Archive for April, 2007
Just a brief post today, but family is requesting more pictures of Who Dey, my bengal cat - so here are some more.
I’m kinda sick so I don’t feel like typing too many captions or what not, I think I’ll just upload the pictures. Besides that, Who Dey won’t freaking shut up right now - she’s driving me crazy.
This is the new toy my parents bought her. It looks lovely in my dining room :’(
Just so you know, I didn’t put those toys in the bed, she put them in the bed before falling asleep there.
That’s baby, the neighbor’s cat. She usually comes to visit and her and Who Dey paw and growl at each other through the glass door.
That’s her trying to retrieve the peice of cellophane she was playing with after I threw it away.
Ok, I hope that should hold you guys for a while. I’m not too good at taking pictures.
April 14th, 2007
My friend Alex has a great blog about finance that for some reason I just discovered today. Honestly, if you’re into that type of thing check it out.
Reading it today got me started thinking about my own savings account. (of course, being unemployed is also a good reason to start thinking about your savings account)
I myself happen to have 2 savings accounts, and a checking account. I usually keep enough in checking to pay 2 months bills, and the rest in savings. My other savings account handles all of the money my websites make. I decided to keep them separate so that I can measure actual earnings after I deduct for hosting, advertising, etc.
The question I asked today but couldn’t find a clear answer on is “what’s the interest on my savings account?” I noticed it’s not even listed anywhere on my bank’s web page. When I did track it down, I was shocked to see that it’s only at about 2%.
Why was I shocked? Well, that’s because the standard rate of inflation is just over 3%. That means I’m losing money simply by leaving it in the savings account. That’s not good.
Luckily, my website earnings are making 4.5% in their ING direct account. That means I’m actually earning money on that.
If you want more information about high interest savings accounts check out Alex’s blog post.
April 13th, 2007
Many of my colleagues in the SEO field give me dumb looks when I start talking about parasite hosting. (OK I can’t see their faces through the IM window, but if I could I’m sure they’d be giving me dumb looks.)
It seems that a lot of people haven’t heard of parasite hosting, and that’s a shame because it’s currently overtaking the Google SERPs like a swarm of locusts.
Parasite hosting is the process of creating spammy keyword filled pages on an older trusted domain. Once they get this page to rank, they can direct traffic elsewhere. Many of these pages just contain 1 link for the user to click over to the desired page.
If you don’t believe me, just do a Google search for buy cialis and look at all the .edu domains that show up. Clicking the first result you’ll see some text on a page, and then a giant image link to a place where you can actually buy cialis. (/me cringes at the thought of all the spam I’m going to get after pinging weblogs.com with a post that contains “buy cialis”)
The same is true for some other spammy searches. As seomoz pointed out, even Forbes is getting in on the benefits of parasite hosting.
Basically, what this tells us is that it’s important to have a trusted domain. Let’s say for example you have a website that sells widgets and you want to branch off into selling sprockets. Should you make a separate website, or keep them together?
According to the success of the parasite hosted sites, you’d be best to just add some sprockets pages into your widgets site. It kind of makes me wonder what I could get away with on a 7 year old PR5 website (not that I would!)
April 10th, 2007
As you can see from the dotCULT sidebar, I’ve been using MyBlogLog for a few months now. If you haven’t tried it out, you probably should. It’s neat to be able to put a face with your readers.
Some of the things I love about it are the ability to accurately track both adsense and YPN clicks. I like that feature so much that I’ve installed it on a couple of other sites just for the stats.
With that said, there’s a few places I’d like to see some improvements on the stats.
For starters, it’s impossible to share your stats with others. Why is that? I’m in talks to sell one of my sites, and there’s no way for me to share stats. An export feature here would be great. Failing that, sizing it so that I can fit the whole report on a screenshot would be ever better.
I like the dashboard for each day. It’s great to see the top 10 referers, pages, and things people clicked. But if you try to run this for a date range it limits you to one category at a time. Why? I’d love to be able to see that same “yesterday” report but for a whole week or month instead. After all, I’m not as concerned with daily numbers as I am with monthly numbers.
I’d also like to see some further integration with other Yahoo properties. (If you hadn’t heard, Yahoo recently bought MyBlogLog.) It’s doing a great job of tracking my YPN clicks, but how much cooler would it be if I could have it show my revenue too? What about ad spending on overture? Can you tie those together and show me a net profit/loss for the site?
I’m not sure exactly what the pro service offers, but these would be some killer features!
What changes would you like to see with MyBlogLog? What do you think of the service? What features would you add?
April 10th, 2007
Last weekend some friends and I were having a debate about corporate spyware. The question we asked is “what would you do if you found out your company monitors everything you do on your computer? Every website you visit, every key you press, and even look at your screen remotely from time to time.”
So where did this come from? Well on Friday I noticed my computer running slow, so like all geeks I did a ctrl alt del to see what was using so much memory. It turns out the problem was FireFox, but even more interesting I found a program called “swsys.exe” running. Since I’ve never heard of it, I Googled to see what it was.
Turns out, swsys.exe is part of an application called “Activity Tracker” that allows employers to log all websites, emails, and even keystrokes! It also lets them look at any employee’s screen in real time.
A quick “netstat” command showed my computer currently connected to my Boss’s. A couple setting tweaks, and that was no longer the case 
That’s where the problem lies.
Over the weekend I talked to some fellow programmers at different companies, and even my old boss. All of them said “screw that, I’d walk out if I found out they were doing that.. that’s shady.”
Unfortunately, I didn’t get the chance to walk out. When I got home Friday I tried logging in to check my work email. (like I do every weekend - to check for any critical alerts or outages.) When my password wasn’t accepted, I knew what was coming.
I was fired this morning for “performance issues.”
I’m not going to bad talk a previous employer - it’s not something I do. I met some great people at Auto Credit Express and had some great opportunities. Altogether working at ACE helped me grow into a much better programmer than I was when I started almost 2 years ago.
On the flip side, I am glad to no longer be working for a company that engages in these practices. It’s one thing to protect your assets, it’s a totally different issue to not have trust in them to begin with.
Has anybody else experienced software like this at your job? Would you work for such a company? What would you do if you did?
April 9th, 2007
Last week, Jeremy posted about a little game called Desktop Tower Defense. (Warning: do NOT click that link if you want to get anything productive done today.)
Desktop Tower Defense is perhaps the most addicting flash game I’ve ever played in my life. I’m serious!! I even got my cousin addicted. I told him about it at 10pm, and then woke up to a message from him at 4:30am saying “you’re right, it is.”
Basically, it’s the reason I didn’t do anything productive at all this weekend. So you’ve been warned. Don’t click this link.
April 8th, 2007
If it seems like my spelling has improved that’s because, well, it has!
Before I moved dotCULT over to the new server I decided to mod it up a bit. I installed some less common options like pspell (the php spelling module) and mod_python (haven’t played with that yet) and some newer upgrades like PHP5 and MySQL5.
One of the benefits of having PHP5 and pspell is that I get to use cool AJAX wordpress plugins like Visual Spellcheck.
If you want to use it, you’ll have to use the more basic wordpress editor instead of the richtext (but I don’t like the richtext version anyway - it creates ugly code.)
Once activated, the plugin will put a little “check spelling” link above the textbox. Clicking it highlights any misspelled words like in the screenshot below:
It’s pretty cool - and easy to use. I really wish they’d make a spellchecker addon for ScribeFire. It’s so much easier to blog from FireFox than it is to open up my blog all the time. (especially when it’s having DNS issues… but don’t worry I think I have all fixed now.)
April 4th, 2007
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