Blessed by the Potato

First off, this is the 600th post here at BbtP. For a long while there were roughly two comments for every post (typically, someone commenting and myself replying), but lately the comments have dropped off… at this rate posts will outnumber comments around post #700.

I’d like to start off with a public service announcement: back up your data. I just backed up my most important stuff: my digital pictures, spreadsheets, blog posts, etc., to my external hard drive as part of my quarterly backup task (which was supposed to have been in March closer to the equinox, but I procrastinated). I’m now tempted to secure the external hard drive somehow, perhaps create a drywall compartment in the wall and make it a fixture of the house so that if someone breaks in and steals my computer, they’ll leave the drive alone. Another option might be to get a network drive and keep it somewhere else in the house inconspicuous. Of course, with a 60 GB hard drive the Xbox also looks like a good place to hide a backup. For the paranoid readers (and come on, with this site that must be nearly half of you) TrueCrypt is a good way of keeping your files secure on those DVD or external hard drive backups.

As the spring weather rolls in (and with today’s snow, back out) I start to think about the upcoming european trip I’ll be taking. The incessant reminder emails to register for the conference I’m attending may have also influenced this train of thought. I’ve already booked my plane tickets, after seeing the price jump a few times, but hadn’t looked at the train situation at all yet. I just sort of assumed that everyone always talks about how great the european train system is, so it must be no problem to hop from place to place by train while we’re there. Indeed, there are some bright spots, such as France’s TGV, but now that I’m looking into it, the whole experience sounds rather miserable. This is of course because we’ll be starting out in Switzerland, which is not flat. Check out this image of the rail line I snagged from Google maps:

Is that a railway or a roller-coaster?!

One thing’s for sure, Sid Meier’s Railroads! would never let me build that line. So looking up the train times now (something I should have done before agreeing that we’d visit Venice after the conference) I find that we’d spend the better part of 3 of our 10 non-conference days in Europe just lollygagging around on trains.

/train

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)

I don’t know what’s changed behind the scenes, but it looks like my domain host is no longer handling the URL forwarding for my site properly. It used to be that it would forward the holypotato.com part to [MY_IP]/blog which would allow you to add on the location of any particular post [ /?p=XXX ] to create a link for any particular page. It was a little annoying (couldn’t just cut and paste from the address bar), but it worked at least. Now though, things are all screwy and that’s not working. More importantly, my hidden/administrative subdomains [ xxx.holypotato.com ] that I used to direct me to certain parts of the site for admin stuff or my own personal file bank home-away-from-home are also taking me to the main page, which is bad. So far that’s annoying but not critical — reading, commenting, and as you can see, authoring are all still working fine. The RSS feeds (which oddly enough do use the same URL structure as trying to link to a specific page) appear to still work.

I’m working on seeing what I can do — bear with me, especially if the site goes dead for a little while while I fiddle.

Update: Ok, I know what’s changed behind the scenes. Domain Direct, part of TuCows, who used to be, way way back in the day in league with Rogers (or took over a registrar that was), where I bought the holypotato.com domain from originally, has been shut down and its operations taken over by Hover, another part of TuCows with substantially inferior service. Everyone on the support forums is complaining that the redirection to individual pages isn’t working. Just logging in to the support forums took 20 minutes. So it doesn’t look like there’s going to be an easy fix for this from them, which means it’s probably time to go host shopping again.

Update Jan 23/09: At first Hover tried to pass this off by saying that “page-level redirection” was a premium service that not many people wanted, and consolidating the Domain Direct and other registrars meant cutting some fat… but after a number of people complained about it, it appears to be mostly fixed (I’m still having an issue with the favicon, but I can live with that).

Well, if you haven’t noticed, a few months ago I put up some fairly discrete ads (one on the right sidebar, just under links, and a small banner just before the comment form if you go anywhere off the main page). Never did I allow myself to get deluded enough to think that these would ever pay much, especially given how little traffic this site gets, but I was hoping that it might be enough to cover the cost of webhosting (or at least the difference in cost between webhosting and sucking up electricity with my own server).

No such luck. Even though my traffic has nearly doubled thanks to my guest articles at the moneygardener, the results from the first three months of ads are in, and the grand total is: $0.03. That’s right, one cent a month. I’m thinking of taking them down as soon as I get off my lazy butt to find the stylesheets, because that’s pretty pointless. I got an email a few days ago (which is what made me think to check my balance) from Google’s adsense optimizer robot thing, and it recommended basically that I put up a whole ton more ads. Now, I don’t want to turn into MDJ, and have half the front page as solid ads just to make a few bucks a month, so I’m going to pretty much ignore the goobot.

One thing I’m going to look into is to try to blacklist a few of the advertisers that I know my savvy users just wouldn’t click on, to give the ads that have a better shot of being of interest show up. Also, I should note that I’m expressly forbidden from encouraging my readers to click on the ads, so just in case, you better not click on any for a few weeks after this post.

I’m closing in on both the 500 posts mark as well as the 3rd year of BbtP being in blog form. I was going to do a best-of post for my 500th post, but those can sometimes be pretty lame, and I’ve also got a small flood of new visitors after the Money Gardener put up a link today, so I figured I would instead do a best-of post now to try to guide newcomers to the good stuff.

About Blessed by the Potato:

It was revealed to me at a young age in a vision (induced by an overdose of caffeine and no sleep for 36 hours during a programming assignment — damn you Sze) that the the Potato was a great and powerful supernatural power, and that I must worship it and follow it’s teachings. I was blessed by the Potato that night, for my programming assignment got an A+ even though I don’t remember actually having my eyes open at all for the last third or so of it. Combined with the fact that there were a great many newbs taking my preferred handles at the time as the internet grew, I chose to use the name Potato, in honour of my new… whatever.

More to the point, Blessed by the Potato is the name of my sometimes-whimiscal, sometimes-serious personal blog. As a personal blog, it covers a wide variety of topics with no particular posting schedule — some weeks I’ll post every day, some weeks not at all, though it’s very rare for me to miss more than one week in a row. Hopefully this post will help you get started on the 3 years of material here, and find what might be of interest to you.

Personal Finance:

I’ve always had a passing interest in money and the stock market, and especially in the small numbers games, like figuring out how much you have to use the phone before a monthly plan becomes better than pay-as-you go. However, blogging about personal finance has only been a very recent thing for me. There are certainly more knowledgeable and experienced people out there writing about personal finance, but if you want verbosity then you’ve come to the right place.

Personal Finances
My Financial Mistake And What You Can Learn From It
Rent vs Buy
Mortgage Budget Sheet
Intro to Finance: Mutual Funds
Intro to Finance: Stock Market Investing
Intro to Finance: Leverage/Margin

Cars, Hybrids, and Saving Gas:

I’m not really much of a car guy or a gear-head, but I write about my car a bit, especially since it’s been stolen… twice. That got me looking at replacements, in particular hybrid cars, which I’ve written about in great detail. I’m also interested in them since they seem to converge on that space between techno-geekdom, environmentalism, and personal finance.

ScanGauge – Part 1 – A nifty device that among other things can give you real-time feedback of your car’s fuel use; can be used to help you train yourself to drive more efficiently.
Hybrid Cars: The Benefits of My Research — A long discussion of almost every aspect of hybrid cars; unfortunately it’s starting to get a little dated.
Hybrid Payback – Them’s Fightin’ Words! — People focus so much on the financial aspect of buying a hybrid, but even then they do it wrong! Here I take a very large number of words to say that you should look at how much you could save over the life of the car, and not how long the payback is. Plus, I point out that at worst you’re out the hybrid premium, but if gas prices keep rising you could save a lot of money, so a hybrid drivetrain is also like insurance in some respects!
Fear of Hybrids — Magnetic fields? Really?
Nokian WR Review — I’ve become a snow-tire believer. These are great because I don’t have to take them off in the summer!
Gas Mileage and Winter — A discussion of why gas mileage is worse in winter, and some tips.

The Environment, Conservation, and Other Green Sundry:

One of my first posts to draw in a random visitor from the Google was one on a malfunctioning security light that was eating up half of my house’s total electricity consumption, and how I read the meter on the side of my house to track down the problem.

Where The Heck is the Juice Going?
Snow Crash + Further Hydro Measurements

Insanity:

Insanity is all around us, and apropos to the heading, just about anything can be found here. In particular, after my car was stolen I commented a few times on stupid, insane thieves. Most of this stuff is more topical/timely though, so it might not be worth delving too much into the archives.

Power Bricks
Life With An Evil Genius

School and Science:

As the kids would say, I’m in 23rd grade (3rd year of my PhD). Science interests me enough to make a career out of it, however, I explicitly avoid trying to write too much about my own field: it’s not that interesting to other people, and I try to keep my professional life professional (and BbtP is anything but professional). That doesn’t stop me from writing about science in more general terms though.

Advice For My Sister As She Goes To University

Gaming:

I used to be an avid video game player. The last year or so I haven’t really found the time, and the Wii is just too much like exercise some days ;) While I do have some posts discussing and reviewing different games, I can’t really say there’s any I would highlight for new readers or include in my best of. Nonetheless, you know now that that category is there if you’re interested.

Food:

Food and eating is one of life’s great pleasures. However, I find it hard to write too much that’s meaningful about it. Note that I do have a recipe section in the “Pages” on the right.

Permalinks:

And finally, a short note about permalinks here. Unfortunately, I don’t have my hosting set up quite right to be able to simply cut and paste from the address bar — often a bit of URL massaging is needed. To do so, take the root (www.holypotato.com) and add the /?p=XXX where XXX is the number of the post in question (it’s the last part of the URL that you will see in your information bar by hovering over a link here).