Tag: site

The Handcart We Are Rapidly Pushing to Hell…

Random Thoughts

… is filled with social site web apps.

Look! One of my friends has installed SuperFunAwesomeWall! To read the cool stuff they have written I need to install it! But wait! Another friend has installed AwesomeFunSuperWall, which is not the same application… and, uh, a third friend installed FunSuperAwesomeWall… and another FunAwesomeSuperWall… okay, what the hell… And I’ve been bitten by a vampire, and a werewolf, and a zombie, and a dog, and I’m in bat country.  I’ve been asked to join an entourage, a pimp squad, and a sports team, no less than three movie applications, and some trivia.  I’ve been Poked, SuperPoked, MegaPoked, SexyPoked, and CanadianPoked, could someone please stop with all the damn poking?  I’ve had myself compared to other people in every possible way, and I now know which superhero (Marvel and DC), L Word character, Simpson, Lost castaway, Friend, drunk, color, type of Irish Republican, chocolate, Spice Girl, assassin, and dead Russian author I am.  Among a great many other things, and while all those things might be true, one thing I can say with absolute certainty that I am is someone who has almost entirely stopped logging in to Facebook.

About the only time I go there anymore is when I get an email that someone new has requested to link up, or on the odd occasion that I remember I have an account and decide I want to check and see if any more people I forgot I used to know have appeared.  The sad thing about most of those apps, besides the fact that they are horribly repetitive, is that most of them are crap.  Seriously, and annoying to boot.

Perhaps its just me… maybe I just don’t get it… but there really doesn’t seem to be much “social” is all these social networking sites.  In fact, the social aspects of direct messaging and message boards seem to be the hardest parts of the sites to find or use as they are drowned out by ads and apps.  One day, I was logged into Facebook using my Heroespowers to try to gain another level when I asked myself, “Why?  Why the fuck am I doing this?”  So I tried to dig through the app to find the community, the social part that should exist beyond spamming all my friends with useless power messages and invitations to install the app and join the spam, and I couldn’t find any.  I searched all my Walls (I had 3 installed in addition to the default one) and the only messages I found were the equivalent of chain letters.  I removed a good 90% of the apps I had installed (I’m a sucker for trivia) and sent out a couple of messages to some friends.  After a few days I realized that using Facebook for anything social beyond finding people to begin with was pointless.  Once we found each other and exchanged contact info, dropping “back” to email or AIM was so much easier than using Facebook.  And more reliable too.

“Why have Facebook email me every time I get a new message when I can just have people email me directly?” I found myself wondering.  I suppose if I were famous, I could use sites like Facebook to have a “public” face that people could talk to while hiding my “true” email address.  But I’m not, and everyone I currently talk to I feel safe giving my real email address to.

Of course, I realize that my gripes with these sites are largely about the efforts they have chosen to make in regards to traffic and ad revenue.  These aren’t pay sites, after all.  But then again, I’d say that overall their efforts are failing.  When was the last time you clicked an ad on Facebook or MySpace or some other social network site?  Just this instant I logged in to Facebook and the ads presented to me as I navigated ignoring all the random spam messages were for AllPosters.com, some weight loss thing, a local college bar, a website to find out who’s searching for me on the Internet, and upromise.  The one thing all five of those have in common is that they are things I wouldn’t click on.  Only one had any interest to me (AllPosers.com) but I already know about the site, have it book marked, and use it every now and then.  However, had it been some game advertisements, TV shows, movies, or something of that nature, I might have clicked on it.  The one thing all of these social networking sites suck at is directing the proper ads to the proper people.  They need a control panel where I can choose to get video game ads but not weight loss ads, to get TV shows but not college loans.

And just so it doesn’t seem like I’m picking on Facebook, I have a MySpace account as well that I use a little more often (its not too horrible at browsing and finding new musical insterests).  Recently that launched their application platform, and its largely full of the same crap as Facebook, with, in my opinion, the only exception being the MetaChat application launched by the people of MetaPlace.  It is fairly nifty, except… its also fairly useless.  Sure, I can now put a chat room on my profile page, but how often do I hang out on my own profile page?  How often do people visit my profile page?  Do I even really want to chat with the random people who cross my profile?  Everyone I want to chat with, I tend to give them my email address, or my AIM account and we chat elsewhere.

Tomorrow… more on social networking and Internet communities…

Does He Enjoy the Irony?

Random Thoughts

After Jeff Freeman linked to this site, I read through a bunch of it.  Most of it is bile.  The author loves stringing together insults, an equal opportunity hater, because he does, in point of fact, hate everything he writes about.

The bulk of his reviews of webcomics boil down to “that’s not funny” although most times he does make comments about the art as well.  The irony I speak of in the title comes about in this post, a mere 15 posts in to his run.  He takes a moment to explain that the people who think he isn’t funny just don’t get it because he writes the site to entertain, “Like, seven or eight people.”  The irony is that most webcomics actually start the same way.  Looking at many of them now, you might not be able to see their more humble beginnings, before they got enough traffic for ads to matter, before they put up message boards, or ran charity drives.  Everyone starts somewhere.

If the author keeps it up, he might one day sell out just like Maddox, someone who probably started his website to entertain, like, seven or eight people.

WordPress Theme: Options

Random Thoughts

I’ve been using and playing with WordPress for quite some time now.  I’ve tried dozens of themes and have looked at dozens, if not hundreds, more.  While I’m fairly settled on my current theme for the weblog (I still might make some tweaks here and there, and new banners), I’ve always been looking for something for the main website.

It doesn’t help that I really don’t know what I’m going to do with the main site.  However, I have stumbled upon what is probably one of the coolest themes I have ever seen for WordPress.  It is called Options.  Here is a link to the demo site.  Its the first theme I have seen that really manages to take WordPress and leverage it as a Content Management System instead of just a blogging tool.

Anyway, unless something much cooler comes along, I’ve finally settled on a theme for the site (though its likely to get a little tweaking).  Now I just need to decide what the content is going to be.

A New Theme

Site News

As you might have noticed, there is a new theme to the blog. Normally when I change the site around I just say “Please excuse the mess” and make changes. I never talk much about what exactly I’m doing to the site (except that one time I went in to detail about switching to WordPress from Coranto).

However, I really want to throw some credit out this time because this new theme is just all kinds of cool.

The base theme for WordPress is called The Sandbox. Its a theme built specifically to support templates. You might be thinking “But isn’t that just what WordPress does?” and in a way you are sort of correct. However, while WordPress just provides functions that you can plug in to your themes, the Sandbox theme is a skeleton design for all those functions that can then be inherited and manipulated by the “skins” of the Sandbox. This is really where the Sandbox shines. Now I’ve got one theme that handles the nitty gritty page code, and then I have about a dozen different skins that supply new images and a CSS file, along with any other enhancements. If your webspace has size or file limits, file reusability is important.

So, now to the usual… things may change around a bit now and then here, so bear with me… Please excuse the mess. 🙂

Part of the Problem

Random Thoughts

The other day I happened to notice that the main probablynot.com page had gotten a couple of new incoming links. Its odd because, honestly, no one really reads that site, they come here to the blog. But I suppose if you were Googling, since the most recent posts are RSS fed to the probablynot.com root site a person might get directed there.

As always, I like to know why people are linking to me, and what they have to say.

The first link was actually from back in July, so I’m not sure why it took so long to show itself, or perhaps I haven’t looked at my own root site since July 23rd. The site appears to be a collection of book reviews. I’ve seen these kinds of aggregation sites before, and I actually think its kind of neat to be scraped for it. Cool.

The second link looked funny. While the first site was a blog called “Crime Always Pays” and the post with my link was “The Monday Review”, the second site was called “Crime Review: The Monday Critical review”. It had nearly the same information. I say “nearly” because it was the same info, but it had been passed through two filters: the first changed some words to synonyms, and the second inserted some ad keywords. In fact, the entire site is just rife with Google Ads, and looking at the profile of the blogger, he has a bunch of similar sites all designed to draw traffic, collect clicks, and (he hopes) generate money.

Looking deeper, the second site copies nearly every post from the first site, up until August 1st at least… which lead me to examining the first site a little closer and noticing the review of mine wasn’t the only review of that same book to be tapped. In fact, page by page digging through the archives shows that it really is just repeating the same books over and over, slightly randomized. The site is chaotic enough to suggest it is hand made, but repetitious enough to belie that and show its true colors of most likely being a bot generated site.

I hate these kinds of sites. An aggregation post or site doesn’t bother me too much, but these automated Google Ad factories piss me off. And now I’m on one. Worse, in their quotes of me, they quoted my link to the book I reviewed with my Amazon Associates ID, so I may actually make money from this abomination.

The thing that irks me most however is that their link uses one quoted line of my book review and the link back to me does not go to the full review, but to the root site. Even now, that post has already scrolled off the RSS and doesn’t show there. Searching the root site you’ll never find that review, its on the weblog subdomain. My ill gotten traffic is being directed to the wrong place.

*sigh*

Oh well… its the Internet. There isn’t much I can do about it.

wis.dm

Random Thoughts

I have a new addiction and wis.dm is it’s name.

It is really interesting to see questions people ask. It is also fun to think up questions you wonder about.

I’m hooked.

And I’ve already created my own metagame out of the site: creating questions that invent unique entires for the word cloud. If you want to play, you can’t just completely go out in left field, you have to ask a real question. Example: I asked a question that revolves around the movie Tremors, so I created a keyword/keyphrase of underground monsters. I would have gone for the gusto and said “underground God damned monsters”, but I don’t know the site’s policy on dirty words.

If you get there from here, add me as a friend.

You Clicked What?

Random Thoughts

My life has become noticeably easier since I began using an RSS feed reader for all my favorite sites. Not only does it ensure I don’t forget to check a site, but I have been able to start reading from more sites.

One web site I always love reading is Snopes. If you don’t know them, visit them and enjoy. They like to debunk, or sometimes bunk (or is debunk like disgruntled and the root word isn’t really a word), stories. Today’s gem is about an email scam involving fake IRS investigations.

Being in computers, and having actually been a domain and system admin that involved working with email servers, you might think I would be numb by now to the dumb things that people will click. Spam email comes in many forms, but to me at least they have always seemed obvious. I don’t bank with BB&T, so its odd that they send one of my accounts forty seven emails a day about money I don’t have with them. Almost every email that comes in regarding a pharmacy, drug prescriptions, Viagra, Cialis, or any number of other drugs… not real, and if I did have a need for any of those, I would not buy them from an unsolicited email, I’d get a prescription from my own doctor. And I would never take a mortgage from a bank that sends me a random email, especially when its not addressed to me.

Seriously folks, if you don’t know the person sending you the email, take a minute and read it, consider it, and 999,999 times out of a million delete the thing without clicking on the links.

And another safety precaution, if a company sends you an email that says, “Click here and enter your account information!” Even if it looks valid, even if it is valid, don’t click there… go directly to their website yourself and log in to your account manually.

A Change Gonna Come

Site News

Its not often I post in the Site News section, but hey, I’ve got site news… I’ve been looking at new themes for a while now, but I’ve been holding off redoing them because I also wanted to upgrade to the latest WordPress, which required a newer version of MySQL than I had available.

Well, after much wrangling, my database was finally migrated to a new server, and as I type this the latest WordPress is uploading. So a new theme is coming…

I was born by a river in a little tent,
And just like this river,
I’ve been running ever since.
It’s been a too long, too long-time a-coming,
But I know a change gonna come,
Oh, yes, it is.

It’s been too hard living,
And I’m afraid to die.
I don’t know what’s up there beyond the sky.
It’s been a long time a, long time a-coming,
But I know, Lord I know a change gonna come, Lord.
Yeah, yes.

And then I went to see my brother, oh yeah.
I said, “Brother, help me, please.”
He turned me down.
And then I went, I went to see my sweet mother.
I said, “Mama, Mama I’m down on my knees.”
It’s been a too hard living,
And I’m afraid to die.
I don’t know what’s up there beyond the sky.
It’s been a long, long time a-coming,
But I know, but I know a change gonna come.
Oh, long.

-Sam Cooke

12:01 PM

Reviews

If you have never seen the short film 12:01 PM, then you have missed out.

Don’t confuse 12:01 PM with 12:01, a horrid movie update of the same basic plot starring Jonathan Silverman and Helen Slater. 12:01 PM is about a man, Myron Castleman (played wonderfully by Kurtwood Smith) who appears to be repeating the same hour, from 12:01 PM to 1:01 PM. Its kind of like Groundhog Day, only its just the one hour. Looping a whole day over and over again isn’t really all that scary, because you have a whole day, but how much can you really do in an hour. Anyway, Myron realizes that he is repeating the hour and tries to figure out how to get out of the time bounce, but one hour just doesn’t seem to be enough to get anything done.

This is a masterpiece of short film making as its only 25 minutes long and yet in just about every way is more satisfying than most feature films.

Now, I bet you are wondering why it is I’m talking about a short film that was made in 1990, over 15 years ago. Its because I really would like to see this short film again. I’d like to own it on DVD. Its only 25 minutes long, but I would gladly pay $20 for a DVD with this on it and nothing else. The problem is… its not available. Well, not in the US anyway.

I really hate region codes. They suck. As does the NTSC and PAL crap. There is a box set for sale over on the Amazon UK site called Academy Award Winning Shorts – Cinema Collection – 56 Movies – One Box. It looks like a pretty damn kickass box set. There is a full list of the shorts over on Play.com. I want to own this box. Of course, its confusing, because the Amazon site and the Special Features section on Play both say its Region 0 or All Regions, but the details on Play say its Region 2, which is more likely. But it doesn’t matter, because its PAL, which means my TV won’t play it. And this box, which is just awesome for its content, is not available in the US (Region 1) or in NTSC. And I just find that to be really crappy.

So, I’m going to do something I don’t normally do and make an open call for piracy… if they won’t sell it to me, I have to resort to other methods. If you know where I can get a copy of 12:01 PM, point me at it. And if you work in the film industry and have any influence, put this on a Region 1 DVD and I’ll buy it, even if I already get a pirated copy.