Well Another Blog Has Moved Out of FontBitch Status!

I'm feeling like a good citizen making the world safe for blog reading!  Of course if there are: 

• 500,000 blogs
• Say 80% aren't sizable
• And I've affected maybe 5
• I've got a lot of work ahead of me.  Sigh.

Anyway,  Kasia at www.unix-girl.com/blog is now FontSafe and I do apologize for calling her a FontBitch.  Where are my manners at times?  That's right they are written in fixed 8 point verdana type, light gray on a dark gray screen  ... 

Additionally Kasia has gotten www.movabletype.org to install under ModPerl and tells how here and here.  Very cool.

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BlogBack: Followup on Miscellaneous Random posts

Just a follow up to different recent posts....

• About this Blog
  • I mentioned rearchitecting this blog (god I hate that as a verb) earlier and here's what it looks like.  I'll make these sub blogs which don't exist yet
    • hightechmarketing101
    • inbox buddy
    • lessgeekyscott (for at least my mom and perhaps people who want my writing that is understandable to non geeky folks)
    • evectors
    • blogging
    • opensource
    • php & fuzzyoffice
    • searchcritic
    • webcritic
  • Frequency on the sub blogs will obviously be less but this Radio blog will remain my "SuperBlog" and contain everything.  Comments?  This will all happen around next weekend when i have the time.  A preview of 1 of the blogs is a http://www.hightechmarketing101.com/ with a small taste of the content and some problems with the CSS / broken links.
  • All stories will remain here but be pointed to from the other sites
  • Radio makes this all intricate to setup but not hard at all.
• PHP Stuff
  • I've been coding too much PHP to write some more but work is ongoing on FuzzyOffice and other things.  Checking some of the domain names I've registered recently might be interesting for folks.
  • www.oscommerce.com seems like an awesome open source replacement for the pain that is Miva Merchant.  I'm still getting it running for a new test site but someone I respect greatly has it up and running already (from like Friday).  And you have to love a product so good that it runs a cool online lingerie store.
  • www.phpbb.com is outstanding !!!
• Marketing 101
  • John responded to my responses to his article.  Got that ?
• Rich Editing in Mozilla or "I Don't Wanna IE No More"
  • Andy from www.surfmind.com is taking a swing at this.  If you are interested in it, swing by www.surfmind.com and let him know or IM / email me and I'll hook you up.
  • Xopus is another approach to it.
  • Adam seems interested enough to at least respond to my email about it.  A big name pushing for this would help a lot.
  • Mozilla 1.1 is much better -- it runs well on my machine at least.  And Andy is a huge advocate for Mozilla as always (side note -- it's astonishing how just one enthusiast can change your mind on an Open Source project; project leads take note)
• Buffy Stuff
  • I saw somewhere online that Faith is coming back for 5 end of season episodes
  • At last 2 post 30 year old Buffy fans have admitted privately to me that they watch the show.  It's ok people -- Joss is an outstanding writer and the humor is wonderful. 
  • I was wrong about Dawn breathing fire being new -- that's last season -- Thanks Deb !
  • Can you believe that there is an honest to god Buffy paper magazine?
• Copyright and RIAA
  • WebRadio seems to be dying: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-956730.html
  • Napster is more dead than ever (big shocker there)
• Web Development
  • www.rackspace.com remains outstanding ! (had to plug a great company)
• Windows
  • Yet another Windows crash last night.  Would you believe I found over 1.3 gigabytes of temp files on just 1 drive.
  • I loathe and despise Microsoft more than ever for their shoddy engineering practices
  • I got the CDs for Redhat 7.3 recently so my desktop Linux workstation will be updated and going back into daily use in a week or two
  • Another bad security flaw in Windows: http://news.com.com/2100-1001-956729.html
• Other Short Items
  • Eszter is looking for help with cool PC gadgets -- got suggestions?

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Photo of the Day

From Libby in South Africa:

View Original

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I Can Cook!  Really!

I took some email teasing on the What Do You Eat for Lunch posting so I thought I'd blog what I cooked Monday night:

• Fresh Salad with Balsamic Vinegar based Dressing
• Grilled, Organic, Hormone Free Beef (yes I broke down for 1 time since I found organic beef at Super Stop & Shop)
• Mushrooms in a Red Wine Sauce Over the Top of the Steak
• Fresh Corn
• Wild Rice
• Molten Chocolate Cake with Home Made Chocolate Gelato on the Side

The previous real meal I cooked was Pan Seared Halibut.  I even set the table.  I'm only a loser some of the time...

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New PHP Conference Coming Up

I just got the dates on PHP-CON, www.php-com.com, from the new www.phpjournal.com magazine.  Just since I was listing to The Doors last night, I feel compelled to quote Jim: "Pretty Good, Pretty Good, Pretty Neat, Pretty Neat".
October 24 + 25, Millbrae California.  Rasmus is doing the keynote and Jeremy Zawodny should also be speaking I believe.

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Warning Discreet Blue is NOT Netscape4able

http://radio.weblogs.com/0107808/ (matt mower's purple version)

I'm going to be shifting my blog over the the discreet blue theme from www.bryanbell.com and I wanted to point out that it isn't NS 4 able.

Bryan mentions some CSS problems on his description of the theme NOT that it's entirely unreadable.

Anyone have stable, tested, reliable Javascript code I can drop into <HEAD><SCRIPT> to detect the browser and redirect to an alternate web page if it's netscape 4 ?  Thanks in advance.

 

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Recommended: Douglas O'Flaherty

Doug is someone I've met a few times and have a really, really good feeling about.  His skills are good and he knows what he's doing.  He's also newly laid off due.  If you are looking for someone with startup experience and good overall skills both technical, marketing and product management, see:

http://oflaherty.homeip.net/douglas/resumes/

He's also got a pretty strong Open Source background and I suspect would be open to contract gigs if you needed (although I honestly have no idea on this one; that's a suspicion only).

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From John Robb: Big Push to Outlaw Spam

I saw this on John's blog and I think he's just plain wrong (reason below): 

Big push to outlaw spam.  The problem isn't the spam, its the ability of people to send unsolicited e-mails without paying for the priviledge.  If all unsolicited e-mail cost $0.05 to send (with $0.03 going to the person getting the mail), spam would dry up quickly.  The costs of dealing with spam are all currently being borne by the recipient.  That's completely wrong.  If Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail instituted a $0.05 policy tomorrow (all except for the addresses you entered into your buddy list), they would probably generate tens of millions of $$ in a year in revenue.  People would be happier, they would build accounts that could be used to buy Portal services and most spam would slowly wither and die.  A simple sign up process in order to be registered to send e-mail (to register your address on the server as one that can send e-mail) would be all it would take.  I bet Paypal would be a great way to do this

PermaLink

There's no question that people send Spam without cost.  And that leads to our current situation, no question.  BUT let's just play with that in the blogsphere for example as well as other places.  Here are some thoughts:

• How many times have you sent an email to a blogger who's not on your buddy list? 
• Would you have done it if there was a fee? 
• And there was no guarantee of a reply?  (Which there isn't). 
• Not to mention the very obvious free speech issues here.  (Note -- these free speech issues will be reviewed by the California Supreme Court in early 2003 since Intel right now is blocking inbound email from an ex-employee). 
• And let's not even talk about the issues with re-architecting email protocols to handle this (or is John saying that ONLY Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL should do this?)
• Also bear in mind that the spam filters on these services are extraordinarily weak -- and I have to think that's intentional since they seem to make money from inbound email (at least of their own).
• Bear in mind that virus creation is illegal and we still have viruses. Internet protocols are so open that for some things it's virtually impossible to stop them.  So we need to have a layer of protection beween us and that type of material.  This sounds absurd but think about it for a minute -- isn't an anti spam software and a virus checker nothing more than a "Lock" on your door?  And don't we all unthinkingly pay for locks (and alarm systems) on our doors all the time?

Obligatory Statement of Bias on this Post

On this one I have to come very, very clean.  I have an email product, Inbox Buddy, under development that does enhanced email management, ERM (email relationship management), anti spam stuff, etc.  So I have a clear and obvious conflict of interest.  Still my product does LOTS more than just spam (one of the reasons its taking so *$#$* long).  So making email charged for would decrease spam and decrease some of the value of my product. 

I've started a new blog, the Inbox Buddy Blog, to chronicle it at

http://www.inboxbuddy.com/blog/ (not much content there but it's coming, like the product itself). 

And, yes, it's built with Radio and category multiple posting to different blogs.  I gave Movable Type a shot for this one but the advantages of having your content in a single spot with different output options were so compelling that I couldn't use MT.  Not to mention the fact that I'm just plain too dumb to install it apparently (I had a nice post about the experience but last night's random Windows crash killed it since it was just in a browser window).

 

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Warning!  Blogitechure Going On

I know many of you have noticed my rather prolific output and commented "Dude!  It's hard to keep up."  And I've heard you but not had the time or mental energy to address it.  What I'm doing right now is forking my blog content into multiple sub blogs so if you only care about, say, "Marketing 101" or "Scott's Less Geeky Stuff" (that's for mom) then there will be multiple sub blogs, all independently RSS'able and such.  Doing this, however, will delay blogging today and tomorrow for a bit.  As will getting ready for Scoble's WebBuilder conference.

This blog will, as always, remain *everything*.  More later.

A big Thank You to the whole UserLand crew for making categories and upstreaming such a damn good feature.  And thanks also to Paolo for his tutorial on this (link to follow later -- my machine crashed last night and I lost it).  And, yes, I actually IM'd one of the UserLand developers this morning and said Thank You personally.  Keep it in mind -- it's a nice thing to do.

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