Archive for July, 2007
I have to agree with Mike Arrington. The wall street journal is pretty off on their write up of blogging history. They just published an article saying happy 10th birthday to blogging. While the word may be only 10 years old, the concept isn’t.
I myself started blogging in 1998… only we didn’t call it a blog or a journal. We called it a website. Back then though, there were no fancy files like wordpress. You needed to know how to get hosting, and write your own perl (later PHP) scripts. Of course, I didn’t invent blogging either.. I saw others doing it before me and said “hey cool.. me too.” That makes me think “blogging” is a bit older than the WSJ says it is.
Even in dotCULT’s heyday of 2000 we didn’t call it blogging. Maybe they’re talking about the popularity of the word blogging… if so, then it’s not even 10 yet.
Also, I’m tired of hearing the phrase iPhone Application. There’s just no such thing. What you’re really talking about is a website. Sure it may use iPhone style graphics and look really good at 320X240, but it’s still a web page… not an iPhone application. Speaking of which, I DO have 2 iPhone formatted websites: NoSlang.mobi and RPSgame.mobi. They’re not applications, and they’re not just for iPhones. You can use your Nokia too if you want. Let’s stop calling things by stupid names and call them what they are.
July 16th, 2007
Can having your server go down harm your rankings? It appears so!
When apache and cpanel on my txt2day server tried to update itself automatically, something went wrong that required a server reboot. Unfortunately, I was out of town and couldn’t do it until 4 days later.
It looks like Googlebot came through while it was down though - that’s when problems occurred.
Doing a query for just the word txt2day shows a totally different site at the #1 spot. I’m not sure why, maybe somebody can explain.
Doing a site:txt2day.com shows a couple sub pages, but not the home page.
I’m usually willing to give things like this time, but it’s been almost 8 days now… and googlebot hasn’t reindexed.
I’ve re-submitted the URL to google, changed text on the homepage so that googlebot will see it’s changed, filed a reinclusion request for the homepage, and linked to it from several sites (including this one)
I’m not sure what else to do. The site used to be in the top 3 of google for any text message related term. It’ll be interesting to see what happens if and when the rankings return.
To compare, Yahoo picked up that the site was back about 2 days later. MSN has re-listed the site, but with the wrong title and no rankings now.
July 13th, 2007
If anybody works at BellSouth..oh nevermind you’re probably not reading this.
Nobody with BellSouth DSL can access any of my websites that have jonesy.biz as their DNS servers.
I’m not quite sure why… It’s had this DNS server for over 3 months now… long enough for you to update your listings.
Why is that? It’s not only affecting dotcult.com but noslang.com and feedbutton.com as well.
If somebody could give me some answers I’d be very grateful.
I doubt there’s an issue with my DNS settings, because I’m posting this right now..
So what gives? Throw me a bone here.
July 12th, 2007
Some of you may remember that I was at one time an editor on shoutwire. Shoutwire is a Digg style site, but with a little more moderation to prevent spam. It also offers editorials.
One of the editorials I wrote for them the first time is still in their top 5 most popular. It’s called My Daughter’s a Tramp, Isn’t it Cute. You may remember it.
I left Shoutwire shortly after that when one of the people in charge started making unreasonable demands from us unpaid editors. He treated us like outsourced labor - and poorly.
Anyway, Shoutwire was recently purchased by Tubearoo (stock symbol: TUBR) and after seeing that a 400 day article was still in their top 5, they invited me back.
I’m not sure how long I’ll remain there or what, but my plan is to try to post 1 new editorial every week.
Here’s my first one.:
Paris Hilton… Is all it takes to make you read this.
Check it out.
July 12th, 2007
Wow! I went up north from Wednesday through Sunday and my phone spent more time in other people’s hands than my own. I couldn’t go anywhere without a bunch of 16-25 year olds running up to me and asking to play with my phone.
It’s not like I was showing it off though…. there was no need to. My own cousin didn’t notice I had one until 2 days had passed, but that didn’t stop everybody else from noticing every time I was on the beach and took a phone call or checked an email.
I was curious as to why there were so many articles about it, but now I see why. People really do like it, and it IS that cool. I guess the newness just wore off on me.
The worst part is that the edge service didn’t work at the beach, so I couldn’t show off what I think is the coolest part of the phone.
Anyway, I did manage to take a bunch of pictures with the camera. I’m loving the fact that I can just touch a couple buttons and boom they’re on flickr. You can see them at my flickr account if you want.
Anyway, I’m still digging through hundreds of emails (443 to be exact) that I received during the 2 days I took off.
I’ve got some new projects in the works too… (or possibly quite old, you’ll see.) I’ll talk more about that in a few days when I have time.
July 9th, 2007
If email was the first killer app of the web, and social networking is the current one, then the iPhone web browser is going to be the killer app that revolutionizes the phone industry.
Never before have I seen so many articles about people making their websites or applications work on the iPhone. There are games made strictly for the iPhone, AIM clients made for the iPhone, and scaled down versions of Digg, Google Reader, Twitter, Flickr, and any other popular site you choose.
If anything is going to kick off the .mobi revolution than this is it! I think the iPhone is going to cause developers to start thinking about mobile phones when they develop their pages - and it’s about time. It’s where the web is going.
I know it contradicts the Berners-Lee description of the Internet. It DOES destroy an essential property of the web. I also think it’s it’s time for the web to evolve. I don’t think the phone browsers will ever be 100% the same as computer browsers. They shouldn’t be - they’re a different experience.
Anyway, in keeping with the trend I’ve put up an iPhone version of my Internet slang translator. You can check it out at NoSlang.mobi. It’s a totally scaled down version, but it’s still got all the power of the full one. Go ahead and bookmark it if you like.
Update: When I was testing stuff for the iPhone I started by fooling around with a basic rock paper scissor game. It’s very easy to code, and something fun to do. Anyway, a friend said I should release it as an iPhone app too, so I present to you: RPSgame.mobi - rock paper scissors for the iPhone.
If there’s any interest in a dotCULT version let me know and I’ll make one. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you can start coding up a Wordpress plugin to make a .mobi compatible website out of your current blog. I’m sure it’d get heavy use and press.
July 3rd, 2007
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