aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Saturday, January 06, 2007
Moving to Expression Engine and Network Solutions
I’ve got Expression Engine set up at my new host, Network Solutions; I paid the $50 to have pMachine set it up for me. Well worth it, the install went without a hitch.
Today I’ve got to customize the templates, add custom pages, and move all of the entries from Movable Type. I’ll see shortly how effective the import utility is. I’ve done some testing; it went well. I’ve got my fingers crossed.
I’ll redirect the DNS to Network Solutions later today. I’m not sure how this might affect RSS feeds. Or search engine generated traffic. I assume it will break all old links to my existing posts.
I’ll post again when the transition is complete.
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Me and my blog software. Continued.
My hosting package is up on Saturday, so I decided I’d switch. I am completely satisfied with ICDSoft but they do not offer a package with the bandwidth I need at a reasonable rate. I had done some work with sites hosted by Network Solutions and liked their features and service, so I bought a package there. On Monday night. Not a lot of time.
I had further decided to leave Movable Type. You may remember my post, Hating your blog software. Since May I’ve been having problems, as yet unresolved. I wanted better support than I was getting with the free package, so I plunked down 50 bucks… only to find out that I paid $50 for LESS than I was getting for free.
Basil has asked for a post on Movable Type; I’ll tell the full story there one day soon. I was a big fan, until that $50 debacle. Six months later they tell me, “The level of support included with each of these licenses is identical. If you purchased the Unlimited Personal Edition under the assumption that it would afford you a different level of support than what you were already receiving under your [free!!!] Commercial license, then the purchase was unnecessary.”
Swell.
Back to the looming deadline. I thought I’d switch to Expression Engine from pMachine. I tried out the package and think it looks great, but what I read says it’s more than I need for my little blog. And it costs $99. I read up on WordPress, too. It has its advocates and fans but nothing made it an obvious choice over Movable Type. So I concluded I should let bygones be bygones and stick with MT.
Then I asked their support about switching hosts. The article they referred me to (from January 30, 2004!!!!):
Moving your Movable Type blog to a new server or to a new host is much more perilous than you might think. If not done properly, you could lose all of your entries… I’m not a techie, so if something goes wrong by following these instructions, I can’t help you. I accept no liability.
Um, reassuring?
Back to Expression Engine. For another 50 bucks they’ll install it for me. Sounds good. I want to set up a blog with forums and photo galleries and more for the students at school; I plan to use Expression Engine, this will pave the way. Sounding better. They have a Movable Type Import Utility and can do it in one business day.
But that still may not make my Saturday deadline. And can I get the import done in time? (To top it off I’m out of commission tomorrow - a lumbar puncture - won’t that be a fun blog post! And my parents arrive Saturday night for a brief overnight stay.) Time is ticking away… If this little blog is missing Sunday, you know I missed the deadline. I’ll keep you posted.
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Site outage
You might have noticed that my site was down for a good bit of today. It hasn’t been behaving well since, either. It seems a cable was cut in Boston:
A network outage at hosting provider SAVVIS Communications Corp. has knocked a number of Web sites offline including Web portal Lycos Inc.
The outage occurred around 9 a.m. (EST) on Tuesday when a backup data line connecting SAVVIS’s Boston data centers was accidentally severed, said Kathy O’Reilly, a Lycos spokeswoman. At the time, crews had been in the process of repairing the main line to the data center, which was also down.
With the two data lines out of service, the entire Lycos Network—including Lycos Mail and the Tripod Web hosting service—was knocked off the Internet, O’Reilly said. None of the data being stored by Lycos was affected by the incident, she added.
SAVVIS is one of the largest hosting providers in the U.S.
What’s a blog
Dave Winer says it’s the unedited voice of a person:
People use blogs primarily to discuss one question—what is a blog? The discussion will continue as long as there are blogs.
It’s no different from other media, all they ever talk about is what they are. We got dinged by the NY Times because all bloggers talked about at the DNC was other bloggers. But what were they busy doing—talking about other reporters, except when they were talking about bloggers—talking about bloggers.
Nothing wrong with it.
And you don’t need comments, “We already had mail lists before we had blogs. The whole notion that blogs should evolve to become mail lists seems to waste the blogs. Comments are very much mail-list-like things.”
LATER: Others think a blog is defined by its ability to leave comments.
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Trash traffic
Most blog traffic is trash… Everyone knows it. If you look at your stats, you’ll learn that half of your traffic--or a lot more than half--comes from search engines. People type in things like “nipple schoolgirl goat priest molasses,” and they end up at your site for ten seconds, and they leave, hopefully disappointed. Those people aren’t “visitors,” no matter how much you like to think they are. They’re just lost.
I mention it because I’m in the midst of another traffic burst; thanks to another… [drum roll please] ... TYPO! I spelled Saddam’s name wrong - S * A * D * A * M - I corrected it right away, but it’s in the url and evidently that counts for search engines.
So lots of lost souls from around the world who can’t spell and are searching for video of Saddam’s execution are finding their way, briefly, to my little blog. Lucky me. 
Here’s more of what I wrote last time a typo got me a thousand visitors:
Internet fame is overrated anyway. Remember Gary Numa Numa Brolsma? His Internet fame began in his Jersey bedroom with a webcam in the fall of 2004. He had no idea what was in store for him. 13,367,200 views.
By Spring of 2005 he had been on Good Morning America and turned down an interview request by the NYTimes. It found his performance “earnest but painful” and called his posting it on the Internet a “grave mistake.” The paper of record also reported that “according to his relatives, he mopes around the house.”
Moldovan pop band O-Zone parlayed his performance into a Today Show appearance and a Universal contract, but the song, Dragostea Din Tei, looks destined to be a one hit wonder. If they’re lucky.
This week Rocketboom checked in with Gary. He’s making a new version of the video - “not the same but similar to the original” - and says YouTube is planning a contest. I’ll post about it on my blog.
Maybe if there’s a typo I’ll top a thousand visitors. That’s all the fame I need.
Really.
That was in June. In September Brolsma’s new Numa Numa was released…
Uh, I think I’ll sit content with the cozy few legitimate readers I get every day. And laugh off the occasional typo-inspired traffic burst.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Guns & bloggers
Amanda at Think Progress sees a war on blogs in the odious McCain ”Stop the Online Exploitation of Our Children Act.” Last week I pointed, twice, to the CNet report about it.
Digby’s commentary from last night - “you have idiots making policy about things of which they don’t even have a basic understanding” - concludes with this important juxtaposition. From CNet:
Cathy Milhoan, an FBI spokeswoman, said on Friday that the FBI “continues to support data retention. We see it as crucial in advancing our cyber investigations to include online sexual exploitation of children.”
Other data,though, not so much. Remember this?
March 8, 2005
Dozens of terror suspects on federal watch lists were allowed to buy firearms legally in the United States last year, according to a Congressional investigation that points up major vulnerabilities in federal gun laws.
People suspected of being members of a terrorist group are not automatically barred from legally buying a gun, and the investigation, conducted by the Government Accountability Office, indicated that people with clear links to terrorist groups had regularly taken advantage of this gap.
Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, law enforcement officials and gun control groups have voiced increasing concern about the prospect of a terrorist walking into a gun shop, legally buying an assault rifle or other type of weapon and using it in an attack.
The G.A.O. study offers the first full-scale examination of the possible dangers posed by gaps in the law, Congressional officials said, and it concludes that the Federal Bureau of Investigation ‘’could better manage’’ its gun-buying records in matching them against lists of suspected terrorists.
F.B.I. officials maintain that they are hamstrung by laws and policies restricting the use of gun-buying records because of concerns over the privacy rights of gun owners.
LATER: James Joyner says the requirement is hardly an onerous one; Red State sees it as an attempt to score some cheap points with the GOP base.
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Feed publishing Best Practices
Niall Kennedy’s put together all you need to know about feeds:
Web feed syndication is made up of two base vocabularies: RSS 2.0 and the Atom Syndication Format. These base vocabularies are extended using namespaces to create a common set of expressions for your web feed data. In this post I’ll walk through some best practices for publishers syndicating their data via web feeds. READ ON
Sunday, November 12, 2006
Typography & ugly websites
95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.
Maybe I’ll read it tomorrow but tonight I have friends coming over for dinner. So for now I’ll rehash this:
Ugliness has never looked better. I have spent the last few days examining a surprising trend in web design that has made ugly websites look absolutely irresistible. No, its not the bolded, 18 point Times New Roman font shouting at me as I access the page that has me excited, nor is it the harsh colors that have actually managed to make my eyes hurt and distort my vision. In fact, its not even that logo which is so pixelated from being processed, resized, saved, and edited so many times that it appears to be blurred to protect the identity of the company who owns the website that has me singing the praises of ugly websites. What is it?
Ugly sells.
That’s right - ugly websites are surprisingly effective in making money. As a person who puts business before technology, a profitable website is a website is an unbelievably attractive website to me.
I don’t know how true that is but I do know that he goes on to say this; and this I believe will always be true:
Many of the websites that I referenced above have one underlying trait that can be attributed to their success: they are extremely easy to use.
Google is probably the best example of how functionality over form can lead to success. When Google initially launched, every other major search engine was in the process of transforming themselves into a portal that would offer users all the information they could possibly want, and probably more than they really would want. Google, on the other hand, made their website ridiculously simple. There is one purpose to Google - to search the web. Nothing else was there to distract you from this one goal. It certainly did not hurt that Google was able to serve up relevant results, but the simplicity of the system was key to winning over users. [...][F]unctionality is more important than the design of your website. This does not mean, however, that a beautiful website cannot be easy to use. What this does mean is that you should never sacrifice the usability of your website for a fancy design effect or a more visually appealing website.
Friday, October 06, 2006
A Blogger Nobel
The Nobel committee just said that media organizations may win the peace prize. I’m not joking: I’d nominate Blogger, for it gave voice to the people anywhere. How about you?
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
Subject to libel
I’ve pointed to it before; unfortunately, I haven’t read it: EFF’s Legal Guide for Bloggers. I’m reminded of it because in a USA Today survey of cases it turns out that the first blogger in the USA to lose a libel suit is from right here in Georgia:
Rafe Banks, a lawyer in Georgia, got involved in a nasty dispute with a client over how to defend him on a drunken-driving charge. The client, David Milum, fired Banks and demanded that the lawyer refund a $3,000 fee. Banks refused.
Milum eventually was acquitted. Ordinarily, that might have been the last Banks ever heard about his former client. But then Milum started a blog.
In May 2004, Banks was stunned to learn that Milum’s blog was accusing the lawyer of bribing judges on behalf of drug dealers. At the end of one posting, Milum wrote, “Rafe, don’t you wish you had given back my $3,000 retainer?”
Banks, saying the postings were false, sued Milum. And last January, Milum became the first blogger in the USA to lose a libel suit, according to the Media Law Resource Center in New York, which tracks litigation involving bloggers. Milum was ordered to pay Banks $50,000.
Via Walter Olson at Overlawyered.
Friday, September 22, 2006
Today
Sunday, September 03, 2006
Hating your blog software
Thomas Hawk says, ”I hate blogger.”
Me, I’m tempted to say, “I hate Movable Type.”
After nearly 2 years as a freebie with Movable Type, I paid the $49.95 this week for ”Professional Support.” I did it in part as a gesture of support for the company. 
To date I have built several Movable Type blogs, installed and upgraded the software a number of times, and managed this site with few help tickets and no cash payment to SixApart. They’ve earned their $50 bucks.
But now they’ve essentially told me that mine is a worthless gesture!
It turns out that the support I paid for is actually “Basic Support;” they hope to offer “Advanced Support” in the future. And what precisely is this Basic Support I paid for? It’s nothing more than what I had before. For free. I read the FAQ and somehow missed that fact.
For the record I got more support for the problem I’m grappling with now from Chad Everett in passing as a kind gesture (I plan to visit his wishlist to say thanks and check-out his plug-in MT-Notifier if I decide to stay with Movable Type), from my web host (which indirectly suggested I might want to consider WordPress) and from various readers who have emailed me (and again suggested I move to WordPress).
I’m left with my site not working properly and perplexed as to what to do. I am fond of Movable Type and feel some loyalty to it. But right now I’m feeling bilked, talked down to and mishandled by support. Given that I work in tech support myself, I realize that it may well be a misunderstanding but that misunderstanding has two sides to it. If there’s no movement on their side and I have to build this blog all over again from the ground up with “Basic Support” it may well be time to give in and join the crowd moving to WordPress.
So on this holiday weekend blogging will be spotty as I mull that over and pursue some more terrestrial pleasures. If you’ve got an opinion on the topic, please fire away. Comments and email are welcome!
UPDATE: Days later and I still can’t bring myself to go back at it with Movable Type support. Jim at Right-Thoughts suggests I try ExpressionEngine from pMachine. I’m listening. I’ve heard others say good things about their product.
Monday, August 28, 2006
RINO Sightings is up!
A collection of good posts from people who don’t drink Republican Kool-Aid:
A self-described “honorary member,” I’m there too:
Happy Birthday Don! Love the Ninja Text Generator!
Sunday, August 27, 2006
GOP kid bloggers
They’re the real reason they passed DOPA!
The TimesOnline on the curse of the kids’ blogging:
AS the leader of the Republican party in the US Senate and a possible presidential candidate, Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee has a reputation for sober rectitude. The same cannot be said of his son Jonathan, a Vanderbilt University student who recently appeared on the internet wearing six cans of beer strapped to his belt.
Nor has Jonathan’s brother Bryan done much to help his father’s attempts to strike a reasonable note about US involvement in Iraq. “I was born an American by God’s amazing grace,” wrote Bryan Frist in an online profile. “Let’s bomb some people.” [...]The popularity of teenage networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook is proving a goldmine for political bloggers keen to compare the pious proclamations of candidates running for office with the blogs and picture-sharing websites maintained by their children.
No sooner had Congressman Louie Gohmert, a conservative Republican from Texas, unleashed a tirade against the moral inadequacies of Democrats opposed to the war in Iraq, than someone found internet pictures of his daughter Caroline dancing on a bartop and posing with a man in his underpants.[...]
Errant children have long been a fact of Washington political life, but have rarely caused any lasting scandal. Bush was untroubled by the underage drinking exploits of his twin daughters Jenna and Barbara. The president’s brother, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, was not seriously damaged when his daughter Noelle was arrested on drug charges. His son John was arrested for having sex in a car in a shopping centre car park.
Friday, August 25, 2006
I don’t blog for traffic. Really.
Today my traffic was unusually high, double the average day. So I looked into it to find out why. Googlebombing. A throw away post I wrote so I could go to bed and still meet my self-imposed four-a-day minimum. It has a trackback from Googleblog so people are coming, looking and leaving and my traffic doubled. I’ve pretty much learned that’s how a small blog like mine gets blog traffic.
An inadvertent typo in April sent traffic through the roof with people expecting to find a religious conversion. I had a run-in with Wonkette that I’d rather forget (and won’t link to). And my best traffic ever was when a site known for outing famous people posted the simple (suggestive) phrase ”Oh… So gay!” linked to my post on the origins of the word ‘gay.’
The world beat a path to my blog to find out which DC politician I had outed. They left just as quickly, some feeling dismayed and deceived and most never having read the least little bit of my artful handiwork. So if you lust after traffic, you can get it. Just remember:
Most blog traffic is trash… Everyone knows it. If you look at your stats, you’ll learn that half of your traffic--or a lot more than half--comes from search engines. People type in things like “nipple schoolgirl goat priest molasses,” and they end up at your site for ten seconds, and they leave, hopefully disappointed. Those people aren’t “visitors,” no matter how much you like to think they are. They’re just lost.
The guy who wrote that has since let it lapse. Too bad. It was a good post:
Even worse, you may be getting traffic because big bloggers link to you. That doesn’t make you a success. It makes you a pet, living on table scraps. When the scraps stop coming--when you say the wrong thing and stop toadying--those tasty scraps can stop coming, instantly, and then you find out how much readers really care about you.
I’ve not toadied. But I have been linked to by the big blogs. The biggest of the big (and my hero, Cory) found me I don’t know how and linked. Not even a blip of traffic. Andrew Sullivan got me traffic and wrote a fine post, but he called me “Typical Joe” (horrors!) and I did come away from that one feeling vaguely like a begging hungry pet.
Internet fame is overrated anyway. Remember Gary Numa Numa Brolsma? His Internet fame began in his Jersey bedroom with a webcam in the fall of 2004. He had no idea what was in store for him. 13,367,200 views.
By Spring of 2005 he had been on Good Morning America and turned down an interview request by the NYTimes. It found his performance “earnest but painful” and called his posting it on the Internet a “grave mistake.” The paper of record also reported that “according to his relatives, he mopes around the house.”
Moldovan pop band O-Zone parlayed his performance into a Today Show appearance and a Universal contract, but the song, Dragostea Din Tei, looks destined to be a one hit wonder. If they’re lucky.
This week Rocketboom checked in with Gary. He’s making a new version of the video - “not the same but similar to the original” - and says YouTube is planning a contest. I’ll post about it on my blog.
Maybe if there’s a typo I’ll top a thousand visitors. That’s all the fame I need.
Really.
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Movable Type support?
I’ve been a big fan of Movable Type. It’s been good to me. But then, I’ve never tried anything else.
Now this little blog has become unweildy. It’s been having trouble for months - tonight it was down for an hour - a bunch of hung processes on my account.
I’ve not been able to find the help I need. I’m happy to pay for support, but I’m not reassured by what I read. Any feedback from fellow Movable Type users?
LATER: The site’s been down all night and has gone down a couple times since. Movable Type says good luck and won’t help; my site’s unstable they say.
Thanks.
I’ve upgraded to 3.3 but that hasn’t helped. ICDSoft suggests the problem is trackbacks. Time to disable them. But is it also time to try move on from Movable Type?
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
State of the Blogosphere
Steve Siffrey’s summary from the latest State of the Blogosphere Report:
• Technorati is now tracking over 50 Million Blogs.
• The Blogosphere is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago.
• Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every 6 and a half months.
• From January 2004 until July 2006, the number of blogs that Technorati tracks has continued to double every 5-7 months.
• About 175,000 new weblogs were created each day, which means that on average, there are more than 2 blogs created each second of each day.
• About 8% of new blogs get past Technorati’s filters, even if it is only for a few hours or days.
• About 70% of the pings Technorati receives are from known spam sources, but we drop them before we have to send out a spider to go and index the splog.
• Total posting volume of the blogosphere continues to rise, showing about 1.6 Million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second.
• This is about double the volume of about a year ago.
• The most prevalent times for English-language posting is between the hours of 10AM and 2PM Pacific time, with an additional spike at around 5PM Pacific time.
RELATED, Cory Bergman:
Sure, Movable Type and Blogger (and MSN Spaces for newbies) rule the blogging world. But many of us have made the switch to WordPress, and we’re glad we did. Turns out, lots of people are signing up with WordPress.
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
The New Yorker on Citizen Journalism
Last week it was Schiff on Wikipedia; this week it is Lemann on blogging. This from a publication without even an RSS feed. Skip the article, here’s the Romenesko summary:
The best Internet journalism usually happens by accident. Most often it’s “when smart and curious people with access to means of communication are at the scene of a sudden disaster” and post raw information, says Nicholas Lemann. More from the Columbia j-school dean:
* “What has citizen journalism actually brought us? It’s a difficult question, in part because many of the truest believers are very good at making life unpleasant for doubters, through relentless sneering.”
* “The quality of Internet journalism is bound to improve over time, especially if more of the virtues of traditional journalism migrate to the Internet. But, although the medium has great capabilities, especially the way it opens out and speeds up the discourse, it is not quite as different from what has gone before as its advocates are saying.”
And here’s a proposal from Steven Berlin Johnson:
Lemann is a superb journalist, and I agree with just about everything he says in the article. But that’s the problem. I think everyone agrees with just about everything he says in the article. Jay Rosen tried to kill off this kind of discussion a year or two ago with his smart essay, Bloggers Versus Journalists Is Over, but obviously it didn’t stick. So let me propose a slightly more blunt approach. Does anyone disagree with the following concepts:
1. Mainstream, top-down, professional journalism will continue to play a vital role in covering news events, and in shaping our interpretation of those events, as it should.
2. Bloggers will grow increasingly adept at covering certain kinds of news events, but not all. They will play an increasingly important role in the interpretation of all kinds of news.
3. The majority of bloggers won’t be concerned with traditional news at all.
4. Professional, edited journalism will have a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than blogging; examples of sloppy, offensive, factually incorrect, or tedious writing will be abundant in the blogosphere. But diamonds in that rough will be abundant as well.
5. Blogs—like all modes of contemporary media—are not historically unique; they draw upon and resemble a number of past traditions and forms, depending on their focus.
So here’s my proposal: if you’re writing an article or a blog post about this issue, and your argument revolves around one or more of these points—and doesn’t add anything else of substance—STOP WRITING. Pick a new topic. Move on. There’s nothing to see here.
BTW I’ve decided my post on Schiff’s piece was off the mark. I was reacting too much like a thin-skinned blogger. My only excuse is that without the tools of my trade I’m not at the top of my form.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Marriage Equality dialogue
Some weeks ago I got an email from a fellow blogger:
Wondering if you’d be willing to dialog over a 4 or 5 week series of blog posts about the topic of gay marriage - why you’re for it, why I’m not; attendant issues and implications; religious and cultural arguments/concerns…
I’m a former pastor, a Christian who is evangelical in doctrine. I enjoy blogging for similar reasons you pose and want to expand my thinking in lots of different areas…
My purpose is not to convert you to my way of thinking. I promise not to belittle, harass, mock, etc any of your comments or reflections or arguments. I will not question your faith and will take your statements at face value. I would like to sincerely understand what your thought processes are on this topic and will give you my sincere arguments as well - and if I pull a strawman I expect to be called on it. And vice versa.
Now that was an offer I could not refuse! Lyn had read my Why Blog? post - I blog to to stay intellectually engaged, it’s a way to document, develop, deliberate and deepen my thinking - and he asked me to live up to it.
It took a couple weeks for us to get going, but Lyn posted my opening argument on Tuesday. I hope you’ll go check it out.
It’s a bit longer than I’d like but I think it captures pretty well my current thinking on the topic. I’ll be posting Lyn’s response here in the next day or so. I hope you’ll join in with comments.
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Snakes on a Plane
The blogosphere as focus group:
Although its anticipated cult status is high, the film doesn’t seem to have been created as a ready-made cult classic. It began like many other action films, as a god-awful B-movie script with a simple premise and simple thrills that needed some rewrites. It was filmed to be a PG-13 snoozer with the working title “Snakes on a Plane.” A groundswell of Internet love for the title emerged. The title was changed by New Line Cinema to “Pacific Air Flight 121.” The Web erupted into e-riots. The studio, realizing the golden, rotten egg upon which it sat, restored the original title and shot new sequences to push the rating from PG-13 to R.
And like a snake shedding and re-shedding its skin, “Snakes on a Plane” was born and reborn.
Everyone who hears about it loves “Snakes on a Plane.” And yet no one has actually seen it. There are countless homages and parodies of all levels of production value on the Web that millions have enjoyed—from film mash-ups using previous footage of Samuel L. Jackson and nature shows, to camcorder images of white college-age males in their garage. None of these are based on the movie. This preemptive attack of fandom was caused by the four syllables that make up the title.
But can it top Con Air?
Friday, July 07, 2006
New media, old story
J D Lasica quoted in the Times on Amanda’s leaving Rocketboom:
“It’s a classic story of artistic differences with a new twist,” Mr. Lasica said. “Here are the leading pioneers of the new movement with different ideas on how to capitalize on the trend. Andrew sees the Internet as the end goal in itself, rather than the steppingstone to TV or traditional media. Amanda understands that Hollywood is where the money is right now.”
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Rocket-ka-boom!
Amanda Congdon has decided to move to L.A. to pursue opportunities that have arisen for her in Hollywood.
We wanted to meet her demands to move production out to L.A., however, we are a small company and have not been able to figure out a way to make it work, financially and in many other ways at this time. While we continue to remain with open arms, Amanda has in fact quit and left Rocketboom. So sadly, we bid Amanda adieu and wish her all the best.
Amanda’s sad goodbye is here. The transcript is here. Andrew Baron’s response is here. (He says he first heard she was leaving in her video.)
Jason Calacanis wants to hire her over at Netscape, “You’re a star baby… it’s time to be treated like one.” She certainly appears to have acted like one, a petulant one at that.
Om says she should go to Podtech with Scoble. Scoble says, “It’s clear that Amanda and Andrew are in pretty deep pain… I’m saddened by this, and offer my support for whatever path Amanda and Andrew take in the future.”
I’m with Dave Winer leaning towards Andrew’s side. I may just be the one Rocketboom fan enamored more with the show than Amanda. It certainly sounds like she’ll be fine.
The best analysis so far is from Steve Safran at Lost Remote. He’s not buying the NY to LA story, “They could have easily worked out a system, fast, ...After all, Johnny Carson moved the entire production of “The Tonight Show” from New York to Los Angeles without missing a beat.”
He’s guessing it’s ego and money and says the best hope for Rocketboom is to “re-brand itself in a new direction. Simply replacing Amanda would be a disaster.”
My favorite comment:
The web shouldn’t be an auditioning ground for TV. It should have its own stars who stay true to the medium and earn their riches that way. Forget about web stars going to TV; I predict it will go the other way soon.
His conclusion:
As in most divorces and band breakups, Amanda and Andrew both lose in this fight. They will both find future success. But McCartney’s songs without Lennon were too mushy, David Gilmour without Roger Waters is too ponderous, and Rocketboom without Amanda will be a mere bottle rocket.
I’ll be interested to see what Andrew Baron does; Scoble should go after him.
LATER: More from Amanda; persuasively more.
FINAL UPDATE: New “girl” chosen. That was fast.
Sunday, July 02, 2006
Fame sucks!
If you try to click through to Vincent Ferrari’s AOL cancellation call right now you get this message:
We’ll be right back. As soon as the server cools off.
We were Digged and in the New York Times on the same day and blew through 12 Gigabytes of bandwidth and 700,000+ hits in 12 hours. I’ll be back, but I have to give my server a rest so the other. folks on it don’t kill me. See you soon, and sorry for being too damn famous for my own good
Fame sucks!
With that I revel in my Flappy Bird status and modest traffic numbers. These are the good old days!
Friday, June 30, 2006
Fighting blog comment spam
FINAL UPDATE: Comments are back, the spam is deleted and I will be implementing a new spam prevention plug-in in the next few days. ICDSoft has been absolutely super helpful in working with me to resolve this problem. They truly are the ultimate in web hosting! I’ve still got some real work to do, but they got me through the worst of it.
UPDATE: Still no resolution. My ISP isn’t giving me the resources to delete the comments (I can do it one by one - for hundreds of them). They have shut down all comments to help me out; I am trying to find a way to run the plug in on old posts and get comments open again on new posts. This problem only recently overwhelmed the Movable Type spam filter…
I’m not so happy about Movable Type right now, though it is as much my fault as anything else. The improved Movable Type spam filter had been working ok up until about a week ago. now I’m hit with hundreds of spam comments a day. When I try to declare them “Junk” I get a server 500 error.
Asking my hosting service, ICDSoft, about it, they tell me I’m hitting my memory limit, that they’ve already raised it for me and can’t raise it any higher, and that Movable Type makes unreasonable demands on the server so I should consider WordPress.
Yes, I know about WordPress. And the work it takes to change. In any event I’ve got to get rid of that spam and close down comments on those old messages. That will take a good long time; that’s what I’ll be doing much of today.
Argh!
Friday, June 09, 2006
Yearly Kos
I thought I might go; circumstances intervened.
There’s plenty of coverage. One organizer put the ratio of conference-goers to reporters at eight to one. Judd reviews the reviewers and concludes:
So far what they’ve discovered hasn’t been earth shattering: 1) many liberal bloggers don’t fit into the stereotypes the media has created, 2) liberal bloggers are respected (and feared) by politicians, and 3) liberal bloggers disagree about stuff. Check your local paper for more breaking news.
SEE ALSO: YearlyKos.org
LATER: Markos was great on Meet the Press:
There’s this perception of bloggers as being these anti-social people, typing away at keyboards in their parents’ basement. And I think what we’ve seen is that actually the people who read these blogs are a real cross section of the Democratic Party, a real cross section of America...We have people on the left, the center, the right and everything in between and up and down the party spectrum.
