Categories
Internet

Hijacked domain

You may or may not have heard about the hijacking of the www.hoopla.com domain from Leslie Harpold. If you haven’t, you can read more on the story at TextismTime is TightMetaFilter, and diveintomark.

What’s funny is that I received an email last week “warning” me that burningbird.org and other variations of “burningbird.xxx” were being scooped up and that I was at risk of losing my online identity. Considering that another company had burningbird.com before I ever signed up for burningbird.net, and that searching on Google for “burningbird” always returns my web sites (yes, Google is very good for this type of search), I’m not worried over much about it. Besides, I’ll always have “yasd” and “shelley powers”, as well as me when I look in the mirror, thank you very much.

Take more than a domain name theft to steal me.

And for those who are looking for traces of Leslie Harpold, or a souvenir as Mark would put it, don’t forget the Wayback Machine is an invaluable resource for finding “lost” web material.

Categories
Weblogging

My weblog has fallen down and it can’t get up!

A weblogger’s nightmare:

I am looking at a weblog page with a Google box to the right and a NY Times box to the left and several buttons with coffee mugs all over them that generate OPML, RSS, and various other assorted and sundry XML flavors. Within the page there is this outline with links and plus signs and you click on the plus signs and the content is expanded to show even more outlines, which can expand to even more outlines, and on and on and on.

And I see myself hunting desperately through the page knowing if I look hard enough, deep enough, I will find the truth. I will find what the weblogger has to say.

Finally, after I click enough of the little plus signs, and get rid of all these boxes that keep opening up and tell Google to shut the fuck up for just one second, I find it.

Hear the words of The Weblogger:

You are The Doc Searls Weblog!

You are located at http://doc.weblogs.com/

You are rather jolly. You write a lot of geeky stuff. You are so fond of penguins that you edit a journal about them.

At which point my head implodes from one mind bomb too many, and the weblog falls over and the Internet gets sucked up into this huge black hole and the universe as we know it ceases to exist.

Categories
People Photography

Photos: Rock art and coastal guard

I went down to my favorite beach for a walk and Bill Dan, the San Francisco rock artist was there, being interviewed by a journalist (sorry, didn’t catch the publication). I whipped out my camera and grabbed some photos of him and some of his work.

Bill Dan, Journalist, and some of Dan

Bill's shirt says Rock Art

Some admirers looking at the rocks

Categories
Burningbird

Back to old colors…sort of

I know that some of you liked the newer, lighter colors and these probably are more professional, but what can I say — I was born to be tacky.

However, I have kept the background behind the writing white or very light to help with reading.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Google API and Weblogging

I just can’t see any usefulness of the Google API for weblogging.

So you can use it for lookups. To lookup what? We’ve all seem how useful Google lookups are. I still get hits for add morpheus node. And this buys me…what?

Weblogs aren’t “resources”. People use Google to find “resources”. Google lookups work extremely well for persistent resources such as tutorials for CSS or articles on the Giant Squid or such (as I get for my other web sites). They don’t work especially well for weblogs unless the weblog is created for a specific purpose and to be a resource.

Most of us just want to have fun…

The only accurate Google lookups I’ve had are for “burningbird”, “shelley powers”, and “single childless women in their 40’s do any of them feel positive about their situation”. And why would I want to put this as an embedded web services call within my weblog page? I would assume that people could use these phrases in Google to get to my page — they wouldn’t need to use it once they’re at my page.

Embedding a Google SOAP call into my weblog page is only going to add more CPU use every time the page is loaded as well as slow access to the page itself as it waits for the SOAP call to finish processing at Google. If I want to slow up page loading, I can easily add another photograph. I bet my friends who access my weblog via modem would just love me to add yet more bandwidth hogging content.

If I wanted to add searching capability within my weblog, the easiest, most efficient thing for me to do would be just embed a link to Google and attach the phrase to the URL. Then if people want to read more about me, they can, without penalty to the rest.

I am a technologist. I love technology. But there’s nothing that irritates me more than the use of Technology just to use it. Tinkering — that’s cool, and a great learning exercise. Talking about technology because you think it’s neat, or fun, or because it’s something you love, or you use technology in your job — that’s cool, too. Go for it! Have fun! Thanks for sharing! But to get caught up in technology because someone has convinced you that it’s the “geek” thing to do or because you want to get mentioned at Scripting News — phhhut!

I have to ask you all something, what’s more important to you: that you get hits or that people come to your weblog to read what you have to say.

I keep hearing from you all that you’re really only concerned about attracting readers who come to the weblog to read what you say. Yet we’re inundated, drowned, overwhelmed, and suffocated by all of the technological gimmicks that we absolutely must have at our weblogs or perish!

If you want people to come to your weblog and hang around for what you say, then say something interesting, unique, funny, controversial, informative, silly, cute, beautiful, smart, witty, sexy, or any of the above.

We need more sex in weblogging and less technology. There. My pronouncement for the day.