Blessed by the Potato

I have not been thrilled with the consumption of Domain Direct by Hover. I figured that I was handling the hard stuff of having a website with the server, database, stylesheets, content, and that the process of pointing people to that (domain forwarding, nameserver) should just work. For the most part it did under Domain Direct — there were some twists, such as the fact that the IP of my server isn’t truly static, so every now and then I’d have to update all the pointers, and that the one time a year that would happen would invariably be when I was on vacation. Also due to the way the forwarding was made “transparent”, the URL of a specific page wasn’t shown in your address bar, so anyone wanting to put in a permalink to a specific page would have to build it themselves by hovering over the title of a post and adding the /?p=XXX part themselves. This didn’t seem to be a big issue since I seemed to be the only one who referred to anything here.

Anyhow, things worked, even if there were some work-arounds needed, and then Hover came along and broke things. They were lambasted for it, and fixed things, so that now things look to work just as before, except for the favicon.

Oh, and something I just found out about: the RSS feed.

The thing is, I have no idea why the RSS feed isn’t working properly. The real strange thing is that if I try re-subscribing to the feed in the Google Reader, I get some posts, but nothing past mid-January (right when Hover took over). That was weird, since my own RSS subscription is working fine. Now how on earth the feed could deliver some posts, instead of working or not working was beyond me. I could get all the up-to-date posts with the un-forwarded RSS feed (the IP address directly). Finally I tried another reader and there’s nothing — the RSS URL is invalid. It’s not forwarding correctly. Google just has a cache somewhere.

So, that explains my weird web server issues. It gives me one more reason to move to a professional host instead of doing it myself, but unfortunately I don’t have the time to manage a move right now nor the financial inclination to do so.

One way to get the RSS feed is to subscribe to it via the IP address. This is of course not the preferred solution since my IP can change at any time without notice, breaking the feed. You’d then need to come back here to get the new address and re-subscribe. What a pain. The other way is to try to figure out what Hover is doing to break the RSS feed (answer: frames). Since I elected to turn on the frames to hide my IP address (so only holypotato.com appears in the address bar, which looks a little more professional IMHO), I suppose all I can do is elect to turn them off to make the RSS feed work. You may have noticed that I’ve already implemented this (unless I’ve changed my mind since posting).

To subscribe to the RSS feed, simply add
http://www.holypotato.com/?feed=rss2
into your feed reader of choice (Google Reader, Thunderbird, your iGoogle homepage, etc). It should work now — please let me know if it doesn’t! (oh, and http://www.holypotato.com/?feed=comments-rss2 for the comments feed)

John Scalzi wrote about the Law of Internet Invocation 5 years ago, nearly to the day. It states simply “If you name them, they will come.” Through the magic of trackbacks and Google, it is far more likely that someone on the internet will find out that you’re talking about them and drop in for a visit. This can take reviewers by surprise since you don’t often expect or intend to invoke someone by talking about them, though this was the accepted pattern of devilry through the ages. Now it has come true for me a second time, as Jon Chevreau has appeared to accuse me of not reading all the way to the end when I reviewed Findependence Day.

I can see where there might be some confusion. I said the story was not great, which some would take to be a nice, obtuse way of saying it was terrible. It wasn’t — it was not great, as in just okay. It was decent, and as I said, worked very well as edutainment. But bored high school English students of the future are not going to be forced to write essays on the relationship between Jamie and his shrew-like wife Sheena, or exploring the role of Theo as a father figure in their Findependence Day unit sandwiched between MacBeth and The Mote In God’s Eye. Conversely, Twilight touched on some matters regarding the magic of compound interest, but I won’t be recommending that book as educational in the slightest.

I recently posted about the dearth of ad revenue here, and I was a little surprised at how bad it is. I know this is a low-traffic personal blog spanning multiple topics, but there are a lot of other bloggers out there who have essentially “gone pro”. I’m actually quite amazed at how much ad revenue some sites are pulling in, with Four Pillars making enough to cover paying $20 per post to Mr. Cheap for writing. Hell, at that rate I could write one post every three months and cover the server bills! (Mike: hint, hint)

With ad revenue that enticing though comes the steady soulless grind: many “pro” blogs try to keep up their once-a-day posting scheme, even if they have to post less than stellar articles to fill the space. It loses the passion and discussion and opinionation that makes reading blogs worthwhile in the first place. It’s like the regular media but without the benefit of journalism training (not that I put much value on professional journalism training). Million Dollar Journey is the perfect example of this: I used to read it every day (and followed most of the comment threads, too), but now the site has over half its page space devoted to ads, and meeting the once-a-day format has taken it’s toll. The biggest symptom of this is the list post: 5 ways of cooking bacon; 7 types of winter tires; 10 books on retirement planning; one ring to rule them all. The posts also start getting shorter and shorter, with fewer details, and less research, with the first ten comments often containing corrections… and you start wondering if you can trust anything this guy (and here I’m referring to pro bloggers in general and not MDJ specifically) is saying — especially once they start getting into affiliate deals. Then to help promote the blog sites will join “carnivals” on some topic to increase cross-linking and help their readers find the other blogs. A lot of these carnivals are a great way to find new blogs and particularly good posts. However, some of them are just mis-mashes of regular blog-a-day posts with no unifying theme. One that struck me as being particularly strange was a post on how to subscribe to RSS feeds in the investing carnival, New Year’s edition, under real estate investing. In that same carnival is a link to a domain squatting “investing” site… and it wasn’t even a link to a particular post for the carnival.

I’m actually a little surprised at how high a lot of pro bloggers set the bar: many aim for a post every weekday (5 posts a week). That’s a pretty hectic pace, even when the posts are only 400 words long. I know it seems to synergize well with people’s daily routine to better bring in the ad revenue or whatever, but still, a lot of very successful sites (including some linked here: Penny Arcade, XKCD, etc) have thrice, twice or just once a week posting frequencies. I personally blog more for my own entertainment than yours, so I post whenever the heck I feel like it; I do try to keep up at least once a week, but sometimes will post three times a day when I’ve got a bee up my bonnet and nothing better to do with my time. I figure by now people have learned how to set up feeds, or aren’t terribly disappointed to come here a few days in a row to find nothing new (granted, if I go two or three weeks without a post, then it’s understandable if the bookmarks get pulled).

I first reviewed Astraweb back in 2006, shortly after Rogers cut off newsgroup access. Things have really only gotten better since my last review: speeds have picked up considerably (I can just about max out my connection now at certain times of the day, and the average is well above 300 kB/s, and well above 100 kB/s even in peak times), retention is longer, and the deal is now 120 GB for $25 US, which covers about 8 months of my downloading habit, and is still the best value-for-money I’ve found. What made me think of revisiting my already positive review was that I ran through the end of my last block of credits tonight, and they actually let me go over so that my download finished up. I only went a few MB over, and I have no idea how long they would have let me keep going (I doubt I could have set up a 30 GB download to run with just enough credits to start and they would have let that finish — maybe it only checks every few minutes or so), but it was nice that they didn’t stop it immediately when the digits rolled over to zero. I naturally signed up right away for another 120 GB, which should take me through to late summer (though if I don’t start using the VCR/TV to watch TV I might run out before this TV season ends in the spring).

Trend-Micro for a number of years, together with UWO, offered students here copies of PC-Cillin/Internet Security for $15. From that you could protect as many computers as you pleased, the theory being it was worth the subsidy to keep the UWO network secure. This year however, it’s $15 per computer, and you have to go up to campus to physically pick up each license. I picked up three licenses for our computers recently, knowing that I needed one for my new build and both my laptop and Wayfare’s laptop, which expired early December. We both thought Wayfare’s desktop was on a different schedule… unfortunately we were wrong and it expired this week as well.

Figuring that her computer is behind the hardware firewall and that she “doesn’t do much” with it, and not wanting to pay and have to go up to campus, we decided to try out a different, free, antivirus product. We went with AVG, one I’ve been using on my server computer for some time (ever since PC-Cillin stopped working on WinME). Well, within a day she was infected with some sort of browser hijacking trojan. It keeps throwing popups at her as she tries to surf, and does it even in safe mode.

So, right quick I switched it up to Trend Micro Internet Security for her… unfortunately, perhaps because it was already infected, or perhaps because it’s a nasty new exploit they haven’t solved yet, Trend Micro wasn’t able to fix it either. I’m still trying to figure this thing out, and am sincerely hoping I won’t have to resort to a reformat…