brainwagon

Try comparing this blog entry with the audioblog that I mentioned yesterday. Same event, different media, different impressions. Thanks Wil! Addendum: Perhaps I should expand on why I think this is interesting. Some people have claimed that audioblogs are a waste of time because of their many “disadvantages” compared to the written word. Yes, the […]

While playing around with Flickr, I did a quick grovel through their services API. It appears that James Clarke has already written a Python binding.

I have to thank Russell Beattie for writing about StatCounter.com, the service that he uses to monitor his website. In the days immediately after the Apple Keynote, his website showed a significant bump in traffic. Neat. I decided to give it a whirl (for the level of traffic that I use it for, it is […]

Dan Gillmor has a new blog on the future of journalism, where he tries to ask and answer questions about where journalism is going and the role that the citizenry play in journalism in the Internet age. Interesting stuff, and less annoying that most mullings of journalism vs. blogs.

Google Blog If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks […]

Lisa Williams has a terrific article on the policies and ethics which surround blogging. I’m actually most concerned with the actions of employers: the word of people being fired for the contents of their blogs frankly fills me with a bit of sadness and dread. What will the world be like if this powerful new […]

It’s great to get a linkback from Lisa, but I’m afraid I must disappoint her: that wasn’t me playing Live and Let Die on the ukulele. That bit of brilliancy was entirely Brook Adams. He’s got a CD. Check him out.

While exploring the depth of my ridiculous referer spam issue, I ran the following simple query: mysql> select count(*) as cnt , baseDomain from referer_visitlog where to_days(now()) – to_days(visitTime) = 0 group by baseDomain order by cnt desc limit 10 ; +—–+————————–+ | cnt | baseDomain | +—–+————————–+ | 682 | chikaliresortmalawi.com | | 682 […]

In the last couple of days, I’ve been targetted by referer spam bots. These dorks access pages on a weblog repeatedly in an attempt to get their referer tag listed on your home page. I’ve been trying to figure out how to combat this behavior, and can see two different ways of dealing with it: […]

No Need to Click Here – I’m just claiming my feed at Feedster

Robert Scoble mentioned how you can get detailed graphs of your blogs popularity from PubSub. Click here to watch brainwagon’s slow slide to oblivion. Addendum: Here is the way that pubsub link ranks are computed. Addendum2: Random link as requested by the page above.

To the nice three people who have ranked brainwagon on podcastalley.com, thanks! It’s great to know that at least three people thought enough of this little endeavor to click a button to let others know about it. Addendum: seven people? Staggering!

Well, I scribbled up a new logo image on some scratch paper, scanned it, colored and touched it up with The Gimp, and did some minor tweaks to my CSS files, all to help ring in the holiday system season. I keep meaning to fix the huge amount of blank space at the top of […]

Lisa Williams has a nice weblog post on the need for uBlogger: a universal way of creating any weblog content from anywhere. Great idea! It’s really annoying to me just how many applications and translation stages my posts have to go through. Can we evolve to a more streamlined blogging future?

I downloaded the most recent release of ChaitGear Powerpack, a set of WordPress Plugins that you include support for the referer list and an Amazon Wishlist. I ended up having to recompile mod_php4 and install a couple of php modules, but now all seems to work. I put up the wishlist mainly as a lark, […]