in my experienceAds
June 1, 2010 1:25 PM
I will be implementing Google AdSense very soon as a way to pay the costs for this blog. It's been ad free for over 8 years, but now I'd like to recover some (likely a tiny fraction) of the costs.
A massive percentage of the traffic to my site is coming from search engines and most of that traffic goes to only a few pages. I'm considering only placing AdSense on individual archive pages and not on the home page (and probably not in my RSS feed either). This would effectively only target those random people who arrived here via search and not those who regularly read the site.
So, here's heads up to those who read this blog. Ads are coming soon. If you don't like ads then disable cookies and Javascript or just don't come to the site. Feel free to yell at me via Twitter.
Social Graph
February 16, 2010 11:17 AM
- This is the place where I share personal stuff with people I actually know. If I don't know you directly and know something personal about you, then I don't have a connection to you on Facebook. It's ironic that Facebook is the service that scares me the most when it comes to privacy issues but is the service where I have my most personal relationships.
- I have one account that's "me" that covers nerd stuff. My other account is for games and Warcraft related stuff which I assume people on my personal account don't want to hear about. I tend to use my normal account for quasi-bookmarking of links and ideas.
- Buzz
- This is much like my personal Twitter account, but it feels much more directly identifiable as ME since it's attached to my email account. It seems that in Buzz I should watch what I say more carefully and have to keeps things on the techie side of the world.
- Xbox Live
- These are people I know well, or that I don't know very well at all, but all of them are people I've met online and aren't annoying. I have know some of these people for six years now and have been promoted up into the Facebook realm of my social graph.
- Flickr
- I'm not using this, but I feel like I should be. I've been taking a lot of pictures with my iPhone and processing them with Mill Colour and have posted some of those pictures here. But they are a part of what I think of as a 'collection' and want to get them out there.
I haven't mentioned Posterous, Tumblr or Plurk, which I could use, but don't since those all seem like people are shouting in the abyss. They all seem to relish a stream of consciousness that amounts to nothing.
All of the services mentioned are ways to create and consume noise about our lives and I'm looking for ways to aggregate them all here on In My Experience in some meaningful (and yet automated) way. I looked into Storytlr, but it's a pain to get running and I have a wife, career and kid. Occasional blogging and manual labor will have to do for now, but I know there's some layer in between a personal blog and all of these other cloud services that can make things easier, meaningful and vaguely permanent.
Google Buzz
February 10, 2010 2:03 PM
I'm guessing people's Twitter habits and social graph have solidified enough where Buzz isn't a real threat, but we'll see what happens. My guess is that this lives somewhere between Twitter and Movable Type's Motion.
The funny thing is that I could have Buzz'd this, but I blogged it instead. I'll now share the link to this on both services and create more ancillary inside-baseball noise. I'm wondering when the madness will end.
No Comments, Revisited
February 2, 2010 1:41 PM
Today, Engadget, the king of gadget blogs, turned off comments site-wide. I did the same thing here a while back due to spam reasons, but Engadget has done so due to "mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening" comments posted on the site. User and community involvement is a double edged sword, and I have to say, that on my own site, I miss seeing and reading the comments from my readers (I never had very many, but they were loyal).
So, what to do with comments on blogs? You'll never escape spam nor offensive comments, but there are ways to manage the issue...
- Tweetboard uses Twitter which has seen wide adoption, but has had some reliability issues (eg, the recent database migration was fubared). I like it though since it has some viral (eg, po.st link) qualities to it.
- Disqus offloads the commenting engine onto someone else's shoulders, but since it's somewhere else you can't control it's availability. Also, user have to go sign up for another account at another site.
- TypePad exists, but nobody I know ever talks about it. I never see it on the web (it's a Wordpress world these days).
I'll be watching what Engadget does since they are a part of a much larger network of blogs and there has to be a better way to do this (or at least a way that allows for comments that doesn't totally suck).
Lifestreaming evolution
January 20, 2010 10:51 AM
Almost a decade ago, blogging got started and today we have far too many ways to show everyone how awesome we are. You can post your photos on Flickr, Tweet your lunch and become the mayor of store and let everyone know about it. But, the lowly blog remains the one place where you can (should?) collect your thoughts into a longer and more coherent format.
The main issue with blogging is that it takes a long time if you care about it at all. You write your thoughts on a given topic, reread it, rewrite it, maybe show it to someone else for some copy editing and then post it. Back when I was blogging regularly, I was spending two hours or more per post to make sure I was making a clear point that was at least vaguely supported by a fact or two. Then I had a kid and the value of time and coherent thought went thru the roof.
Today, many people, including me, who used to blog every day are now just using Twitter since the format itself encourages you to be short and carefree. From time to time though, you want/need a longer and more permanent format, so the blog remains relevant. Still though, I have signed up for, and continued to use, many cloud services, such as Flickr, Facebook, and Digg and I'd like to have more content here on IMX than just the blog entries.
So, it's time to evolve past the blog and aggregate all of these various cloud activities, and Storytlr seems to be a way to do that. The best part is that I don't have to relinquish control which is a big deal, so I'm going to give it a try. But due to the reasons that I use Twitter a lot more and blog a lot less are still in play, so it's like the circle of life(streaming).
I think the concept of personal cloud aggregation is something MovableType can't ignore and I can see myself dropping it for the first time since I migrated from GreyMatter to MT.
No comments.
November 24, 2009 3:35 PM
When I started this blog in 2001 I had comments turned on and received very little spam, but of course, that didn't last. Even trackback entries were spam, so I turned it all off. It looks like the folks at TypePad have put effort into dealing with that issue, but I'm not ready to turn comments back on yet.
For now, if you have something to say, then say it via Twitter/Tweetboard. You can use the Tweetboard on the left side of the page. Just click the "tweets" tab and figure it out. If you can't make it over that low barrier, then chances are I don't need to know what you had to say anyway. Also, you get to say what you want, without me having any control.
Anniversary Redesign.
November 6, 2009 5:19 PM
This blog will turn 8 years old on November 28th so I'm going to (pre)celebrate that with a redesign.
I'll be looking for ways to integrate Twitter and whatever else so I can to make things as easy as possible. The old days of spending two hours researching an entry are long gone, but I'm still putting stuff out there all the time and I might as well use my old domain as a clearing house.
We'll see how it goes.
TrackBack spamming.
February 1, 2005 9:06 AM
I just removed all trackback links and removed the trackback cgi because some jackass has been pinging each and every blog entry on my site (and that sends me an email, and I hate email, especially hundreds of them).
When this site comes back into some more regular development, all that comment and trackback stuff will be off due to spammers like today's gambling advertiser (who's a an idiot because they could have just pinged the Communiblog and gotten their one set of links on all pages in one single ping).
I hope rel="nofollow" puts you people out of business.
Back to basics.
September 7, 2004 11:43 AM
Over the last couple of months I have not been blogging (obviously) and have instead been spending time with my family, playing video games, and working. To be honest, I haven't missed it at all, and perhaps it's because I have gotten bored with the whole thing, or my core interests have simply migrated. I'm not exactly sure what the deal is, but I do know that this site will continue on.
There are a couple of posts on this site that still prove to be useful to people (mostly the ones with JavaScript code ready to be stolen) and those will remain available, as will the entire archive. Hopefully I'll get back to adding to this site again, but it's likely going to be stuff more directly targeted to me (and probably more boring for you).
For a while, I was blogging items that I thought would be interesting to my (one or two) readers, and that really isn't what blogging should be about (imho). I named this site "In My Experience" for a reason, and that's the simply write about my experiences with things. I plan on getting back to that, but I really have no idea when.
Also, I'm disabling comments for the time being due to the constant comment spamming that has been going on.
Transition.
May 7, 2004 2:22 AM
Much time and effort on this over the last couple of years has migrated from working and video gaming to working, parenting, and video gaming. For now, this leaves no time for blogging, but I have plans to keep posting items that I want to remember for more than a day or two and other plans to build the site up as a résumé platform.
I don't think I'm going to lose my job soon (but who knows) and really just want to assemble most bits of work and related materials into one cohesive unit. In the near term my plans are to...
- migrate to Movable Type 3.0 (comment icons will be broken for a while)
- get the blog off the home page
- maintain the archives and comments as is
- retire the Communiblog
- redesign the main interface
I have some usability of web forms interactions questions I want to post and some javascript that's worth posting. But that will wait until I have time, and with a first birthday coming up for my daughter, that's not the time.
Many thanks to the regular comment posters, and fuck you very much to the comment spammers.
See you soon/later.