An Eclectic Mind

iSight being replaced with a USB camera.

Some of you may have noticed that my Webcam disappeared right around the same time I upgraded to an iMac computer. The reason is going to sound pretty lame, but it’s true: The FireWire cable from the camera to my computer just wasn’t long enough to reach my window and I couldn’t get a FireWire hub to work properly. So I took the camera offline.

I sold the iSight on eBay and got a whopping $150 for it. That’s more than the darn thing’s list price when it was brand new. (Okay, so only by a dollar, but it is more.) So I have some ready cash to buy a replacement camera.

After some minimal research, I settled on an Ecamm Network iMage USB Webcam for Mac and Windows v 2.0. It’ll give me a reasonably-sized image and doesn’t require any special drivers. It even has screw holes in the mount so I can attach it to the window frame, nice and high for the best view.

I’m just hoping it doesn’t interfere with the iMac’s built-in iSight camera, which I still want to use for Skype, iChat, and other stuff.

Because the proceeds from the iSight sale were burning a hole in my pocket, I also sprung for the relatively inexpensive Macally Portable Goose Neck USB Video Web Cam - ICECAM. This is a toy I can use when I’m on the road to bring Webcam images from wherever I happen to be. Tune in next month; I’ll try to display images of my audience (if there’s more than just one person!) while I’m doing my presentation at the Peachpit booth.

I really like having Webcams and have had one, off and on, for at least six years. You can find one of my Webcams at the KBSZ-AM radio studios near downtown Wickenburg. Here’s the current image; maybe Pete Peterson, station owner, is in the shot. This image (as well as my personal Webcam, when it’s up and running) appears on wickenburg-az.com.

I’ve also written about setting up a Webcam on a Mac. The most recent piece is “Creating Timelapse WebCam Movies on a Mac” on the Peachpit Press Web site.

Both new cameras should arrive right after Christmas. I’ll write more when I’ve had a chance to play with them.

I just don’t have the time to learn and do this.

I need to create an online reservation form for Flying M Air. It should be secure and run on my server. It should be able to pull tour names and prices from a database I can maintain and do calculations based on what customers choose. It should be able to securely collect credit card and other personal information required to charge the card. It does not need to have credit card approval access; I am prepared to do all that manually. It would be nice if it could include a “special offer key” that discounted the flight for people who entered the correct code. Again, I’d want to maintain that myself. When the form is submitted, it should send a summary of the info to me and the customer. I should get it in a format I can use to import into an Excel or FileMaker Pro database for further processing.

The idea is for the form to collect reservation info from people who just don’t want to call and do it on the phone. I don’t have a toll-free number and I occasionally get tourists from overseas as customers. This would help people who don’t want to make that toll call or live in a very different time zone to handle their reservation securely.

My server runs at GoDaddy.com. It’s a Unix box with PHP and MySQL. The solution would have to integrate perfectly with my existing Web site design, which was developed with WordPress. (I can assist with the form creation part.) You can see it at www.FlyingMAir.com. I’d put the form on a WordPress page.

I have a budget for this, but if you or someone else you know can do the job and save me the bother of learning to do it myself, I’m certainly willing to pay. I will not, however, pay by the hour — I’ve seen too many people milked by Web developers on a hourly rate. I’m also not interested in hosting on a different server or setting up a system that will require me to retain someone to update database contents.

Interested? Leave a comment on this post. You don’t have to provide any info other than your e-mail address in the form field; I’ll contact you directly that way.

What my blog is worth — according to Technorati, anyway.

I was surfing aimlessly this morning, just finishing up my trip around the net, when I came across a widget like the one you see here on another blogger’s blog. His blog was worth $74K. I clicked the link, filled in the form and soon learned that my blog was worth $64,922.10.

(I should note that $64,922.10 is the number that came up today, when I wrote this post. It’ll be interesting to see how that number changes, especially as I continue to move book support related content off this domain name and only MariasGuides.com.)

While it would be nice to think that what I’ve been spouting here has a lot of value, I sincerely doubt that it has this much value. I’m certainly not one of the “A-list” bloggers out there. My content covers too many topics to have a consistent readership. I don’t get a lot of comments. And my subscriber numbers seem to hover between 100 and 200, no matter what I do. So $64Kk seems pretty outrageous to me.

But I’m sharing this with readers as a curiosity. Have any of you checked the value of your blog using this widget? If not, give it a try and see what comes up. Report your findings in the Comments for this post. Be honest! And tell us whether you think your number is as outrageous as mine.

And if you do visit the site where this widget can be found, tell me what you think: Is the blog a splog? I think it is.

In the meantime, if anyone wants to buy this blog, the current going price is…well, whatever is says in the box above.

Experimenting with another new plugin.

Just thought I’d try another new plugin on the site: Share This. This adds a Share This icon and link at the bottom of each post. If you like the post a lot and want to share it with a friend, click the link to view a bunch of options for sharing it via e-mail or social networking.

This is in a trial stage right now. It’s there and it should work, but I’m not happy with the way it looks. I just don’t have time to tweak it right now.

Your feedback is welcome. Use the Comments link or form below to let me know what you think of this change.

I’ve had my last pingback spam.

Anyone who has a blog knows that the comment feature is what makes a blog stand out from a plain old Web site. The comment feature is what makes a blog interactive, it’s what gives readers a chance to share their point of view or additional information about a topic. It gives them a chance to ask questions and get answers.

The comment feature works with the pingback feature. Pingbacks (which are often referred to as trackbacks) are machine-generated “comments” that are added to a post when another blogger writes a post that links to it.

Huh?

Okay, think of it this way. You’re blogger A writing post 1. Blogger B writes post 2 that includes a link to post 1. A comment appears on post 1 that links back to post 2. This is all done automatically in WordPress (my blogging platform of choice) if — and this is a big if — you left the Allow Pings option turned on for post 1. You can find the setting for this in the Discussion area of the Write Post administration panel.

Unfortunately, the pingback feature also makes it possible for sploggers to get free links to their sites. A splogger builds content on a blog by stealing it from RSS feeds. Their goal is usually to get hits on their Web sites, which are full of Google AdSense ads, but they sometimes are part of a “link farm” that boosts search engine ranking.

The problem lately is that my sites have been attracting more pingback spam from splogging sites than real pings from legitimate sites and bloggers. These must be manually deleted, since my spam prevention software doesn’t seem able to catch them all. And frankly, I’m a little sick of spending each morning deleting six to twenty of these comments.

So I’m going to stop writing posts with the pingback feature enabled.

And if you’re having this problem on your blog, I recommend that you do the same.

I add gravatars back to this site in a big way.

Before I redesigned this blog, back in the days when it was still Maria Langer: The Official Web Site*, I added gravatars to the comments section of the blog. Gravatars are icons or avatars of individuals that are linked to their e-mail addresses. When someone with a gravatar posted a comment using his e-mail address in the appropriate field, the gravatar would automatically appear with the comment. If the gravatar changed in the future, it would also change on this site. Here’s what mine currently looks like.

This feature works with any site run by someone geeky enough to take the time and effort to set it up. With WordPress, it doesn’t take much time to do. Just the willingness to install and activate a simple plugin and modify some code in the comments.php file for the blog’s theme.

One of the reasons it took me so long to get this set back up was that I’m one of the few commenters who has a gravatar. I got a little tired of seeing [mostly] my face in the comments. It didn’t seem as if many other people were interested in this personalization feature.

Then Automattic (makers of WordPress) purchased Gravatar. I figured it would be more supported. And I was right. The Get Recent Comments plugin I use to list recent comments in the sidebar of An Eclectic Mind and Maria’s Guides support them. So I decided to enable that feature. From there, it took only moments to go the next step and put the gravatars back in the comments themselves.

So now it’s fully implemented on both of my main Web sites. And I’m encouraging people to go to Gravatar.com and get their own gravatars. And if you need help doing that, check out “How to Create a Gravatar” on Maria’s Guides.

I’ll be looking for your gravatars in the Comments of both sites.

* Read with tongue planted firmly in cheek.