Time Warner Kills Newsgroups
Posted by Mitch on Jun 29, 2008
How did this one slip under the radar? Time Warner Cable has discontinued its newsgroup services as of June 23rd of this year. They cite it’s because of low subscriber usage, but anyone who believes that needs to buy swampland from me to build their houses on.
I discovered newsgroups pretty much after I got online over 10 years ago. It was the logical follow up to the old bulletin board system, and I liked it a lot. Took me a few years more to learn that I could access music and movie files through the newsgroups, and thus I’ve been able to circumvent the paid subscription services, which I enjoyed, even if I couldn’t specifically ask for content that I might really want.
In my mind, the truth is that the bandwidth that went into downloading these services, thereby bypassing Time Warner, who now offers its own music and movie services, wasn’t worth the cost anymore. That, plus there were some pretty unsavory groups out there that, a couple of weeks ago, many internet service providers agreed to stop allowing usage of, probably made this decision a no-brainer for the Time Warner people.
My only gripe is that they could have given some notice. It didn’t show up in any of their online newsletters, and it didn’t show up in the bills along with all the other junk they usually send. This one didn’t even make the newspapers or online news, and I’m surprised I haven’t read about it on any other blog up to now.
Okay, fine, I’ll take my ball and go play elsewhere; maybe. We’ll see; sniff!
My Blog Is Worth,…
Posted by Mitch on Jun 21, 2008
Or so says the people above, who run a site called “How Much Is My Blog Worth”. This time, unlike when I posted about being rich, you have to answer 19 questions as honestly as you possibly can so it will give you an estimate of what your blog is worth. I’ll own up to having some difficulty figuring out a couple of things, as I’m not quite tracking everything as well as I probably should be doing right now, but I got through it, and what’s above is what it came up with.
Of course, I’m not in Alvin Phang territory, but it gives me something to shoot for. 
Caveman’s Crib; Wild Fun
Posted by Mitch on Jun 20, 2008
Not sure if the Geico commercials are all across the country, but they’re definitely here in New York. I have to admit that I believe the people who came up with the concepts of the gecko and the cavemen weren’t paid nearly enough. I’ve enjoyed the gecko from the first time I saw him, and then when they brought out the cavemen, I’ve watched with rapt attention every step of the way.
However, the cavemen have something the gecko doesn’t; that would be a website geared towards how they live their life amongst the rest of us. And it, also, is one of the most entertaining and creative things I’ve seen in a long time.
When they first started it, they were using it to promote an upcoming party the cavemen were about to have. Now they have about five different scenarios set up, including the latest thing that’s also been in the commercials, the different dances the cavemen can do.
It’s all interactive; you go to the site, Caveman’s Crib, then decide among one of the five choices it gives you below the flash image, though you can also move around the image and find things to click on there. Then you go into their environment, their apartment or other places, and you find things to click on where you can look at their life. You also get to move around their surroundings if you can figure things out. There’s a lot to see, and every once in awhile one of the cavemen will pop up and either give you an update on something, or chastise you for being a bit too personal (being in the bathroom while the caveman is taking a shower was weird; at least he doesn’t come out).
Overall, it’s just a lot of fun. If you’ve heard of them, you’ll enjoy yourself; even if you haven’t heard of them, I think you’ll enjoy yourself also. Check it out.
The Game Palace
Posted by Mitch on Jun 14, 2008
Time for something a little different. My friend Aussie Sire has created a little online game room that he calls Blogsire’s Game Palace. It’s a place where you can basically play a bunch of different types of little online games, some you’re familiar with, some you’re not, just to basically waste time and try to get into the top ten for your own bragging rights.
I have to admit that I don’t play a lot of games outside poker and chess, but there’s something fascinating about some of these games, and I have to admit that I like the spirit of competition. Thus far I’ve played three of the games, making sure I was in the top 10 before moving on. After all, who doesn’t like seeing their name in lights.
So, if you’ve got some time to waste and want to just noodle around for awhile, give it a quick look, and have a bit of fun.
Google Analytics Works Great
Posted by Mitch on Jun 14, 2008
To me, the best way to track the traffic to all my sites is by using Google Analytics. It’s pretty easy to use if you’ve created your own sites. All you have to do is sign up, drop in the code they give you somewhere on each of the pages on your site (or only those you want to track), and you’re good to go.
As an example, I’m going to take a look at one day’s worth of traffic, instead of an entire month. On June 6th, I wrote my second rant against New York state and those stupid internet taxes. I guess it was a passionate enough topic for once because it got over 140 readers; that’s my best day ever for a blog post.
Google Analytics tells me how many visitors I got on that day for all my posts, though I can select just one to see the information on it. It tells me how many page views total, as well as an average of how many pages people read on average, the bounce rate (how many people left my site after the initial visit without checking anything else out), the average time spent on the site, and the percentage of new visits.
It then gives you an overview of visitors, which, for one day, doesn’t really tell me much, and a map overlay, which is really intriguing because you can break it down into countries, then states, and even cities. The folks in Cali seemed to love me on that day. Then you can see the traffic overview and the top 5 pages that were visited on that day, or that time period.
Of course, it goes deeper, as that was only the main page, but I just wanted to give you a flavor of the types of stats you can get. If you’re running an Adwords campaign you can use Analytics to track it for you also. And the visitor numbers are way more accurate and realistic than those numbers your host will give you.
All in all, I believe this is something people should be using, even though I also use Site Meter. This has so much more for you, and it’s free; can’t beat that!
Looking Forward To Firefox 3
Posted by Mitch on Jun 4, 2008
Firefox is my favorite browser, as I mentioned in my post about Error Doctor. Now it’s in testing for the next release, Firefox 3, and I can hardly wait.
The main improvement that I’m looking for is how it handles memory. For all its good qualities, it uses a lot of RAM, which, when you’re doing as many things as I tend to do at once, really starts slowing down other things. I’ll admit that I’m not quite sure how virtual memory works, but Firefox can eat it up the longer you have the browser running. It got so bad for me that I had to turn off pre-caching of sites just to free up some of that memory.
So, just that one feature would be enough for me. But there are a few more things coming that I like. There will be more security against bad sites, those sites that will drop malware and other nasty things on a flyby. You’ll also be able to close your browser and have open right back up to everything you just closed out if you wish; I love that idea, because I’ve often had to shut it down for some reason or another, and forgot to bookmark some pages I’d wanted to read. Something else it will do that I don’t have an issue with but others do is that if you have to close the browser in the middle of a download, it will pick that download back up when it’s opened again; that’s actually pretty great.
Of course, I won’t be happy if all the extensions I presently use won’t work with it, but I hear most of the developers are scrambling to get them all working, and that would be a good thing. Oh yeah, it’s supposed to be faster than Firefox 2, and no one ever complains about more speed, do they?
So yeah, I’m ready for Firefox 3. I will not be a tester, though, so anyone else who’d like to do it can, as the beta is available already. I hope you have a good experience with it; I’ll wait until the real thing is ready.
Website Grader
Posted by Mitch on Jun 1, 2008
I just came across a website that I think anyone who makes websites, has a website, or just wants to check out a website, should give a shot.
It’s called Website Grader, and what it basically does is goes through your website and the web and gives you a report on how your site is graded against general standards and then against the web itself.
I decided to run this site through it, just to see what it came up with, and it was pretty illuminating. The first thing it did was give me an overall grade of 84 out of 100; that was the highest out of all my websites, so I’m not mad.
Next it talked about what it calls online SEO, and its evaluation was intriguing. For one, it doesn’t show my site as having a description, which I guess it wouldn’t since it’s a blog, but I have to figure out how to get one in there, I guess. It found all my metatags, and did an evaluation as to how well I’m touching upon my keywords, which I got to suggest. It also doesn’t like font tags, preferring that I use CSS instead. I found that slightly interesting, since the blog is set up with CSS, but I know it’s because I use font tags to highlight links I’d like you to know about, such as the one for the website I’m talking about. It also talks about “Hx” tags and images, and I have to admit that I haven’t thought much about putting any “alt” tags in the images I’ve put on this site; I’ll have to rectify that at some point.
Next it talks about offline SEO, and that’s also intriguing. It first tells you how old your site is, and when its registration is up. It tells you what your page rank is, then it tells you how many pages are indexed by Google. That’s not such a bad thing to know, that’s for sure. It also tells you the last time Google indexed your site; that’s great also, since it seems they do it more regularly than we might think.
Now, here’s where it started getting good. It tells you what your traffic rank is, and this site is in the top 1.97%, per Alexa. Yeah, I know, let’s beat up on Alexa some more. Anyway, it then told me that, as a blog, it’s in the top 1.5% per Technorati; and here I was thinking I wasn’t getting any love whatsoever from them. And it says I have 837 inbound links; I’m not mad at that either.
There’s other stuff that may or may not be important, depending on your perspective, but, the way I see it, all information is good information, whether you use it or not. I will say that I also ran this program for my main site, and I’m glad I did. It seems that it shows the “www’ portion of my site as having 3,038 inbound links, but the non www part of my site having 3,020, and told me that if I set up 301 redirects I’d get credit for all of them and it would help my site rank higher. I’d never even thought about it, so I did that, as well as a couple other changes, and immediately improved my rank by six points.
This is a great informational SEO tool, and you’ve got to check it out.
Facebook Kills Network Pages
Posted by Mitch on May 31, 2008
Either tomorrow or Monday, Facebook will be eliminating the networks function of their site. For those who don’t know, networks gave you a chance to initially link up with people who had something in common with you, such as region of the world or country, college, high school or business. When I first signed up, I picked the network where I lived, and it gave me a chance to look through that network to find other people living in my area that I might know. I also was able to sign up for my alma mater’s network because I have a specific email address associated with the college.
With that gone, people are pretty much going to be relegated to having to find friends by popping in their names or email addresses and doing the individual search. Some people might find their friends in one of the many groups that are there, though, if you remember my post on Facebook, the groups are all overrated (even mine, unfortunately).
Of course, there are going to be some other changes, which Facebook probably needed to make, and probably what MySpace needs to think about doing some day. Many people who haven’t seen the news are going to awake tomorrow or Monday and wonder where everything is, and what’s going on. I think the networking thing is the most significant thing they’re doing, though, and I’m curious how new people will be greeted. I won’t see it, obviously, so I hope I get to talk to some new people to see how they got in, and what they think about the process.
Of course, I’m still hoping Facebook does something with their servers, because it’s still one of the slowest moving sites I deal with. Maybe they need to take a page from Google at some point, but I think they’re hedging their bets, wondering just how far social networking groups like theirs will be relevant, especially as everyone starts to notice that, though there are lots of members, there’s very little real participation between those members. I wish them, and me, well.
Subscribing To RSS Feeds
Posted by Mitch on May 28, 2008
RSS stands for “really simple syndication”, and basically it gives people an opportunity to follow new content from websites or blogs that are often changing what’s being presented on the site. For instance, if you notice on the top right side I have a little icon giving people the option to syndicate my blog, so that they will be informed every time I write something new. I want people to subscribe to my blog so that my message will spread, but there’s reality that many people may not quite know what RSS feeds are.
The video below talks about it in a little more detail, as well as how to use it witnin Internet Explorer. I use a separate program that’s not associated with my browser called Feedreader to put all my feeds into, and it’s free.
After watching that, I hope you decide to subscribe to my feed; I won’t be mad if you do. Meanwhile, I can’t take full credit for finding the video, so I thank Barbara Ling for writing about it on her blog.
Twitter’s On My Nerve, And I Just Got There!
Posted by Mitch on May 28, 2008
I’ve been on Twitter for less than a month, and I’m already starting to get irritated with it.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Sure, I came to it kicking and screaming because, like most people, I just didn’t quite get the concept. Basically, it’s fast and immediately blogging, or more like quick notes of what you’re doing at that moment. You’re only allowed 140 characters, including spaces, to say what you want to say; this makes you think just a little bit more concisely, which is hard for someone like me who wants to go on and on.
Once I started, it just grabbed me and I thought it was pretty neat. I found a few friends to follow, and as time went on, people started to find me, people I didn’t know, and that was neat. What happens is that you can follow people throughout the day and they can do the same to you. I’m following 3 or4 more people than follow me, but that’s okay. At least half the time I post a link from a new blog post, whereas 25% of the time I’m putting out a thought, and the other 25% I’m talking to someone.
One of my friends introduced me to TwitterFox, since I use Firefox, so I didn’t have to always sign onto the Twitter site I thought that was pretty good also, until I started getting these strange messages, “rate limit exceeded”, with a different number all the time. I thought that was odd, and asked my friend about it, but he said he hadn’t noticed it, probably because he’s not as anal as I am at looking at stuff. I also noticed that, quite often, the light blue “T” of TwitterFox that’s sitting at the bottom of my browser goes red, and that’s when you know it’s down.
I tried to figure out what the problem was, couldn’t, deleted it and reloaded it, and nothing was solved. I then went to Google and did my research, to see if anyone else was having the same problem. And that’s when it hit me; it’s not Twitter Fox at all, it’s Twitter. It would seem that it’s experiencing the same problems that both Facebook and MySpace experienced with rapid growth, which then brings on server issues. Just this past weekend Twitter announced they’d had a major server crash and were rerouting things, but they never fully shut us down, or so I believe.
So, though I’m still going to be “twittering”, I have to admit that it’s not fun when I go to post a message and everything is frozen. And it doesn’t matter whether I use TwitterFox or log onto the page and try to post something; when they’re down, they’re down, and there’s nothing you can do about it. However, I know the visits to this blog have increased since I hooked up on Twitter, so I’m not going to complain too loudly. They haven’t increased on my other blog, though; I find that interesting.
Anyway, if you ever get the urge to follow me on Twitter, just click on this link. I don’t think I’m going anywhere for awhile. You can learn more about it by checking out this link to eNetworking 101.
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