Dead Programmer's Cafe

Tag: World Wide Web

  • Dirty Money

    Livejournal’s outstanding found_objects community has this gem that is a mix of CSI and Capital 1’s “What’s In Yer Wallet?” commercial.

    Don’t know about you, but I just had to check all the bills in my wallet.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Holy Relevancy, Batman!

    I put in Google Adsense ads ( aka Ads by Goooooogle) hoping that maybe they will compensate me for my almost daily Fair and Balanced newspaper, or maybe even cover the cost of my hosting. I am stoked – practically for the first time ever I’ve seen an ad for something that I could use. More than that, it’s an ad for something that I was desperately searching for and could not find:

    NYC Subway Mosaic To Buy
    Buy restoration mosaic like you see on the walls of the NYC Subway.

    It is way better than I expected:

    “Subway Mosaic Handmade Tile
    This ceramic mosaic comes from a source that has supplied mosaic to a great deal of subway stations in the NYC Subway System. This is the real deal. The clay body is a frost-resistant stoneware body. The glazes are a combination of matte and glossy. You can have a copy of any station in the NYC Subway System made to any size you want. You can even customize the color, if you do not like the original glazes.”

    And the prices are way reasonable – 18 x 28 (from what I understand this is a standard small IRT medallion size) is $285.00! I think my bathroom is going to get one of those.

    The moral of the story – Google ads are worth paying attention to.

  • First Post!

    I finally installed MovableType, converted my Livejournal entries and created a very rough preliminary design featuring a graphic made for me on commission by the very talented Jesse Reklaw of Slow Wave fame.

    The masthead, secondary pages, xml feeds and all the shiny features like categories, pings, trackback, etc still need a lot of work. This is why I suggest you don’t subscribe to XML feeds yet – there likely to be a lot of change in them.

    MovableType has a feature for timing the release of entries that actually works well (unlike Livejournal’s) and since I write posts in bursts on weekends, I’ll try to time them so that they will spread through the week, making Deadprogrammer.com an almost daily blog.

    I have a few dozen topics for posts right now, but I am also working on lostindication.com (my photography portfolio), organizing my notes (of which I have a few notebooks), finishing deadprogrammer.com, working on a few other interesting projects. Since I have a day job, the progress is slow.

  • Two More Random Thoughts

    Don’t know about you, but I am tired of the question “Are you going to buy Google IPO stock”. No. I am not. But hey, I am not an investment expert. Just check out my track record. So I told my plumber, who also asked, – you might be more qualified to judge the merits of purchasing Google stock.

    I think I found a perfect job for me. I could do bubble wrap too.

  • eBookery

    I am going to break my rule of not repeating slashdot news. Why? Because Apple called. They want their ipod ebook back.

    Eink. How the hell can do you pronounce that? Oink? Well, if it’s not vaporware and actually performs I might forgive them this silly name.

    Yeah, the design looks horrible from the first glance, especially in comparison with my beloved Rocket and Softbook. But they have this shiny new screen.

    Check out their management team. Jerry Kaplan is nowhere in sight. Maybe they have half a chance. Also, one of the co-founders clawed his way to a President. They did not make him CEO, so that makes me think that a search for a “professional” CEO is underway.

    Interesting, the entire team except for the CFO majored in chemistry, math, physics or engineering. Even the sales dude. Does a chem major a good sales dude make?

  • Knowledge Worker’s Dream

    I recently remembered the most amazing story that I’ve read 5 or 6 years ago, and my wife found the book that contains it yesterday. The book is called “Fairy Tales For Computers“. , and the story is “The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster.

    The story was written in 1909 and since it’s in public domain now, so the full text of it is online.

    It’s a story of a future in which people live in small apartments underground, all cared for by an almost Matrix-style machine, communicating almost exclusively through telepresence.

    “‘Who is it?’ she called. Her voice was irritable, for she had been interrupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.”
    …
    “Vashanti’s next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? – say this day month.
    To most of these questions she replied with irritation – a growing quality in that accelerated age. She said that the new food was horrible. That she could not visit the public nurseries through press of engagements. That she had no ideas of her own but had just been told one-that four stars and three in the middle were like a man: she doubted there was much in it. Then she switched off her correspondents, for it was time to deliver her lecture on Australian music. “

    Living constantly communicating with hundreds or even thousands of correspondents, looking for and generating “ideas”, being served by and cared for by automatons – isn’t that a knowledge worker’s dream? Are you scared yet? Don’t “accumulations of the last three minutes” strike you familiar? Your inbox, your livejournal “friends” feed?

    Too bad that “A Logic Named Joe” is not out of copyright. These two stories together are an irrefutable proof of time travel. But none of you will read it, so nobody will believe me anyway.

  • Outsiders.

    Do I have any readers outside of Livejournal? Leave me a comment if you are such a reader. Any Microsofties out there?

    P.S. If you need an LJ code, just ask.