An Eclectic Mind

Why the post count is shrinking.

Regular readers here may recall that a few months ago, I split off all book/article support content to a new blog-based site called Maria’s Guides. It looks and works a lot like this site, but it contains just the content that readers of my books and articles might want to read — and none of the flying or travel or writing stuff I often blog about. I really didn’t want to have two blogs, but it really was the best decision to attract and keep two subsets of regular readers and subscribers.

Making the split was rather tricky. It required me to export all posts from this site, open the resulting text file in a text editor, and delete the posts and comments that were unrelated to my books and articles. I then imported the remaining posts and comments into the new site, which I’d already prepared.

Of course, the original version of all the Maria’s Guides posts were still on An Eclectic Mind. And since An Eclectic Mind had been around so long — four or five years as a blog after five or more years as a regular Web site — all the original posts were coming up in Google searches. So people were still reading this content on An Eclectic Mind, rather than on Maria’s Guides.

Still following me on this?

I faced a dilemma. If I simply deleted the duplicate posts on An Eclectic Mind, visitors would get an Error 404 message when they tried to view that content from sources like Google (which accounts for more than 35% of this site’s hits these days) or direct links from other sites. I don’t know about you, but when I get a 404 error, I don’t waste a lot of time looking for the content I was seeking. I’m outta there. I assume my blog’s visitors would be the same way.

The solution was to set up redirect permanent statements in this site’s .htaccess file. Each time I deleted a post on this site, I’d create an entry for the same post on the other site. When a visitor followed a link to content that no longer existed on this site, he’d automatically be taken to the same content on the other site. It would be completely transparent to him, unless he happened to glance in the address bar for the resulting page, which would show the MariasGuides.com URL.

Deleting content and creating these entries is a long and tedious process. Fortunately, I had enough foresight to use the same permalink structure on both sites. So it’s just a matter of copying and pasting URLs and deleting posts. It takes about one minute per entry. Today, I did another batch. I’m going backwards through time, doing the newer posts first. All of 2007 is now done.

But if you pay attention to post counts — you can find the current post count for this site near the bottom of the right sidebar — you may notice that the number of posts on this site dropped by about 30 today. The site now has more comments than posts, which is kind of neat. (I learn a lot from reader participation here.) It’ll continue to drop as time goes on. I expect to delete another 200 or so posts by the time I’m done.

BLog Technicalities, Call Me a Geek blogging, web design

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.

BLog Technicalities, Call Me a Geek cameras, Internet, online

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.

BLog Technicalities blogging, web design

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.

BLog Technicalities, On Blogging blogging, Internet, web design

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.

BLog Technicalities comments, spam, WordPress