No, that’s Lens Crafters. And no, it’s not some D&D thing. It’s another funky Web 2.0 deal (I hate the ‘Web 2.0’ lingo, but it’s practical. What are you gonna do?) like Flickr or MySpace. It’s part of Squidoo, a site that lets you create lenses for things you’re an expert on. Essentially, you create single web page that acts as a lens on a specific topic. You fill the page with info and links about said topic to educate the random web surfer.
Where it gets interesting is that each lens can make some cash. Each lens has Google ads on the side and you can link to Amazon or other retailers and earn referral fees. The cash generated goes to Squidoo, charity and lensmasters like me (and potentially you).
So I’ve signed up with the current flavor of the month, MySpace. I’ve got my own little MySpace page with my favorite movies and music and a running tally of how many friends I have (yesterday it told me I had 0 friends, but today I’m up to 12–score!).
I’m trying to see what all the fuss is about, and so far I don’t really get it. I think I’m just old.
I don’t ordinarily think of myself as a productive person. I like the idea of it, but productivity, organization and efficiency are all things I strive for but rarely attain. At least that’s how I feel about it–others would probably describe me as productive, organized and efficient. Those people also don’t see the piles I usually have surrounding my work space.
I especially like it when I find a new way to make my work more efficient, like I found today. It starts with Lifehacker, a blog dedicated to productivity, mainly through technology. I stumbled on the site more than a month ago and it wasn’t until today when I actually had time to sift through the 200+ plus Lifehacker RSS entries and see what the site was really about. It led me to a few new upgrades:
If you’re getting a 500 server error on my blog, I’m aware of the problem and trying to fix it. It appears to be showing up for .php files created after the start of November. So my November archive and any individual entries created in the last two days won’t load. I had a similar .php problem before, though it doesn’t appear to be the same issue this time.
Maybe technology should move up on my list of things I hate about blogging. I love technology as much as the next twenty-something geek, but I really dislike technology when it doesn’t work like it’s supposed to. I want to spend time writing and reading and doing fun stuff, not changing the HTMLUMask to come up with the proper file permissions so my server can display my .php files. What the hell does that even mean?
Update: The site should be fixed now. Apparently it was a problem with the permissions of the new folder for November entries, fixed with the DirUMask. Something that probably should have been caught last month, but oh well. Technology: Can’t live with it, can’t watch TV without it.
Some of you may remember that I upgraded to Movable Type 3.2 about a month ago (the rest of you probably don’t care, so you can stop here). While I love a lot of the new features they have, especially the ability to manage all your comments, trackbacks and entries from all your blogs in one spot, I’m pretty disappointed with some of their features, namely the spam protection.
The new version of MT has a different way of dealing with spam comments. You have more power to control what gets through and what doesn’t. They’ve even claimed that it’s such a good system that you don’t need MT Blacklist, the old standbye anti-spam plug-in that so many of us have relied on.
AOL bought Weblogs Inc. for around $25 million. So what’s my blog worth? Leave it to the web to give us the answer. Plug in your url and this site will tell you how much your blog is worth based on the same links to dollars ratio as the Weblogs deal. So what are the blogs I write for worth?
Just when you thought the iPod Nano was incredibly cool, Apple tops it with a new video-capable iPod. We knew it was only a matter of time, but now it’s here.
The new iPod still comes in 30 and 60 GB varieties, now they offer black in addition to white, and they boast a capacity of 15,000 songs, 25,000 photos or 150 hours of video and up to 20 hours of battery life. You can also hook that bad boy up to your TV with an optional S-video cable. And if you turn to the new iTunes 6.0 you can download music video and entire episodes of TV shows, like the latest episode of Lost the day after it debuts on TV.
This all sounds incredibly sweet, but before we get too excited let’s take a reality check.
If you’ve had problems viewing my blog or commenting the past week or so, it should be fixed now. It was an odd problem with the new Movable Type 3.2 upgrade I installed and my .php files not working properly.
After using it for a week, I still really like the new features, though I’m not as thrilled with the comment protection. I still don’t understand how it works, which means I have a hard time tweaking it to make it work better. MTBlacklist seemed to be more straight forward. I suppose it is saving me time–I just wish it was saving me more time.
Yesterday I upgraded to the new Movable Type 3.2. So far, so good. (though I can’t stand their new user’s manual—it’s way over written and makes everything sound harder than it really is.)
This does mean that MTBlacklist, the old spam filter I used, is no more. MT 3.2 has built-in spam protection, and the guy who wrote the code for MTBlacklist says it’s now obsolete (he now works for Movable Type). I’m sad to see it go since it kicked some major spam butt. Let’s look at the numbers for my blogs:
100,957 comments blocked (which means I never had to deal with them)
12,316 comments moderated (which means I had to delete them from the system, though they were never public)
12,796 comments blocked for using the word ‘poker’—I added the word to the blacklist out of frustration sometime in August 2005, apparently a smart move.
946 comments blocked for using the word ‘f-ck’—another word added out of frustration.
That’s a lot of comment spam, considering my blogs only have 2,200 legit comments total (and 145+ of those are about Simple Plan’s Pierre Bouvier).
I love blogging. Why else would I keep doing it for almost seven years? But still, some things about it just annoy me. So I present the Top 10 Things I Hate About Blogging.
10. The Name of My Blog.
Thoughts. What a stupid name. It started as Daily Ponderings and then became ReAL Thoughts and is now just Thoughts. Stupid. All of them. The problem is I can’t come up with anything better. As dumb as the name is, it sure beats Kevin’s Blog.
