Tag: Around The Web Posts

As you can see, my little advertising experiment with Commission Junction is pretty failtastic. Which is strange, because the ads are fairly targeted based on a few specific, popular pages of mine. I’m not a big fan of advertising to tell you the truth — I ripped Google Adsense off here a few months ago. To me, it’s worth $10 a month or whatever not to have them pollute my main page. I was testing a new concept though with more targeted ads that I choose, but so far it’s not working. Is anyone here actually making money with your blog (i.e, enough at least to pay for hosting)?

So I’m currently at my mom’s place looking at her new computer. While checking out her new monitor, she spilled the goods: Mom: “Hey, you know that blog entry about people getting to your blog by googling duanestorey.com” Me: “Yah” Mom: “Don’t tell anyone, but it was us.. That’s what we do” So there you have it. My mom needs a few lessons in how to browse the web. I still love her though. Even though it means I might be adopted.

I love Digg. I surf it at least a couple times a day, usually when I’m bored, sitting a work waiting for something to compile. I would say that without a doubt the majority of my “cool” news actually comes from Digg. Lately I’ve begun submitting the odd story on my own to Digg. No matter how many times I try to submit something though, I always seem to get stuck on the same old problem — what category does the story fit in? The main problem I think is that Digg categories are more mainstream news oriented and less about the things I actually am interested in (even though I think most techies are interested in the same things I am). Image from here The main technology categories are: Apple – this seems straight forward Design – what the fuck does this mean? Gadgets – I can live with […]

Big thanks to all of you who pinged me about helping with my little web experiment. So far we have six hosts represented, but I’d love to have a lot more. So if you have any friends that have blogs and can help out, please direct them to me. I’m collecting data in real time right now, so it will be interesting to see what it’ll all look like after a few days. When this is done, we should all have a pretty intimate insight into all the various hosting companies out there and how they compare to each other during normal wear and tear. The teaser is over for now! Stay tuned, in a few days I’ll post some detailed results.

Hey guys. I want to do a fairly simple web experiment this week. I want to try to assess real-world uptime and latency for a bunch of popular hosting sites. I need a bunch of volunteers to help out. Basically all I’ll need you to do is upload a file to your root directory and allow me to ping it from time to time to do some measurements. I’ll tabulate the data next week and put it online for everyone to see. So, if you can help out, drop me a comment and let me know: The name of your hosting company The address to your site Your email address where I can contact you about this The more people the better. Thanks. I am currently on Media Temple and HostMonster, so I can represent those two.

Tonight I had a few people over at my place to watch movies, drink some beer, and hack out a few techy type things. My little project for the evening was to try and media-ify my blog somehow. One of the ideas I was playing with was extracting all the media out of all my blog posts and having that in a separate player somewhere. There are other players for WordPress (based on the popular flash FLV player) that do something similar, except with those you have to manually input a playlist or set up a special directory. A snapshot of the media player The main benefit of the way I’ve done it is that it’s just business as usual for you, the blogger. The plugin will parse all your entries and pull out the media you normally include anyways. It generates a site-wide RSS feed all that media which […]

Yes, this is what I look like before I cut off your head and steal all your powers, bitches. Big thanks to Clay for misusing all our web design resources at work to make this possible. Apparently he thought the whole Star Wars thing was too retro, and came up with something better. Thanks for supporting my cause against the evil guys against me, dude. Watch out for my sword. PS – I’m commando under all that shit. Believe it. Also, tomorrow is a big nerd session at my place. John Bollwitt, Boris Mann and John Biehler are definitely swinging by to drink some beers, watch some movies, and play catch-up for all the things we’ve all fallen behind on this week. It’s the unoffical “Catchup-Camp” over at my place.

Wow, what can I say. That is a pretty impressive sum of money. I read this before going to bed last night on Digg, but I thought it was fake. Turns out that Microsoft has just extended a 44 billion dollar offer for Yahoo! To be honest, Google has really handed Yahoo! their hand in search. I personally don’t know anyone that uses Yahoo to do search, although I’ve been told it’s still fairly popular in Asia. I have friends over at Yahoo!, and I once showed them my web logs from my blog indicating that something like 98% of all searches originate from Google. They refused to believe they were true, but that’s how the ball rolls over here. Granted, the readers of this blog are biased towards the technical side, but I think the numbers are fairly indicative of things in North America, as I’m sure most of […]

As some of you know, last year I went from having my blog hosted on GoDaddy to using shared hosting services over at HostMonster (and before that, I went from having a Linux box on the floor of my bedroom to GoDaddy). Shared hosting is a fairly cheap way to set up a website, and you can usually get away with it for less than $10/mo. For the most part, I was pretty happy with HostMonster shared hosting, although in these last few months their databases kept falling over, and I had intermittent connection problems. To their credit though, they always answered the phone and fixed everything in a timely manner. Media Temple’s iPhone Account Center That being said, I’m going to try someone new this time. I asked a few people who they use, and a couple people recommended the next step which is shared computing on a grid […]

I set up a small photography website over at photography.duanestorey.com a while ago. I think I’m going to over haul it this weekend and make it a bit better. I also want to get a domain name for it and make it a proper stand-alone site. If anyone has any ideas for a cool name for a photography site, fire me off an email. I’ve been trying to come up with west-coast oriented names, but so far no go. I’ll give a free 8×12 print and a blog entry on the new site for the person that picks the winner! Thanks!