Testing a Windows Live post

Nothing to see here. I was just updating my Windows Live Movie Maker program and it gave me the option to install this Windows Live Writer program that can be used to update blogs, so I thought I’d give it a try.

My initial impression is that it has a lot more options for formatting than the standard Blogger template. Let’s see how it actually looks on my blog.

Edit: Looks fine. I guess my only question is why I'd want to open up a separate program to write a blog entry when I'm in my browser 99.995% of the time when I'm on my computer anyway and can blog straight from there?

Just remember, kids, nothing on the Internet is ever really private...

Documents: FBI Spyware Has Been Snaring Extortionists, Hackers for Years | Threat Level from Wired.com

The documents, which are heavily redacted, do not detail the CIPAV's capabilities, but an FBI affidavit in the 2007 case indicate it gathers and reports a computer's IP address; MAC address; open ports; a list of running programs; the operating system type, version and serial number; preferred internet browser and version; the computer's registered owner and registered company name; the current logged-in user name and the last-visited URL.

Today's breathless Twitter hyperbole

globeandmail.com: Why Twitter is a matter of life and death

Twitter, once solely the concern of technophiles and new media pundits, is now a firm part of mainstream culture, both online and off.

The new Facebook is the old Twitter

It wasn't that long ago that Facebook overhauled its look, a move that predictably resulted in a ton of complaints. However, Facebook stuck it out, the complaining soon died, and life continued on in cyberspace.

Fast forward just a few months, and Twitter is all the rage, so Facebook decided to once again overhaul its look to make it more Twitter-like.

And I hate it with a passion. Hate, hate, hate. As in, "Thinking of shutting down my Facebook account" hate.

Yes, I know I've agreed with the sentiment that complaining about Facebook is one of those "first world" complaints that us comfortable North Americans make while real problems affecting real people remain ignored so we can complain about Facebook.

That said, the new Facebook format is terrible. It's Twitter. But we already have Twitter. Sure, Twitter is likely stealing traffic away from Facebook, but Twitter has, to my knowledge, no revenue model, and no revenue to speak of, so I have no idea how long Twitter is going to be around.

Facebook, meanwhile, has a devoted (read: fanatical to the point of being dangerous) legion of fans that feels very attached to the site and does not suffer changes gladly (witness the recent revolt over the Terms of Service). So why would Facebook tempt fate again by overhauling its look and risking alienating its users?

All the fun little intricacies that made Facebook "Facebook" are being removed - the status updates no longer default to that awkward third person, "Mike is ...". Awkward, but uniquely Facebook. The birthday calendar has vanished. I have this weird sidebar full of useless things my friends are doing.

In short, I'm not impressed.

And, no, I'm not really going to shut down my Facebook account. In about a week, I'll probably forget what the "old" Facebook even looked like - about the time that Facebook updates its look again and people start complaining about how much they miss the Twitter-like look.

But if I've learned anything from The Simpson's (and I'd like to think that I haven't, but that's a complete lie) it's that, "Rest assured, I was on the Internet within minutes, registering my disgust throughout the world."

Another "first world" complaint

The Internet was aghast this week at the new Facebook Terms of Service, which had a half-life of approximately 2 hours before Facebook sheepishly revoked them and decided that they didn't allegedly want the rights to your content in perpetuity anymore.

I mean, I had friends who were considering quitting Facebook at the thought that Facebook was going to own the rights to their photos forever.

Two thoughts on this:

1) This is a first world complaint. I'm sure the starving kids in Africa are really sympathetic here. Only we who have so much leisure time on our hands could be bothered to get upset over something that in the big picture is so meaningless.

2) Frankly, I'd like to see Facebook (or Google or any other big Internet company) try to win a PR battle by litigating some poor teenager over something like this. These kinds of terms of service would never stand up in a court of law, and I'm always amazed that people get so bent out of shape over it. See point 1.

Bye-bye, new router. Hello, newer router

The Linksys wireless N router that I bought 16 days ago went back to Best Buy today, replaced by a Belkin wireless N router. Turns out the particular model of the Linksys I purchased had a lot of problems - randomly losing the network seemed to be the big one. And the Best Buy return clerk was not surprised in the least to see me returning it - a lot of people have brought them back.

New router installed. Hopefully this works better.

November: New Best. Month. Ever.

So ... a 10-fold increase in my traffic year-over-year makes me pretty happy. Not bad for my little humble corner of the Internet. Click graphic for larger image.

Surely a sign of the Apocalypse

The Google search string, "what's cool on the interweb" resulted in a hit on this site.

October: Best. Month. Ever.

Your humble servant's blog had its best month ever in October, smashing my previous hits and page view records, on the strength of approximately 10 billion hits related to Kimbo Slice and Ken Shamrock. Nonetheless, I'm not complaining.

(Interesting that Site Meter credited me with 2,787 hits in October, and 4,059 page views, while SiteCounter gave me 3,167 hits in October, and 4,417 page views. No wonder I like SiteCounter better ...)

What's nice, too, is that by being on Blogger and having my pages getting properly indexed (thanks in part to Google Analytics), I'm now getting a fair number of hits based on archived content, as well as being in the top 2 or 3 search results on some fairly unique and niche search strings (like "Relient K Trading Spaces").

Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web

Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web

Posted using ShareThis

The disappearance of Colbycosh.com from the search engine is just a coincidence

Colby Cosh reviews Google Chrome.

I'm a twit ... I mean, I'm on Twitter

As if succumbing to the Empire of Facebook wasn't bad enough, I'm now on Twitter. And I really don't know why. As far as I can tell, Twitter is like the Facebook status update and ... er, it's like the Facebook status update. But apparently Twitter is very important, as it's all the rage in social media circles. So, I'm on Twitter. Prepare to be bored silly by my lack of updates, which are now in the sidebar of my blog.

(What's really scary is that I have FOUR PEOPLE following my tweets, and I've updated three times since signing up a month ago.)

I am a man of my word

I promised (threatened, surely - ed.) Sandy Fleischer that I'd mention him on my blog just so he would get a Google Alert.

Yes, it's a gigantic in-joke, and no one will get it except him.

Everyone else can carry on their business.

(And, Sandy, great job today. I really enjoyed the seminar. Thanks!)

SiteMeter: We're sorry!

The ongoing saga of today's unbelievably botched SiteMeter upgrade continues with the company's apology to its rapidly dwindling customer base.

The apology is classic:

Based on some performance issues we were experiencing along with feedback from the community it appears we have pushed our new site live prematurely.

That's certainly understating the reaction from bloggers.

Meet the new SiteMeter. Same as the old SiteMeter.

So much for the heavily touted upgrade today. Look what's posted now.

Good Afternoon,

We have received and heard your feedback concerning the latest changes to the website. We will implementing a rollback to the website immediately. We will also be responding to each of your support requests as soon as possible. If you have any questions please let us know.

Sincerely,

SiteMeter Support Team

After doing some checking on the Internet, the outrage over the upgrade is everywhere.

Dude! That's so meta! Part 2

I was checking my site stats today and found that the Google search string "Google search strings" led to my site.

Er ... no relation

From the Department of Self-Evident Headlines

Feds Say Angry, Suicidal Pilots And Truckers Aren't a Good Idea

... you don't say ...

Testing the ScribeFire posting system

I upgraded to the release candidate of Firefox 3.0 today, and while it disabled most of my add-ons, I found a really cool one called ScribeFire, which lets me blog pretty much anything from anywhere on the Net using a push-button on my browser toolbar. This is my first test post from ScribeFire. Let's see how it looks.

Web 2.0 has been good to me

It's been a few months now since I moved The Newsroom over to the Blogger interface, which allowed for syndicated feeds, permalinks, and better indexing of the blog via Google.

The result, as you can see from the accompanying stats graph, has been a noticeable uptick in my hits and page views. To be sure, a lot of that was traffic generated by Wrestlemania, Ric Flair's retirement, and more recently, the Starfield concert accident I've been blogging about this weekend. But on the whole, my average daily hit count has gone from pathetic single digits to slightly less pathetic double digits.


I'm not going to be winning any blogging traffic awards, but it's mildly satisfying to see that I've generated a small base of regular readers despite no longer having a platform in the pages of the Edmonton Sun from which to generate free name-awareness traffic on this site. (That said, I do get a kick out of seeing the sunpub.com domain show up on my SiteMeter stats generator every once in a while.)

NEW! Shared items

The keen-eyed among you will have noticed that I now have a "shared items" applet along the right-hand side of the page. I have several dozen blog feeds in my Google Reader (an amazing application), and from time to time, I'll be marking items there that I think my readership (all 4 of you) might be interested in reading as well. Or not.

The items can be clicked one at a time, or you can click the "read more" link to read all the items in my list.

Currently, there's some MMA news, a good article on the death of Christian rock pioneer Larry Norman, and and older link to the day I got cut from the Edmonton Sun.

Firefox weirdness

As I mentioned below, I downloaded and installed the Firefox 3 Beta 3 last week, and found it to be quite spiffy, even if had broken most of my extensions.

I had been using it for a few days and not thinking to much about it when I realized that all my extensions were back. And some of the Beta 3 changes were gone.

Apparently, Firefox had downloaded the latest patch for Firefox 2.0 and in the process, it "updated" itself from version 3B3 to version 2.0012. So, now, when I start FF, I get the updated 2.0012 ... except for the odd time it actually starts up version 3B3.

In short, I seem to be using some kind of mutant version 2.0012-Beta3 combo browser. I would download the beta version again, but I much prefer having my extensions back to using the faster Version 3, so at this point, I'm going to wait for the release version of 3 and stick with my mutant hybrid browser.

Firefox 3 Beta 3

On an absolute whim tonight, I decided to download the new Firefox beta browser. I'm about 10 minutes into testing it out, but the 3.0 beta 3 sure feels a lot faster than the 2.0 version.

So far, the only downside is that some of my Firefox extensions have been disabled, but that's to be expected when experimenting with unreleased software. Otherwise, though, it's quite the little upgrade.