Category: Metablogging

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0% Content, 100% Lazyweb

I take pride in keeping my blog mostly lazyweb free, unlike some formerly awesome bloggers that I know. But mostly is mostly, I am not immune to the lure of letting my readers doing my research for me.

It looks to me like I can get a better deal than the one that my current hosting provider, Zipa.com is giving me. My monthly fee is only $10, but I get charged $1/gig for traffic over 10 gigs, $5 a month for shell access (that’s ridiculous) and $2 per month for an extra MySQL database. “Sweet Dreams” deal from Dreamhost looks like a pretty good alternative. Moving all my stuff is a bit of a hassle, so, before I move, any opinions?

Oh, also, my bank, Chase, is totally ripping me off percentage-wise. What do y’all think about ING Direct?

Um, also is anyone aware of a good deal on a Treo 650 with Verizon service (I already have a Verizon account, I hate them, but Verizon reception in NYC is better than any other carrier’s ).

[Update]
Thank you for all your responses. I decided to go with Dreamhost and ING Direct. If anyone knows about a good Verizon Treo deal, please let me know.

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IHA: I Heart Acronyms

I am reading blogs with bloglines.com aggregator these days. I have four categories of blogs there : FIMB, PIMB, RB and LJ.

FIMB stands for Famous Incontinent and Mostly Boring. These are “A-list” blogs like Scobelizer, which are updated with the frequency of bunny poop and are so full of mentions of wiki, podcasting and other buzzwords that it’s not even funny. Still, amongst bunny pooplets there are often interesting links. FIMBS rarely generate original content, but mostly comment on what’s going on. Being gadflies they do that pretty well.

PIMB stands for Pompous Incontinent Multiauthor Blogs like Gothamist. These are usually for-profit blogs with several authors that post even more frequently than FIMBs. There’s mindless link and meme propagation galore, but with a twist. First of all they often have a unifying topic, like NYC or gadgets or politics. Then there’s the attempt to emulate print journalism with things like editorials. The most bizarre trait of some PIMBS is when different authors start to express opinions on behalf of the blog : “Gothamist will go back to finding baseball kinda boring” or “All Gothamist can say is we can’t wait to see Douche or Turd”. My guess is that PIMBs happen when a couple of IMBs or FIMBS get together. I separated PIMBS because they are not as boring as FIMBS, but left unchecked they fill my reading with buzz and white noise.

RB is a set of regular blogs, authors of which make well crafted and original posts. There are some FIMBsh blogs lumped in there, but those usually don’t have the most annoying traits of FIMBs. LJ is a set of all of my livejournal reading.

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Deadprogrammer.com Update

Last couple of weeks were rather stressful for me, thus no posts lately. I would like to break that non-posting streak and work on my site a bit as well.

First order of business – following antonme’s suggestion I installed MTLJPost plugin which will duplicate my posts in my Livejournal making dprogrammer_rss unnecessary. I will be turning off MT’s commenting feature and directing all commenters to Livejournal. I am too lazy to install the threaded comments hack in MT, and there seems to be almost no comment spam in Livejournal. I still need to do a lot of work on MT templates – the layout I have right now is rather ugly and not very usable.

I pretty much achieved what I wanted on the ad front – in about 30 days I’ve earned $7.99 with 1.8% clicthrough rate and $2.49 CPM. That’s a Fair und Balanced newspaper for every weekday! CPM by the way is a mysterious marketing term which means Cost Per Mil, where Mil (or Roman numeral M) stands not for Million but for for 10^3.

This cornucopia of revenue should be of course offset by my hosting costs, taxes and a purchase of $227.00 (+$5 s&h) Gretag McBeth Eye-One (aka i1) monitor color calibration thingy from an advertiser that google ads showed in my post. This might actually be the first time I ever bought anything from an online ad. Oh, Eye-One is outstanding. I will write a review sometime, but it’s definitely the way to go.

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Top 10 Reasons Why Deadprogrammer Left Livejournal

1) Old entries are hard to get to: “back n entries” works only for a while, after that you need to go day by day. Which makes paging through a blog that is not updated daily a nightmare.

2) Can’t run ads.

3) The degenerate “friends” system with it’s stupid add/remove politics. It’s better to read stuff in an aggregator.

4) Livejournal is widely known for drama and teenage angst. Having a Livejournal blog is similar to having an AOL email – it doesn’t matter that the famous hacker JWZ has one. People will still think that you are a loser.

5) No categories. You have to keep a separate journal if you want to give your readers an ability to read only stuff that interests them. I want to write some entries in Russian, but do not want to have a separate journal for that. Also some of my readers might be interested in my photos, but not in what I think about Livejournal.

6) Constant outages, lost posts, slowness and other technical fun. What else can you expect if you share your servers with a million teenagers frantically refreshing their “friends lists”.

7) No trackback.

8) Image hosting that is still in beta, but a fully released “phonepost” system that instead of using MP3 format uses OGG. I spent a couple of hours trying to find a player that would actually play these files when I click on them, but for the most part miserably failed. Those are a couple of hours of my life that I’ll never get back. I mean, what the hell is wrong? You click on a file, the player opens, but doesn’t play anything. You click play button – nothing. You click again…. Arrrgh, it’s driving me nuts!

9) No web logs – you have no idea how many people actually read your stuff. The only indicators that you might have are how many “friends” you have and how many comments you get (both of which are poor indicators). Since you can’t run JavaScript, you can’t have a reliable third party tracker either. I’ve had a visitor from northropgrumman.com at my new shiny (well, not so shiny yet) MT based site, and I would not have know that if it was still at Livejournal. Hey, Northrop Grumman reader, who are you?

10) If you set an article with a future date in Livejournal, instead of showing up if your readers lists normally, it sometimes disappears. There’s a bug there somewhere.

Livejournal does have a superior comment system, but since I don’t get too many comments it doesn’t matter that much.

Did you expect the Spanish Inquisition? No? Well, nobody does. But it brings you 11th reason:

11) No integrated search.