Idiotprogrammer Blog

Category: Art of Blogging

  • Housekeeping Notes

    Ok, running a little late on my roundups.   I’ve busy doing other book-related stuff. Some other thoughts.

    Smashwords Roundup will definitely be tomorrow (it was practically ready last week).  Before I thought I could do 4 Amazon roundups and 1 SW roundup a month. That’s not realistic. 1  SW roundup and 3 Amazon roundups seems like a better pace.  That gives time to work on other things.  

    I’m toying with the idea of starting a week with an empty Amazon roundup and adding to it over the rest of the week. I just pick up so many titles each week! 

    I was thinking that I could do one review a month. I think I’m going to try to do one full review and one capsule review a month. Actually I sort of already wrote my one capsule review already.  Oh, here’s an idea. Maybe I should link to my favorite review of the month (not written by me of course!). 

    One may ask: how do I keep up with all my purchases/freebies/review copies/etc? The answer: I don’t!  I mean, I really try. I’m gotten diligent about collections on my kindle (If an ebook doesn’t belong in one of my collections, it essentially does not exist!)

    Finally, any creative person starts to ask himself: is this project worth my time? I’ve decided that devoting 10 hours a week to doing roundup and litblog stuff is a worthy investment, but I can’t spend too much time or else it would take away time from writing and publishing (and reading!).  For about 10 years I was perfectly happy NOT writing book reviews. And frankly, I am happy enough doing the bloggy thing slowly and  haphazardly. 

    Can’t talk any more. Have to  clean house, send off some job applications and drop the books at the library! 

  • Ok, what happened to my old stuff?

    In 2000 or so I bought the idiotprogrammer.com domain. I had intended it to be my professional portfolio site, with some bloggy articles on it. This would contrast that with my personal domain imaginaryplanet.net which would contain my (nonpseudonymous) personal/creative stuff.    About 5 or 10 years ago, I decided not to renew the domain because I was posting most of my stuff on imaginaryplanet.

    This tends to happen. It’s easy to buy a web domain, and with current web hosting, it’s not that hard to maintain or pay for it. (It’s like $10 a year?). It’s kind of a rip-off, but so what.  By the way, there’s something coming down the pike that should worry indie websites like this in. As of October, Chrome is going to give a security warning for visitors who go to non-https sites. I’ve always known about https, but setting it up was a pain, and it usually involved paying a third party to validate your certificate.

    I understand the reasons for this security upgrade on the browser, but there a lot of non-https WordPress sites out there, most run by individuals  who don’t have the time or resources or expertise to convert to https. I’ll be implementing it probably on my commercial site (still a work in progress, no link yet) and probably on this blog, but this will definitely make me reconsider the old “let’s buy a domain and stick a blog on it” strategy. This may mean migrating projects over to wordpress.com or other larger hosts or simply dispensing with the idea that one needs to buy a domain at all.

    WordPress doesn’t have ironclad security, but it has served me pretty well over the years. Also, I check in often enough to this site that I can apply the automatic updates pretty seamlessly. (To be fair, my excellent hosting service GREENGEEKS does send me emails about necessary updates). At the same time I am less enamored of php scripted sites as viable long term. If you abandon any php application for more than a year or two, chances are that the site can be easily hacked. I assume that the php community has probably taken countermeasures to prevent this — and probably the wordpress community has as well, but it doesn’t give me confidence.

    I like the idea of completely separating the front end from the content management system. The content management system can be under whatever scripting language you want, but it deploys non-hackable code on the domain itself. I know Plone was that kind of system, and probably by now there are several others. But frankly, I haven’t kept up with content management developments as much as I would have liked, and frankly, the non-Wordpress choices seem to involve either 1)signing up a web application (like Medium, WordPress.com) and producing all your content inside it or 2)running a beastly php system like Drupal which requires a fair amount of advanced knowledge. WordPress has still been the happy path for most people, and once you marry a system, it can be hard to initiate divorce proceedings.

    Anyway, these are random thoughts to preface some old content from my idiotprogrammer.com which I forgot to transfer to imaginaryplanet. Every once in a while I remember some great thing I wrote a long time ago, and then crap, I realized that it’s not there anymore! I can’t tell you how many times the wayback machine has saved my derriere, but alas, now it appears that the new owners of idiotprogrammer.com has blocked indexers, so the wayback machine is no longer archiving it.  Bummer! Then apparently after one of my domains was hacked, I still was able to find one wayback snapshot which was not hacked.

    Permit me to rant about people who buy existing domains when they expire.  I don’t want to claim that my sites are particularly marvelous, but I find amazing how often a new owner will just squat on a domain and do absolutely nothing with it! Why on earth would you buy up someone’s personal domain, pay $10 per year to maintain it, and then do absolutely nothing to it.  It’s better to have old content lying somewhere on a domain than absolutely nothing. Perhaps the underlying problem are those pesky domain renewal fees which over the long term makes all domains unusable and uninteresting. There will come a time when facebook.com, ibm.com and microsoft.com won’t have any content on them; it’s coming sooner than you think.

    I’m going to make a bet — somebody prove me wrong! I predict that in 50 years, facebook.com, ibm.com and microsoft.com will essentially be abandoned domains. Perhaps for cultural reasons facebook.com will provide legacy access to people’s old profiles. On the other hand, archive.org , teleread.org, nytimes.com, and hopefully imaginaryplanet.net will still be around — and have accessible snapshots on archive.org — that is, unless the new owners have blocked it.

  • Beware the auto-renewal beast!

    Call me a procrastinator. I plead guilty. (I have also been very busy with a move and a job search).

    For a while I have been meaning to transfer my domain hosting from greengeeks to a slightly more powerful hosting service to accommodate future  web projects. I kept delaying the decision for 2 years (costing me an extra $50 a year), and then I just decided, no, I will just stick with greengeeks for a year (I have had no real complaints about them).

    A few months ago I decided that there was no special reason to stick with godaddy for 5 or 6 personal domains. The cost adds up, and godaddy has no real reason to stay competitive. Then, astonishingly they auto-renewed one of my domains for 3 years in advance! I understand that it’s easy to forget about auto-renewals, but no sane human would have authorized a 3 year renewal.

    I complained and then technical support said, “Sorry, there’s no backsies.” Well, maybe that’s true, but godaddy’s renewal reminder emails only mentioned a one year renewal price. There was absolutely no mention that renewals would be in 3 year increments.  I would have expected at least some kind of courtesy credit for future domain renewals.

    After doing a little bit of research and checking domcomp.com , I finally decided to go with namesilo. They didn’t appear to be that much better than godaddy, but there’s no reason to reward godaddy’s awful customer service.

    On another note, I have noted at how easily companies are adding auto-renewals to the terms of service. Microsoft helpfully auto-renewed my Office account at full price without reminding me it was about to expire. (To their credit, they reversed the charge immediately  after I complained). Since then, I have purchased an MS Office license at a reduced rate.

    It can be hard to keep track of renewals and expiration dates, and forgetting can have serious financial consequences. What if your 12 month no interest purchase is about to come due?

    Luckily, it is not hard to set up reminders. Google Calendar has some way to set up events and then set up reminders. Unfortunately to do so, you first have to go through the rigmarole of  setting up a full-fledged event and change the default notification to email. But it works….

    Update: One hour later, the domain transfer completed. Horray!

     

  • Here is some news (or pre-news!)

    I have been busy publishing the first ebook story collection by Jack Matthews, the first collection he has published in 23 years. Despite the somewhat small size, I consider this to be a major work — perhaps one of his best story collections. My company will be publishing his contemporary microfiction title, Abruptions this summer.

    I have started to offer ebooks at Smashwords. Frankly I will be turning my focus more towards Smashwords; it has been on the cutting edge on ebooks; unfortunately it doesn’t get a tenth of Amazon’s traffic and it doesn’t have the Createspace infrastructure, but they are doing a lot of amazing things. Mark Coker seems to seem trends sooner than most; here’s his latest end-of-the-year prediction.

    I plan to start posting a few small things on Teleread over the next few months. If you remember, I used to contribute lots of things between 2004-2009 or so, but then I had to put it aside. Now I’ll resume posting on a smaller scale. I still would like to start some kind of literary site which is something more than a blog. Every time I get ready to do this, I get sidetracked by real life events. Right now I’m of the mind that I should just publish SOMETHING and then over time add features and specific kinds of content so it accumulates more heft.

    I’m a lot more experienced in deployments, so I’m reluctant to implement something unless I can do it right. I also want to create a method to test changes more easily; that’s the biggest problem with trying to add features to weblogs. Also, I want to create something which one person could run and maintain by himself because — guess what, collaboration is an extra not a vital feature for most literary sites.

    Last night I created a static html page based on an annotated bibliography of Civil War fiction from the Soldier Boys ebook. (Take a look at it; it’s great!). I really just wanted to steal a simple template which uses responsive web design principles (and look good on various kinds of devices). But I realized a few things: responsive web design is hard! Even the simple templates are practically content frameworks because you have to incorporate NAV elements. Having designed ebooks for different readers and devices, I know all about css media queries and breakpoints and inspecting css; even though ebooks have NAV elements, my production method just spits them out via Docbook XSL.

    Also, I know I could figure out breakpoints and screen dimensions, but I became aware of REMs which are kind of like ems, only they are not. Anyway, designing web pages only occasionally, I’m used to being behind a few years on standard practices, but I feel a lot more behind than normal. Maybe it has to do with the value I place on my time, but I’m quickly growing content with just inserting a store-bought or community-written template and hoping everything works. When inspecting these templates, I am more confident of my capability to ruin the css than to fix something….

    That said, I grow weary of current web design, even unassuming ones for blogs. Everything is so focused on social media and signing up for newsletter and shaming the surfer for using an an-blocker. Third-party ad networks are draining your bandwidth and browser memory. Frequently Facebook and sites with videos cause my browser to choke — especially on Firefox. So much content is delivered in-process, so you constantly need to scroll down to fetch more items. The very thought of having to dig up some thing I posted on Facebook 4 months ago fills me with dread. I would spend a good 10 minutes just hitting the More button and waiting for Facebook to serve me another teaspoon of content. Suddenly every listicle must become a photo gallery — not for any functional reasons, but simply to increase the number of clicks you need to make and the time you need to wait.

    Two exciting bit of news which I haven’t shared on FB or G+.

    First, BBC announced that some listeners have found lost episodes of Alistaire Cooke’s Letter from America radio series. I’ve been listening to them religiously (I’m currently at about 1993, and I have noticed that the 1970s decade was missing a lot of weekly episodes!)

    Second, I have become excited at some video essays which I have seen on youtube (usually about artistic or cultural topics). See Nerdwriter1’s playlists and Every Frame a Painting’s playlists. These are thoughtful, well-edited video essays; I’m tempted to try my hand at a few of these — although I honestly can’t imagine how much time is involved. By now, either video essayist can probably crank these things out daily, but novices might find it overwhelming and time-consuming. As good as those video essays are, writing essays is just a more efficient way to produce thoughtful ideas and a fast way to receive them. Sure, video essays can say things which videos cannot; at the same time, can you justify the extra expenditure of time?

  • Not breaking wordpress — Oops, I just did

    This is just a test to see if I have broken wordpress. Fingers crossed that I didn’t totally break it.

    Update: With sorrow I report that my wordpress is broken in ways I will not disclose here. All I will say is: I’m 95% sure that the problem lies with an incompatibility between my Thesis wordpress theme and the latest version of wordpress.  It doesn’t affect what the reader sees, but only what the content producer sees. But it’s a really awful thing even if it’s non-urgent. Assuming that it’s a theme problem — and not a db problem or a WP problem, I have several options to try out. But we’re talking about a good half day of work — if I’m lucky!

    At this moment of my life, I have absolutely no time to mess around with WordPress — maybe in a month or two I’ll be able to get around to it. At the same time, I have an item  on my To Do list to look into making various improvements on my blog (hopefully which I can do all at once). That includes using WordPress to store social media posts, making it more mobile-friendly and other SEO stuff. In the meantime, feel free to browse through to Robert’s Ultimate Guide to all 24 hours of Happy (the Pharrell Williams dance video).   This page is a work-in-progress (and probably requiring 2 months more work), but already it’s getting more traffic than most of my other web pages combined.

    Update 2. After switching out the theme, I have determined that the fault lies solely  with the Thesis theme.  So this bug is relatively minor and easy (though time-consuming) to fix. Horray!