Technology & MSG

Some trending data from 2010, as provided by Google Analytics.
Most Popular Pages
These results don’t surprise me, since each of the pages (with the exception of the main page) addresses a fairly specific topic in depth for which there isn’t a lot of other data available (even years later). To me, this suggests that the search [...]

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When I first wrote about the American Community Survey in July 2007, I had no idea that my thoughts would resonate with so many. It is by far the most popular article that I’ve written to date, even some 3+ years later.
The response has been overwhelming, both in comments on the article itself and by [...]

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From time to time, I lose touch with the people who use my server. People change email addresses, get jobs in faraway cities, move on to new social circles, etc. No worries there. Yet their digital resources remain, taking up disk space and bandwidth that others could be using.
Photo archives are a big culprit, mostly [...]

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Today marks the six year anniversary of this blog.
No formal remarks, but instead a few thoughts about getting past the half-decade mark.
Six years of rants and musings, without care for substance. Longer still if you count the predecessors to this site; technically, I’ve been blogging since June 9th, 2002. I found it hard to believe, [...]

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I own and operate the server that hosts this blog.
In the world of NearlyFreeSpeech.net, Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud, all of which are more fault tolerant, why would I bother running my own?
Because it allows me, my close friends and family to do whatever the heck we what. It gives us options.

If someone needs a new [...]

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A few site updates.
Since I don’t have a phone with Internet access and don’t have regular access during the workday, I don’t find Twitter all that useful. However, in the spirit of being an accessible person I’ve configured FeedBurner to tweet when new things are are published here. For those who follow Twitter moreso than [...]

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I’ve been blogging since 2001.
After a brief stint using my own PHP-based blogging platform, I started using an external blog host in 2002. Then in 2004 I started using MovableType, hoping to provide a more polished and professional-looking site. Back then, my writing was mostly technical in nature (mostly scripting solutions, hardware troubleshooting, and mini [...]

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Someone at The Washington Post’s Express has still got my blog in their feed reader, because I was quoted in this morning’s Blog Log again. To the nameless person sitting in cubicle downtown somewhere, no doubt toiling again for tomorrow’s column, thank you! I don’t ride the Metro every morning, so thanks to Snay for [...]

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I finally got around to burning some additional RSS feeds. These feeds aren’t exactly new, but I didn’t ever make a point to advertise their existence or make any effort to see how many people were subscribed.
This first one includes the last title, caption, and thumbnail of the last 20 photos that I’ve added to [...]

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I’ve been inspired by some recent giveaways and have decided to do something a little different and fun this summer.
In the next few days there will be a contest on this blog. Perhaps the first of many. Words, cleverness, trivia, and photography will be involved. There will be plenty of time allowed for entries. There [...]

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I upgraded WordPress to 2.5.1 this morning without too many issues. It took longer to download and install all of the plugins than it did to convert the database over. I would have upgraded before, but I was running an antiquated version of MySQL until the server upgrade this past week. The upgrade itself took [...]

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After putting it off for a year or two, I invested in a small Dell PowerEdge (with a warranty) to replace the server that’s served this blog up from the beginning. In addition to faster dual-core CPUs, faster memory, and faster disks, I changed to a Linux-based operating system. This is a departure from the [...]

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On a whim, I migrated my domain’s mail to Google Apps yesterday. Without explaining the virtues of outsourced application hosting, simply put the email sent to this domain is now handled entirely by Google.
So far I’m impressed.
The whole process took less than an hour. After you provide your domain name, Google provides file called googlehostedservice.html [...]

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Because I said that I’d update on my success.
Bad Behavior has blocked 613 access attempts in the last 7 days. 111 got past the plugin, of which 110 were flagged by Akismet as being comment spam. The remaining 1 comment was placed into the moderation queue due to the number of links. So after a [...]

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I am being flooded with comment spam. Now I know I’m not special in this regard; everyone who uses the Internet has to deal with spam. Whether in email or comments, removal is always more tedious than detection. I’m not a huge fan of closed-source services, but Akismet has been doing an excellent job of [...]

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