school. So far it's a great little tool. I recommend it. You can track one project for free with it. They have some new tool called Backpack in development, but there have been no details as to what it might be.

Carnival of the Cats #55 is up at enrevanche. Grandma Wendy's Makiko is in it.

Carnival of the Dogs is up at Mickey's Musings. Bingo is in that.

The Friday Ark at The Modulator features all of the pictures I posted on Friday.

Carnival of Cordite #8 is up at Resistance is futile! I didn't submit anything this time around.

If I missed anything else exciting this weekend, it's not your fault. I was pretty busy.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Monday, Apr 11 2005 07:18 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Neolibertarian Blogroll

I added quite a few more links to the Neolibertarian Blogroll today. There must have been an influx of folks wanting to be involved after the first issue of The New Libertarian went out. Now I have 45 links in that roll.

I still haven't made a blogroll of the McCain-Feingold Insurrection. That's a pretty hefty list too.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Sunday, Apr 3 2005 08:35 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Referrer Spam

Ann Althouse decries referrer spam.

And you check the "Referrals" page, and you see the name of a blog you don't know, so you click on it. But it's one of those automatically updated, machine-made bogus blogs that advertise some damned thing.

There are tools to filter out referrer spam in logs, although I don't use any. I can usually tell when something is bogus and they just want clicks. Partly it's what pages they hit. Partly it's because I saw them earlier when I added them to MT-Blacklist.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Wednesday, Mar 30 2005 07:29 PM  |  Permalink  |  4 comments  |  No trackbacks

Mark Hurd To Head HP

It appears that HP moved quickly and selected NCR CEO Mark Hurd to be it's new leader. I was on the engineers that fought “fight” Mr. Hurd when he headed up the Teradata division of NCR and I worked on Informix Extended Parallel Server. While Informix was absorbed by IBM, I relished outperforming Teradata and touting our more open solutions at every turn.

According to The Wall Street Journal Mr. Hurd is an expert in execution, something HP needs right now:

H-P directors chose Mr. Hurd because he is a strong executive able to improve operations quickly and execute strategy, one person close to the situation said. Also, “he's very, very driven” and “has run a mini H-P,” this person said. BusinessWeek floated Mr. Hurd's name as a possible CEO candidate earlier this week.

Good luck, Mr. Hurd. Cutting costs (only a small piece of “execution”) is not the only challenge at HP right now.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Tuesday, Mar 29 2005 09:27 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Neolibertarian Blog Roll

I fooled around a little with blogrolling.com and threw together a Neolibertarian Network roll that you'll see in the sidebar. I'll try to keep it up to date. I had to wonder whether it should point to the feeds on neolibertarian.net or at the blogs themselves. If decided that if people want to read the feeds, they can click the logo, otherwise they can click the links.

When I get the energy I need to do another one for the McCain Feingold Insurrection.

In other news, I dumped my link to blogspotting. It's clearly been dead for a while now.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Saturday, Mar 26 2005 09:00 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Why We Blog

Most people do not accumulate a body of experience. Most people go through life undergoing a series of happenings, which pass through their systems undigested. Happenings become experiences when they are digested, when they are reflected on, related to general patterns, and synthesized.

(Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky)

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Wednesday, Mar 23 2005 10:58 PM  |  Permalink  |  3 comments  |  No trackbacks

Removed Nofollow, Added MT-Moderate

The Nofollow Plugin for Movable Type was a cute idea while it lasted. However, it didn't seem to cut down on the attempted spam on my blog. I think I would reenable it if I was planning to shut down my blog or leave it unattended for a long period of time, thus inviting spammers. In the meantime, it has messed with the parsing of HTML, messed with the display of trackback pings, and other mayhem. If it was bug free I would have tolerated it more.

Just added to the blog, however, is the MT-Moderate Plugin. This allows me to moderate trackbacks, which is something that was sorely needed in the weeks since my blog was noticed by the spammers. It also automatically moderates comments made to postings more than seven days old. While I do get valid comments on my old postings, it's rare.

My other moderation policies are still in effect. For the most part the only way to post without getting automatically moderated is to have a Typekey identity, and if you leave something icky on my blog with Typekey, then I have a means of getting back to you. My family reads this blog.

Josh Poulson

Posted in category “Blogging” Wednesday, Mar 9 2005 12:22 AM  |  Permalink  |  No comments  |  No trackbacks

Building a New Category “Pictures”

Because I post pictures here, I think I'll add a new top-level “Pictures” category and reassign a few of my previous postings there.

It'll make it possible to dismantle my other picture pages and bring them over.