I only wish that if I got fired from a job that I’d get $1.3-million a year for the rest of my life.
What Bloggers and Journalists Can Learn From Each Other
Steve Outing has written a couple of great articles on not only what journalists can learn from bloggers but what bloggers can learn from journalists. Thanks CyberJ for the links.
Referral Spam
Is anybody else getting Referral Spam on their blog? I happened to check my referral logs for the month, and I’ve got a pile of faked referral hits from sites that have never linked to me (a bunch of DVD sales sites, some Poker sites, several sites that sell watches, etc…). I won’t give the URLs here because that would just give them more publicity, but looking at my AWStats page, most of my top 30 links from external pages are coming from spam sites, and I have a feeling it’s not helping the speed of my site.
Looking online, it appears I’m not alone in this. The reason? Because these folks are hoping your blog is running a script that displays that latest referrals to your site. So they’ll fake a referral link to have their link appear on your site (increasing their page rank, giving them a link, etc…).
Anybody have any solutions for blocking these morons, or am I just going to have to start turning off my referral logs (which I’d like to avoid, in case I ever feel the need to ego surf)?
Why I Hate Personal Weblogs
This is a frickin’ hilarious (if a bit dated) essay on one man’s vendetta against personal Webloggers.
Welcome Independent (UK) Readers
Well what do you know. Thanks to the handy Google Alerts, I found out that The Independent mentioned this site in an article about blogging:
Yes, yes and yes. It is not that blogs have encouraged those with dull lives to write. They always have written – the blog lets them to do it in public. Some write monstrously self-regarding round robins each year; the blog lets them to do it cumulatively. The great blogs will survive, even those that make a zen-like, minimalist art-from out of their own dullness (see, for example, http://www.wibsite.com/wiblog/dull/) or those that, even in their dullness, manage to fascinate (http://utterlyboring.com/), if only because they give some insight, however accidental (or self-consciously contrived) into other people’s lives.
I’m dull, but I fascinate. Right on! I think this site is in need for a new motto.
Cheapest Laptop Also The Lightest
It’s nothing fancy, and it’s not loaded with Windows, but it’s small, light, and dirt cheap.
Overclocking Your NES
The default clock speed on the thing is a whopping 1.79 MHz, but if you use the tips on this site, you might get a whopping 4 MHz.
Compliments to Good Parkers
This is a great anti-prank:
I was telling Jenna about this “prank” (via BoingBoing) some guy pulled in L.A. where he purposefully parked poorly to see what kind of notes people would leave him when Jenna said “That would be cool if you left notes for people who were good at parking their car.”
I fell in love with the idea when she mentioned it and couldn’t stop thinking about it for days. So we followed through with it today after we finished with our Christmas shopping in the Woodlands Mall area.
We decided that we would pre-write our notes, then walk through the parking lot looking for exceptional parking jobs to reward with the notes. Twenty notes seemed a worthwhile number, but we couldn’t come up with more than five semi-unique things to write, so we copied each four times. Here were the notes we left (links to images).
Sometimes, people need a little surprise affirmation in their day. Thanks Waxy for the link.
Holy Crap
50,000 dead and counting. Or 56,000 according to Wikipedia (who’s taking their info from several news sources).
I Knew It!
Remember the guy that got a crapload of attention and media coverage for giving the ability to control his huge display of Christmas lights that folks could control via the Web? The whole thing was a hoax. Here’s the official word from the guy who runs the site.