Representative Expression

Is it real this time? Can you really get paid for blogging?
No, I don't mean, you sign up and post on someone else's blog and they pretend to pay you in shares or something.
Or, no, I don't mean you join 1000's of other mugs who sign up and basically provide the parent sites content (which they then sell on at 100x what they paid you, or they rake in bucket loads of PPC revenue).

I mean you get paid to blog about what you choose to blog about on your own blog.

If you are going to write something on your blog anyway, what is the harm in checking on Bloggerwave, seeing if your topic is on there and getting paid a few pennies anyway.  Even if its a miserable $10, that's double what you probably (should) be paying for your monthly web hosting costs.  Write one of those a month and all your web hosting is free.

And it might even get you into the habit of blogging more regularly. 
It's a brand new site, but I was asked to check it out for a client of mine.
Sign up process was easy, nice user interface and all in all it appears a pretty good bet.

Remember, you don't have to pay them anything, you just have to post like you was going to do anyway. So what you got to lose just for looking? 
Check out Bloggerwave and make your own mind up...

There has been a lot of talk recently about the possible need for a "Blogging Code of Conduct" and there have been a number of events in the media recently highlighting bad behaviour by some people towards others.  (The recent incidents with Kathy Sierra  come to mind).

I was quoted in a BBC article a few days ago and a San Francisco Chronicle article on Thursday calling for a "Blogger's Code of Conduct" in response to the firestorm that has arisen as a result of Kathy Sierra's revelation that she's been targeted by a series of increasingly violent and disturbing anonymous comments on her blog and on a series of weblogs that appeared to have been created for the purpose of celebrating cyber-bullying.

Tim O'Reilly - First Discussion on Blogging Code of Conduct

We've drafted a code of conduct that will eventually be posted on bloggingcode.org, and created a badge that sites can display if they want to link to that code of conduct.

Draft Blogging Code of Conduct

And the latest story on the BBC about a blog being taken down...

A British diplomat's blog offering his thoughts on Thailand has been withdrawn after insults and accusations were posted on it by members of the public.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6548653.stm

I can't quite see the need for such a "code of conduct" and defiantly not for a badge.
(Though I would respect other peoples use of it if they so choose).
But there is nothing in there that isn't common sense already.
I mean, "Hey!, it's my blog". I can post what I like, about who I like, when I like.
I don't force anyone to read it.
But it's not like I am going to say anything that is likely to upset someone because it's not in my nature.
And I don't allow anonymous comments on my blog and that is for spam reasons, not to prevent any old Tom, DIck or Harry from posting on my blog.
I also moderate all of my comments. If someone posts something I don't agree with, then I remove it, (in fact I just plain delete it).  And that has nothing to do with restricting free speech. I had one guy object before and I just pointed out to him that it was my blog, my website, and I could do what I bloody well liked with it. I told him that I was not stopping him from commenting on my blog, I was just not letting him do it on my own blog using my own resources. I don't have a problem with him making what ever comment he likes on his own blog.

If someone does have a blog and they post material that's is illegal, then don't go back there.
Same goes for someone who insists on making personal attacks of any kind.
They can talk to themselves and post what they want, they'll soon get bored.

IMHO, it is nothing more application of common sense, and anyone who objects to my methods on my blogs, obviously doesn't have an ounce of common sense anyway...

As to the incident with Kathy Sierra, that just beggars belief...

I've reproduced the draft code of conduct below.

Getting the 'Move your account to
Use the new Blogger' message.

It is that time! You log into your blogger account and you get the dreaded message.  Time to move to the new blogger (the old beta).  You can go to your dashboard, but you get one more chance of doing that and then you 'have' to move over.

(click on any of the images in this article to see the full size version in a new window).

So you get the message, what next?
Do you go ahead and agree to the terms of service and hit continue?

Well let me first say, I've not heard of anyone losing a blog because of a move over from the 'old blogger' to the 'new blogger'.  I've heard of and helped out a few people who have managed to trash their blogs by playing around with the new settings without realizing what they were doing.  But all in all, the process works well (now..).  A few weeks back a good friend of mine (Sally from The ChicAlert), was also apprehensive about moving from the old to the new system.  In the end the automated system determined it couldn't do the transfer and referred it for investigation by a blogspot engineer.  That was the first instance of that message I had come across and I have yet to hear of the final outcome with that story.

The Tick Tock Project - Launch

What do people like the following celebrities, friends and foes, sports stars and world leaders all have in common? Then ask yourself what you may have in common with them!

The main purpose of the project has not been released yet, but there is a teaser at the site right now, so I won't go and spoil the fun by telling you all about it.  I'll let you all go visit it and see if you can work out what it's all about.

http://www.techreview.com/InfoTech/17851/page1/

Monday, December 04, 2006

A collection of online editing applications lets people do more than just watch and share video.

More people are turning to the Web to watch television shows and movies, thanks to sites like YouTube and Apple's iTunes store. But there's an emerging breed of website that's letting people go beyond passively viewing video. A number of startups, including Jumpcut, Grouper, and Motionbox, are providing free software tools that let anyone mix video clips online and, in some cases, make movies even if they don't have content of their own.

Quite a good article this on the YouTube phenomenon which mentions a couple of online tools that I wasn't aware existed.  I've got to be honest though, I am not one of those who spends hours upon hours watching videos on YouTube.  I do have an account with a few videos, but only to see what all the fuss was about.

I will probably use YouTube in the future for posting my own 'home videos' to the net if only because it shifts the burden of bandwidth usage to YouTube away from my own servers.  Why pay for anything when you can get it for free.  So what if the viewer clicks on an advert and YouTube takes a fee, I'm not going to be posting anything that is going to make them millions.

 This is an example of something that was done on Jumpcut

When it gets to a few million I might get excited.

Quite a good tool that someone created using the data from Technorati

History Matters

A MASS BLOG for the national record. The History Matters campaign has designated October 17 a day for the public to make historic. We have chosen 'an ordinary' weekday of no particular significance to ask you to write a one day on-line diary.

Should be an interesting exercise. Go visit the site at the link above to read more about it.

I've finally finished upgrading my web hosting website and its now available for taking live orders.
I'm still waiting for a few payment processor accounts to go live and these are easy enough to add as and when they become active.
For the moment you can select Paypal as the payment processor or a manual invoice step which allows you to place and order and then I email you back to sort out payment options.

So if anyone visits my blog, and wants to place an order, use the manual step for the time being and I will sort you out an extra discount.
Once we agree on a price, I will give you the access page for the payment processor of your choice with the new reduced fee.
For those people who are members of the 'forum', I'll even set you up accounts at cost. (Those who know which forum will know what I am talking about, those who are wise enough to work out which forum can also have the discount). After you have made your order, email me your 'forum' username and I will give you the true 'cost' price.

I am still working on adding much more content to the site, but wanted to get the basics out there and running. I am about to add the following sections:

• Web Site Design - This will include links to the various sites I have already designed and in operation right now.
• SEO - We will also be offering SEO services in order to help improve your site rankings.
• Blogging - More information on the blogging services we offer. This will include installations of many of the popular blogging applications and also dedicated accounts for hosting your 'blogspot' blogs.
• Add in the FAQ section - The FAQ module is there, but not visible at the moment as it has been causing cross-browser problems on verification. Its only a few minor tweaks required, its just getting the time to fix it that is the hassle right now.

Now that there is a way for blogspot blog to add Google sitemap, and also a way to ping Google sitemap, does this mean that if a new blog have not been indexed yet, by adding Google sitemap to their blog and then pinging Google sitemap, one can get one's blog indexed faster?

This is part of a response I made to an email on the Yahoo Blogger support group to the above question. There had been a few questions on the subject in recent weeks so I thought I would post it here as post.

The answer or in this case answers is yes and no and now that I think about it, maybe....
If you host your blog on their servers (blogspot), it will take 3-7 days for them to find it.
If you host your blog on your own server, it will take around 5-7 days for them to find it.  (using blogger that is.. If say you use Moveable Type, then it will take them forevre to find it if you don't have any inbound links or tell them about it).
If you add a google sitemap and tell them about it, it will still take 3-7 days for them to get round to indexing it.

Also remember that just because you've told google about your site in say hours... It doesn't mean they will do anything with the data for weeks. It all comes down to the quality of the site content (and that goes with physical content as well site construction (coding, colour schemes etc)). Just telling Google about a site is a fraction of the story.

But, here is the word of warning I gave out before...

Yes Google have provided a way for you to authenticate your site by the use of a META Tag...
In order to prove that the sitemap you have submitted to Google belongs to you, they used to get you to upload an 'verification file' to your root directory. 
Google would then know that you had access to that folder and the chances were that the site was yours. 
Because some Blogspot users can't do this (because you host on blogspot not on your own web server), they provided a method for users to use a META TAG inserted in their template to provide the authentication.  

But being on blogspot you cannot generate a SITEMAP.XML (or SITEMAP.XML.GZ - the compressed version). 
Usually, this would be a file that contains ALL of the pages on your site.  So in the case of one of my personal blogs, a list to over 2500 individual pages.
There is nothing to stop you generating this SITEMAP file no matter who you are hosted with, but if you are on blogspot you cannot upload it to your sites root folder (because you don't have FTP access to that folder).
You cannot place it on a remote machine and then point Google Sitemaps to it because it has to be on the root folder of your website.
But don't despair...   You have two options, one of which is a tadge sneaky, but still alllowed.  

A couple of questions have been posted to the Yahoo forum recently about the Word Verification feature on their blogs. Basically, there are a couple of processes that can cause your blog to get flagged. (One is when visitors tick the flag at the top of the blog, another is the Blogger "robot' scanning your site and determining that your content is Spam. The 'robot' is not the most inteligent thing in the world).

Anyway, the blogger help page here, describes the method required to get word Verification turned off.

To avoid further inconveniences when publishing, click the "?" (question mark) icon next to the word verification on your posting form:

For great support with help on Blogger Blogs, or blogs in general, have a look at the Yahoo Blogger Support Group.
You can sign up by using the details below.

Update: 05/12/2005
I should have posted an update here rather than in the comments (but I wanted to test the comments out again anyway). The update process was fairly simple. I had made some changes to the code for 3.15 and I forgot about those when I upgraded to 3.20. Apart from that, it was simple as transferring all of the new files to my webserver and going to the main page and running the upgrade tool. No interaction from me required at all (once I remembered what changes I had made).
Some great work by the MT crew to produce such an easy update.

I'm finally getting round to upgrading my MT installation which I am intendning to start in about 5mins.
Point being, if you see this post in a few days, you know I've screwed up and I've not fixed it yet.
Now the instructions say it is easy... We'll see.

LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) -- A 20-year-old man accused of using thousands of hijacked computers, or "bot nets," to damage systems and send massive amounts of spam across the Internet was arrested on Thursday in what authorities called the first such prosecution of its kind
Read Original Article Here

One down, 3,450,342 to go. (Judging by the number of attacks being made on my network each hour).
But this is a start I suppose, let us hope that there are many many more.

Mind you, in saying that, the amount of SPAM hitting my addresses this past few weeks has dropped to less than 10 a week !! It has not been this quiet since I first went online. I haven't changed anything, added any new protection. All I did was create a honeypot@thenameofmydomain.com for each domain I run and enable a spam trap on it that forwarded to SPAMCOP

And after more than 8 new variants of the Bagle virus landed in my mail this week, it appears to have gone quiet again the last few days.
So don't forget to update your virus definitions several times a day and if you can configure it to do it automatically during the day, more the better.

With the recent (MS05-038) and (MS05-039) problems from Microsoft, I decided to have a look at my web logs for the yaps4u.net domain to see what sort users where hitting my site.
In relation to the (MS05-039) problem, I wanted to see how many Windows 2000 users there were out there.

If you click on the extended entry below you will see the stats from my server logs taken over a 24 hour period and equates to about 6000 hits.

As you will see 13.98% of hits use Windows 2000 which is quite a sizeable chunk of internet users.
It appears that 60% of users are of the Windows flavour.
I suspect the low number of Firefox users is probably down to a few page rendering errors when viewing my site with that browser. I will sort it out one day when I find the part number for ordering some more roundtuits.

Over 30% of IE Browsers are pre-IE6 and closer examination of the logs shows that not all of them are patched or up to date, which is very worrying in this day and age.

I won't go into the Anti-Microsoft thing, mainly because I am pro-Microsoft. In fact I am pro-anything, I just refuse to jump on the bandwagon and attack Microsoft at any oppurtunity. They happen to produce the majority of the tools that I use to do my work, and they perform quite well on the whole, so they can't be getting it that wrong. And they always give the appearance of being concerned with customers, so I excuse them any transgressions they make over time. Not to say that wouldn't change if they ever forgot about customers for want of profit, but I can't see that happening.

As Firefox became popular enough to draw hacking resources away from IE, the problems appeared with that browser too. Ok, there won't be the hacker who wants to create an exploit just because it is Microsoft, but there will be the commercial hackers whose aim is to gain financial rewards from their hacking exploits (no pun intended), rather than the discrediting of a major organisation.
In fact recent studies have found that there has been a large increase in what has been called commercial hacking, moving away from the trend of specifically targetting home users. The exploits will still 'use' the home user as a platform for launching these attacks as these supply the majority of unsecured machines with which to do so.
Now they are more likely to use home machines to attack or gain entry to commerical networks, rather than retrieve an individuals personal data.

Needless to say, no matter whose product has been identified as having a potential or real vulnerability, average Joe must be provided with the education to keep their machines up to date with upgrades/patches and the latest security, or these users will go on providing the methods for the hackers to work their nasties.
Education of the public is a must so rather than directing our angst at one company or group, we should start focussing on bringing Joe Public up to speed.

Yeah I know, this is my MT (Moveable Type) blog, so why am I extolling the virtues of a new plug in for Blogger?
I have always been a fan of Blogger and the team (now part of the Google group), because I believe that Blogger is one of the best free Bloggin tools out there.
Granted it may not have all the features of some other bloggin tools, but there isn't much you can't do with it using some jiggery pokery.

Anyway, to make things easier they have launched a plug in for MS Word to allow you to make a new post to or update a post on any of your blogs.
I don't really use blogger much, other than to host my humour and jobsite blog. Even then I only update the Humour blog much lately. I was thinking of moving them both over to my MT server, but this tool is kind of neat.

One of my bugbears with blogger was the response time of the web server when posting, or the sometimes unreliable posting mechanism that often caused me to lose long posts. Towards the end I used to type out my blog posts in Word and save them locally rather than take a chance of losing them. Now I can do that again, but can post it directly to my blog with a click of a single button.

http://buzz.blogger.com/bloggerforword.html

With Blogger for Word, publishing a Word document to your blog is just as seamless as saving it to your computer, and it's easy to get started; all you need to do is download and install the Blogger for Word add-in, and three buttons appear in your Word toolbar:

• Publish creates and publishes a new post from the text in your document.
• Open Post enables you to edit your last 15 Blogger posts in Word.
• Save as Draft enables you to keep a post unpublished; it will appear in your Blogger account, but not publicly on your blog.

System Requirements

The Blogger for Word add-in requires Microsoft Windows 2000 or higher and Microsoft Word 2000 or higher. You can use your existing Blogger username and password; if you need a Blogger account, sign up now for a free account and blog.

Over the past few months the amount of comment SPAM I have been recieving for this website has been going through the roof. So far, and I say so far, they have not found the other blogs that I run.

99.99% of the SPAM is from a select bunch of websites responsible for either medical supplies, or poker. Texas'holdem or whatever it calls itself.
There is no point in complaining to the hosting company of those sites because they just ignore you. You might notice that there are no SPAM comments displayed on my site because I use a MT Plugin call SpamLookup. I recommend that you install this as the very first thing you do after installing MT. If you get a pre-installed version of MT, then make sure that whoever maintains your installation, installs SpamLookup or something as good as it. It will save you a lot of headache, bandwidth and/or database space later on when the 'dark side' find you, and they will eventually.

Despite the fact that no SPAM actually makes it on to my web pages, up until 3 days ago I was getting hit by various IP addresses and I was finding 10,000 log entries a day. This all eats bandwidth and fills up my database with the messages. It's not that major, but it still gets right up my nose. And those 10,000 hits are despite me having a rather long .htaccess file. I last updated my .htaccess a week or so ago when I basically blocked the complete IP address space of Comcast users. This means that anyone on Comcast cannot access my webserver. I also added them to my email blacklist as well. For some reason Comcast are very deaf when it comes to listenening to complaints about abuse on their network. They also end up with a lot of 'open relays' sitting on their network which allows the normal email SPAM to come through. It's a bit drastic I know, but hey, I don't know many people who use Comcast so it is no skin off my nose. It makes life a lot quieter for me.
Well anyway, after I added Comcast to my .htaccess, I realised that it was taking too much time to update this file and also it was increasing in size. One of the problems with using .htaccess rather than the gloabl site config files is that the .htaccess file is parsed on each web page request. This puts an excessive load on the webserver itself and also slows down webpage access. It's not a problem for me yet, but if I kept adding entries to the file, it would soon be. I needed another way to keep them from hitting my site.

When looking at my site access logs, you can see that by far the greatest number of entry page hits was for /mt/mt-comments.cgi
That means to say that they are hitting that page first and not getting it from a link on another page. This could be because the default install of MT uses MT-Comment.cgi as its default name. It does provide you with a method of changing the name of the comment script file incase you have to run it with .pl and not a .cgi extension.
Out of interest I changed the name of the file to something less obvious and changed the file name in the configuration file to match.
Amount of comment SPAM over the last 3 days? None.
Amount of 404 errors in my site access logs... 1000's and 1000's.
So it appears that they don't scan your webpages too many times to see what the link actually is for your comment script file.
So here I would be as bold as to suggest that the second thing you do after installing MT on your site is to rename the file and change the setting in the MT.CFG configuration file.

To take this one step further, I can see a day when they make the process more inteligent at their end and actually scan your blog to find out what link the script file exists at. It would be no more difficult to implement than a similar script to harvest email addresses from your site. So one of the first things we may have to consider in the future is a method of obfuscating the name and link of the comment script file.
Perhaps one step further would be to dynamically change the name of the script file on a regular basis. Basically some process would:
i. Copy the script file.
ii. Rename it to some obscure file name.
iii. Make sure it has the correct privaledges.
iv. Update the my.cfg file to point to the new file.
v. Delete the old file.
vi. Perform a complete rebuild of the blog entries.

The last step is quite important since the script filename is itself a MT Tag and is used in most template files to provide a link to the comment page (assuming you have it enabled). If you didn't change the links in your previous posts, you would end up with a lot of broken links in your archives and older postings. By doing a complete rebuild of your site, all the links would be updated with the new filename from the mt.cfg file.
Once they start scanning your site for the filename, there will still be a few of them that get through, but it won't be anything near the volume you would normally get. It also means that it will slow them down as they have to use more resources to try and discover the name and link of the comment file.

For the moment, I am going to leave the filename as it is and not implement the dynamic changes. I'll see how long it takes them to discover the new link and then manually change it once again to see how long that one lasts. If the gaps get too short then I might think about generating a tool to do the above.
It will have the ability to be run manually, and if your website supports it, as an automatic process run at user defined intervals.

I took the 3 kids up to my parents place in Kent today for one of my nieces birthdays.
It is hard to belive that today she was 18 years old. I remember the day she was born like it was yesterday, and believe me it feels like it was just yesterday. I had joined the Royal Navy one day before my 20th birthday in March the same year she was born.
I had been drafted to HMS Collingwood to complete my technical training and recieved a phone call to let me know my sister had just given birth to a baby girl,(there was no such thing as text messages back then).
I remember going out to wet the babies head, which probably back then in those days ended up drowning it. I can even remember the hangover the next day...

She'll be out tonight legally drinking in the pubs and clubs. Just as well we don't live in the US anymore because she still wouldn't be able to drink legally over there for another 3 more years.
My mum and dad laid on a great BBQ and we all stuffed ourselves with far too much food. There were 7 kids running round the back yard and luckily the weather improved and the day ended in bright sunshine with the temp feeling like it was in the high 20's.
After driving back home tonight, I felt absolutely cream crackered, proving to me that not only did I feel like I am getting old.

In another 7 years, it will be the turn of my eldests boy to have his 18th... Jeesh, now that is a scary thought..

It was great to see Vikki today and wish her the best on her 18th. I know my dad will probably read this sometime tomorrow and he'll show her next time she pops round. He'll be laughing when he reads this next bit and she'll be mortified (I wonder if she did get up to do the kareoke tonight?). When I've found my cell phone I'll upload a few pics of her and cake ;) That will have her reaching for the phone!! You wait until I get the pics from her night out :)

Checking to see whether I had any comments to check the other day I found I had over 200 comments awaiting my approval.
"My God.. who have I offended now", I wondered.
As it turned out, a new Moveable Type Spammer had found my site. Most often Comment and Trackback SPAM is caught by a number of rules that I have in place.
I use a MT Plugin called SpamLookup and it works very well. None of the above comments made it on my blog as it automatically Moderated all of them.

SpamLookup has a number of methods by which is blocks SPAM. You can have it automatically delete the comment or moderate it. I prefer to moderate in case some coments get deleted that are valid. I could set it to auto delete seeing as to get labeled as comment/trackback SPAM you have to enter some very SPAM like comments, but I have never trusted automatic rules 100%.

Another method I use is to have a look at my server logs to determine who is viewing what and where from.
You'd never believe me if I said the bulk of comment/trackback SPAM comes from China (get away!!!), Mexico, Thailand, Korea and the odd batch from the USA.
You can tell the USA ones are the occaisional amature who thinks they are about to make a quick buck, because they are not too clever about hiding who they are.

Every now and then, I pull out those who have attempted to SPAM my blog from the server logs and I add them to my .htaccess file.
Even though the spammers are blocked from posting SPAM to my blog, they are still calling the scripts that post comments, which in turn calls the plugin that verifies the comment, which in turn calls an external site (in some cases) to verify the source of the SPAM.
All of this activity uses up bandwidth but more importantly it uses up processing time on my webserver. This has the effect of slowing down the whole system.
In the case of this blog and this webserver, it is a share server. This means that I am not the only person who has an account on that specific computer hosting the webserver. Most often, around 20 accounts probably exist on a share server.
So by placing them in to my .htaccess file I am preventing them from even reaching my MT Scripts and thus reducing the load on my server.

Here are the contents of my .htaccess file:

order allow,deny
deny from 64.27.27.203
deny from 216.129.107.21
deny from 216.40.249.17
deny from 82.103.65.225
deny from 63.208.158.252
deny from 63.208.158.253
deny from 63.208.158.254
deny from 148.244.150.52
deny from 207.248.240.118
deny from 148.244.150.58
deny from 148.244.150.57
deny from 207.248.240.119
deny from 64.4.195.62
deny from 64.27.27.150
deny from 219.150.118.16
deny from 216.195.51.193
deny from 216.195.51.17
deny from 80.77.84.252
deny from 216.32.80.98
deny from 207.248.240.119
deny from 193.190.128.253
deny from 202.28.204.123
allow from all

All of the above addresses are either known Comment/Trackback spammers, or ones that I have picked up from my server logs.

To those of you that use my Cut n' Paste RSS Feed/Feed2JS (here), I will be updating both the Magpie and Feed2JS code in the next few days.
It shouldn't break anything, but you might see a short outage while I perform the update and subsequent testing.
The short outage will probably mean that any feeds you have displayed via my server will 'disappear' for a short while. They will come back once the update has been completed.

The update should increase the speed quite considerably and introduces a number of fixes. (I've never found anything broken with it, but I'll post a link to the complete list of fixes for the update when I remember where I put it).

I'll add comments to this post to indicate the starting and when I've completed the update.

CG chose to have her blog hosted at her site, (which I must say is a very powerful insight to something I couldn't imagine how I would cope with. Well worth a read).

For those who are considering hosting their blog data on their own servers, here is a rough explaination of what we did.

1. Logged into the web server via FTP and created a sub folder under the public_html folder called blog (original I know, but you could have it stored in the public_html folder if you want)
2. Created a archive sub folder under /public_html/blog/archive (just to keep things neater later on).
3. On the blogger control panel, entered in the FTP address of the web server (this is usually ftp.yourdomain.com, but you could use the IP address if you know it)
4. On the blogger control panel, enter the name of the blog page (in this case index.html), the path to the blog (in this case /public_html/blog) and the web address where the blog can be found.
5. Enter in the username and password for the FTP account on the webserver. I usually like to create an FTP account just for the use of blogger so that I can track access a little better. Whilst creating the FTP account, you can also specify a home directory for that account and limit access to the /public_html/blog/ folder just as an extra level of security.
6. Made a test post...

So there you go. Five simple steps to having your blog data on your own website, six if you include the test post. (assuming you have one).
There are further settings you can change, but this just changes the way it works, but the information above is all you really need to make it work.

1. Change the archive path to the one you defined on your webserver (if you did, if not, it will post it to the /public_html/blog folder in our example).
2. Add an email address to where new posts are sent.
3. Set up the comments section

Why would you want to do this?

• Well I like to be in control of the data that I post, (i.e. if Blogger ever went belly up and trashed its machines and the countless backups I hope it has, I still have a copy of the data on my own webserver. Not that I think Blogger would ever suffer such a catestrophic failure I might add).
• All my posts are still held in the blogger database, but the actual HTML pages that are created are stored on my own webserver.
• It means that I can have my own domain name as part of the blog URL. (It means I can incorporate my blog into an existing website, just like CG did).

The only downside to the above, is a large blog will use space on your webserver that would otherwise be space used on Blogger's server. But if you are on a web server with a host that offers anything less than 2GB of storage, you are with the wrong host, so these days, it would have to be a rather large blog to be a problem when it comes to space.

If you ever fancy moving your blog from the blogger web address to your own domain and need a hand, just give us a shout.

Regards

Chris

Sigrid is someone who also frequents the Yahoo Blogger help forum where I sometimes lurk around. She maintains her blog using Blogger here.
She has just released a new book "D'Amour Road" which can purhase the old fashioned way on paper, or as an e-book for download.

D'Amour Road is the story of two women in Ontario who are about to turn 40. One of them goes missing, and the other joins a massive search to find her best friend in conjunction with the police, her colourful women's collective, and a younger man whom she finds especially captivating. The book explores a number of themes including female friendships, violence against women, wrongful convictions, addiction, cultural biases against aging, and the painful phenomenon of unrequited love.

Career Journal

A short while back Sarah Needleman contacted me regarding an article she was writing about Career sites and blogging. She happened across my site whilst searching around and asked me a few details.

The link above takes you to the article.

I'm probably going to have to tread carefully here, if you Google for most of the job titles, I am usually #1, in the top #3 or at worst on page 2 from most of my day old posts. Most of the agencies I repeat from would pay for the type of Google hits I get. (I might sell them the solution one day, but its not exactly rocket science).
But my argument to them is at least it gets people to their sites, for free, and I don't even charge commission. It was only something I did to try out a few things. Perhaps I should start up a recruitment agency myself.

The things you do when you get bored at 2am in the morning...

Click the link below .
I don't want to give it space on my front page you see ;)

Two more days left before I am officially unemployed.
My supposed last day is the 20th April but I need to go in before then and sign a few documents. Due to my operation last week, I have been waiting on a reply to a few questions about final pay and other outstanding issues before I sign the 'release' documentation. (Perhaps outstanding was the wrong word to use, because the whole layoff process has been crap from start to end).

I'm a lot better off than those people at Rover. As the company is bankrupt I suspect that they will get the bare minimum redundancy payment, (except for senior managers who I bet won't be losing out, probably at the expense of the workers pension fund too).

Because I've just had this operation, I am officially 'unable' to work for the next 4-5 weeks. I have quite a few interviews lined up, but I won't be able to start work until the end of May most likely.
A couple of companies are aware of my recent operation and it hasn't dampened their enthusiasm as much as I thought it would. I hope that my recent back problems don't put them off too much.
But in saying that, I have quite a bit of work scheduled that should keep me going until the end of the year if I am lucky. And if things take off properly, I hope to be working for myself for the rest of my time anyway, (but I doubt that will be the case, pessimist that I am).

A week before my operation my new Sony VAIO A397XP arrived.
I was going to wait a little longer but I managed to find one for under £1200 with quite a few accessories included.
Apart from the fact I needed a new laptop for business work, the main reason for getting it before I went in to hospital was to allow me to take my 300Gig external hard drive and the laptop to hospital with me.
I have all my 'own' DVD's backed up on this drive and it meant I didn't have to watch the 8 or so channels they had on my TV in the room.
Last night I took it upstairs with me so I could right a few notes just before I went to sleep. It was working perfectly fine 5 minutes earlier but was dead as a dodo by the time I got it upstairs.
It looks like the internal power supply has failed inside since it does not work on batteries or the mains adaptor. (It might even be something as stupid as the main power switch or the one on the screen opening mechanism. Either way, its less than two weeks old and it has to be returned.
Armed with a pot of coffee I sat down to phone Sony VAIO support (which you get charged for at 0.07p per minute !), only to have an operator come on the line within 20 or so seconds.
After trying a few basic things to see if it would work she decided it was best to return it, (and trust me, there were so basic I should post them in my humor blog!!).
So they will be turning up next week with to collect it.
The only thing that got me miffed was the fact that they HAVE to have a password and username of an account on the machine or they will wipe the whole thing. No matter how many times I said, just get the thing to power up and return it and that will be good enough, she said they would just wipe it anyway.
It has a SATA drive which is easy enough to take out and replace with a test drive that has an image that they can use to test the machine. Its not a HDD failure, so I don't see why they should have to access it anyway.
When I asked them to sign a confidentiality agreement, she said that had never heard of it before. I asked what guarantee I had of my data staying private and she couldn't tell me the company policy. I'll be firing off an email to Sony HQ to find out more about that one.
In future, I will set up an user account just in case it has to go back. Its not something I even considered before, as all of my previous laptops have been work laptops owned by Motorola.
Damned annoying that it hasn't lasted more than two weeks.

Over the years there has been a sort of competition between my cousin and myself about who can spend the most time in hospital.
While I was in hospital, my aunt phoned me up to wish me well and we were talking for a while. No-one dared mention the fact that since I was in hospital, it meant that it was my turn. People say things usually come in 3's, but I totally dispute this, since I reckon with my run of rotten luck, its more like 3,333,333's. I'd even say I avoid the number 3 I am so fed up hearing the 'comes in 3's saying'.

Well today has been my first full day at home. It was great to sleep in my own bed, (which actually fits. The hospital bed was not built for someone who is 6'3", probably 6'4" now I've had my back fixed).
I couldn't sleep at first last night, so sat up and watched the Portland - Spurs game on Channel 5. (I am in the UK, so NBA games like this are a bonus. Side note, good to see the Mavericks doing well this season without Nash).

I found out today that my cousin has been admitted to hospital today for tests, probably on an 'old' injury. So he didn't waste too much time in following on with our old game. Apart from giving me a laugh, it also has me pissed off, because it probably means that it is my turn again, and I've only just flaming come out of hospital. I just hope that I get a longer break this time. (I even thought about deleting that last comment incase I literally break something. Not that I am paranoid. Well too paranoid)>

The curse of the Perry's as my wife calls it.

Since my MT blog uses the old link of index.html, I've moved the old blogger account to point to http://www.yaps4u.net/blogger_index.html
I'll be posting a closing down message on my old blogger account.

No more frustration at seeing a Blogger error when posting.
No more hassles losing content.

I finally managed to get blogger to export all my old posts, and it only took about a minute to do it.

On the template Tab there is a setting to control the BloggerNav bar, and I had this set to use a NavBar. Out of desperation I changed it to NONE (as in no Blogger Navbar), just in case that was having problems writing to a 320k file (which was the size of the file after 160 posts had been placed in it).

All I have to do now is sort out the template.
One of the reasons I switched to MT was because I am going to finally make the site IE/DireFox/Opera friendly. Even the box standard template I am using now has problems on Firefox/Opera (look at the heading bar where the description gets mashed (but not in IE).