There is so much to do when you blog. Anything from a touch of writing now and again to developing a network, innovating, categorising, designing,... and worst of all, you have to tag everything you damn well produce so the world and his web2.0 wife can you find you every which way.

All you bloggers fed up with tagging, it could be time to thank a bunch of bright north Londoners for an intervention called Jiglu.

Sign up and see what they can do auto-magically for your tagging.

It looks so easy even I could do it. Sign up, they scrape your site, take ownership of everything you ever wrote and in return you get a set of auto-generated tags so folks can find content on your blog from Jiglu. Kushti.

The Jiglu Terms of Service mention the Billy Bragg 1984 apocalyptic material ownership fear. In true Brit style, they say the apocalyptic reference is only slightly over-blown, ie they don't really own your stuff, but they do have permission to use your material however they can.

To be fair, if you want Jiglu, or anyone else for that matter, to promote your material, I guess you have to compromise somewhere! And anyway, whenever you publish an article, as long as you always include an internal link to an article you wrote, or link back to your homepage, it should be OK to let people use your material as much as possible.

Conconclusion

This free tagging service has to be worthy of consideration, methinks. And the Terms of Service are entertaining! I will keep you posted on what happens.

Thanks to Celebrity Insider Photos for having the Jiglu ad in their sidebar and giving me the idea.

I have no idea whether on-line nation is a good or bad show, but it has a cool widget from ClearSpring and that is the enlightening message for today.



If that widgetal graphic rocks your boat, check out the rest of the CW widgets from ClearSpring. They are more entertaining than the shows they promote.

Mr Tides

This sounds like an excellent and well conceived app to tell surfers, fishermen and paddlers the time of the tides and the details of currents all around the world. Linked to a central database, the times are supposed to be highly accurate. The only problem I can foresee with this software is a tsunami. I think Mr Tides would be somewhat out of its depth when the big one hit shorelines.

Sleepless HD

Technically speaking SleeplessHD is an application which recurrently triggers a selected harddisk to keep it spinning and prevents the internal sleep mechanism of some harddisks from taking effect.

Before you glaze over, pay attention to the icon from Braintrigger. Smoking!!!!!

Shrook

Shrook is to RSS readers what Shrek is to ugliness, it rocks. It is a Mac app, but one of its killer features is synchronisation. With a shrook.com account and synchronization, you can log in from any web browser, and all of your channels will be there. It has up-to-date information on what you've read, and when you get back to Shrook itself, it'll know what you looked at when you were away.

We already waste 3 -5 hours a week reading blogs at work. With Shrook, when you get home, you can keep adding feeds so that you can then spend 4 to 6 hours or more reading even more blogs in the workplace. Perhaps this app is not suitable for work!

Freeware is a wonderful thing - in the right hands.

In the world of blogging, there is always the next big networking idea to stir it all up. First MyBlogLog, then BlogCatalog, Wavumi, and now, Blogrush. Never slow to jump on bandwagons, I am there, bottom right sidebar, with my cut-off Blog Rush widget. I will just lean back now and wait to become famous!

I jest, of course, because networking success and fame take time to generate - unless you decide to kidnap the opposition and / or steal back your own material.

Blogrush

We all know that things come in 4's! Sure enough, BlogRush is blogger networking paradigm number 4, a variation on a glorified RSS feed. When I see that Blog rush displays relevant "conversations" in the form of fresh and relevant blog posts, I am thinking, "Thank you. Perfect." Instead of smiley, creative, bizarre avatarial faces in a widget like MyBlogLog, you see titles to blog posts that are related to your own blog genre. Now that makes sense.

100% of visitors get a few random but relevant posts handed to them on a plate. Oi loike that idea and the other MBL clones are in trouble.

Rush to Blog rush

I am adding Blog rush to the side bar mix, adding their widget to my right side bar. I am cool with that extra code because it is a widget that adds content of interest to readers with or without a blog.

Admittedly Blog Rush will not appear too high up the sidebar, because I don't want to drive visitors way from The Pisstakers immediately. But, hey, if you scroll down my home page, pick a few posts here and there, and then zoom off to a post or three on another blog via Blog Rush, I can live with that.

It isn't all rosy. What I can't abide right now with Blog Rush is the lack of adjustments to the widget size. I am sure this will be addressed because the big competitiors,. MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog and Wavumi, already let you twist and manipulate your widgets to your heart's content, so Blog Rush will have to keep up. Otherwise, despite lack of hard evidence of where it is going, Blog Rush seems the best idea to hit the blog network scene in a while.

Sign up

Roll on. And sign up to Blog Rush... apparently if you sign up via me, I get something out of it. I am not quite sure what, where, when or how I benefit, but I just thought I should disclose the upside of joining a Pisstakers band wagon! What do you think?

301 redirects, oh no, that sounds geeky. Indeed, it is, but 301 s, as we call them in the game, are a part of blogmeistery that you need to be aware of.

301 a moved post

The simplest scenario is using a 301 to keep the traffic going to posts that you have re-named or moved.

Sometimes I am so pleased with a post that I forget to give it a Google friendly Permalink ie I stick with the default http://thepisstakers.com/1237y312 hgsdfagkjsdguqoyw.html instead of cool-post.html. Once it is published and people start bookmarking it, you can't just rename it properly and re-publish it. Or rather you can, but bookmarks to the original URL will be broken.

I have a load of naff URLs, and if I were smart I would rename them more usefully, republish and then go to the Control Panel and use a 301 to auto redirect the first wierdy URL to the slick new one.

301 for SEO heaven

The second scenario is consolidating links to one domain. In plain English, I set up this site as http://thepisstakers.com, thinking it is simple for people to type. There are 15000 incoming links to that URL, which is good. However, 30% of people still insist on linking to http://www.thepisstakers.com, so there are 5000 separate links to the www. address too. This is no big deal in terms of keeping posts findable, but for SEO purposes, Google treat each URL as a different website. Bottom line, having two variations of the same domain on the internet dilutes the overall value of The Pisstakers in search engine rankings.

To rectify this common mistake, ordinarily you just go to the Control Panel and fill in the blanks to do a 301 redirect.

.htaccess redirect

Of course nothing is quite so simple for a Pisstaker as filling in the blanks. I created an infinite loop of redirects and no page on the site would open! That is where my web hosts, A Small Orange came to the rescue after midnight last night.

Hello,

I have set this up for you in your .htaccess file with the following:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^thepisstakers\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.thepisstakers.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

How cool is that for support?!

This graphic shows the state of the site before the changes.



Now, there are 20,000 incoming links to www.thepisstakers.com regardless of which URL people have used. ie 75% more links have suddenly appeared and that should do this site a little bit of good in the search engine ranking world. And even if the Pisstakers does not move above the top 72% of sites on the internet (hahahahaha) it is nice to know the site is tidy behind the scenes, thanks to a "simple" redirect.

Just when you thought Firefox couldn't get any better, along comes the back to school version of the browser - Firefox on multimedia steroids, as it were.

The premise of Firefox Campus

Slowly but surely, Firefox is making headway into the Internet Explorer user base, and thanks be to the browser gods for that. And what better way to drive home your advantage for the long term than woo the students of today, so they become the evangelic users of tomorrow. It isn't exactly rocket science marketing. iTunes, the software engine behind the iPod was a student driven phenomenon, and look where that got Apple today, so the same approach could work with Firefox Campus, right? Maybe. Maybe not.

Foxytunes

Do you listen to Music while surfing the Web? FoxyTunes lets you control almost any media player and find lyrics, covers, videos, bios and much more with a click right from your browser.

Maybe they should re-word that from the teachers' point of view?

Instead of finding quotations, illustrations and graphs, news footage, biographical data and the like, invest your astronomical fees developing a 360 degreee overview of Britney Spears . That should help your job prospects by course end, no end, not.

StumbleUpon

The second element of the Campus Edition is an account with StumbleUpon.

Connect with friends and share your discoveries, meet people that have similar interests, and check out what other people are discovering.

Oh, that sounds like a good one for all serious academics! But for attention deficit youths of today, shouldn't that say,

Instead of interacting face-to-face, you can chit chat about the game with your neighbor over the internet; compare in-dorm gossip, and most importantly, share the URLs of essays and presentations you found to plagiarise.

The Firefox Campus edition is no Trojan horse.

There is already a skeptical feeling in teacher land that the internet is not that great a learning tool in most hands. These two lame add-ons look like yet another type of trivia-oriented Google- and Wiki-based research that is replacing good old reading and assessing and thumbing through multiple opinions. Firefox Campus is shallow and won't allay any teachers' fears about the dumbing down impact of the internet in education.

If IT people want a place in education, they need to be aware of the negatives of the right tool in the wrong hands and realise that there is a good reason behind the reversal of some laptops for kids programs. The internet and the use of technology aint that great, yet. I am not saying studying cannot be fun, and there is a place for computer stuff, but the art of learning is a serious business best left to teachers to supervise. This idea of encouraging students to flirt alone between music, Stumbled sites and study is way off base, in my opinion.

Mozilla, find these academic students some academic value in the browser, don't add to the mindless distractions.

I'm back to my Britney thesis now, which is OK, because I have finished studying for today.

Back in the day, Apple used Synaptics touchpads in their laptops, and by default, used the SYNA scroll wheel for the iPod. One day Apple decided they could do it all better in-house, and overnight, SYNA lost 20% of their business.

It seemed as though nobody outside of Synaptics and Ed had a clue just how ubiquitous the SYNAPTICS technology was / is / and always will be, and they lost 60% of their stock value within a few knee-jerk days. As Cramer would say - They know nothing, buy, buy, buy, welcome to the House of Value.

Synaptics are best of breed

Dell and LG continued to give Synaptics loads of business, and they have also positioned themselves at the forefront of the new iPhone-esque touch screen market. For Synaptics, Phone sales v laptop sales is similar to Tyson v Minnie Mouse. Like falling off a log, the SYNA stock has slowly risen from its ridiculous $17 levels without even trying.

Sure enough, a couple of years later, Apple realised their touchpads sucked and Synaptics really were kings of their particular domain. Even before anyone knew SYNA were back in the iPod, their stock was back up to pre-crash levels of $40. And now we know iPods are Synaptics dependent again, thanks Bear Stearns, SYNA stock is set to skyrocket - again. Oh good!

Interestingly, and a cause of mirth for a pisstaker like myself, nobody from Apple or Synaptics will talk about their business relationship. (This is what happens when Apple eat crow and nurse a bruised ego!)

btw, Ed knows practically nothing about stocks, but I do know how to read the tech news and I knew where to buy a few shares. We are off to the seaside now.

Between a complete absence of internet cafes in New Jersey and programing oversights of childlike proportions by HP and a payroll company, it was a stressful few hours trying to print 4 pages of payroll info off the internet.

HP driver bull

HP are such a great company that the software writers for their PSC1510 all-in-one printer/scanner/chaos creator will not let you install the driver anywhere other than on the C drive. This meant that saps like us with their Windows install on the E drive are unable to use a piece of fairly good HP machinery. Thanks HP, and maybe their multi-million dollar software house should take note of the pointer on one help forum, Any software written properly for Windows will recognise the drive where the Operating System is installed, and load accordingly. Looking at the list of software currently occupying the E drive, I would say HP are in a minority of one with their lack of foresight. And to think I was about to buy HP shares on the basis that they have turned the corner and are once again a great company. Wrong.

No Firefox?

Nowadays, if someone wants to see your payroll info, you don't ask your boss, you send them along to specialist payroll companies. However great the providers of this service may claim to be, the company handling my wife's payroll info is another entity that I would not touch with an investment barge pole, even if you paid me. Their central database only works with Internet Explorer. How great can such a short-sighted standards non-compliant company be?

No cyber cafes

Faced with a PC that cannot print, I tried a Mac that can print, only to find I am locked out of a particular website because I don't have IE7. Last option, I needed to find a cyber cafe. Next revelation. Internet penetration in the home is now so extensive in New Jersey that, according to several Yahoo Yellow Pages-type searches, there are no cyber cafes within 50 miles of my house - and even that was only open weekends. I didn't think of a public library, doh, and in the end had to ask an office supplies shop if we could use their computer to access the payroll website.

He didn't quite understand the personal nature of the info we were accessing. Picture the look on Mrs Ed's face when the guy asks for the URL, and then for her password and ... He caught on and was kind enough to let her use the main PC and all was well. But really, what a fricking pollaver.

Conconclusion

We have all the kit at home, but not quite the precise kit required of 2 inefficient corporations who are arrogant enough to think that the world should revolve around their peculiar in-house practices. End result, us little people have to waste half a day trying to print basic info that years ago we could have got posted to us overnight, leaving us free to actually be productive. Progress sucks.

It is no secret that I find busy sidebars a distraction, and I was heading towards hypocrisy with a hotch potch of disparate widgets lurking in my own sidebar. But one day, flash, ahhaaaaaa, more by luck than judgement, I stuck them all together and they ended up adding to, rather than detracting from the basic theme of the site. (All opinions expressed on the Pisstakers are mine!)

Widgets are also a lazy man's way to provide dynamic content, so that every time someone visits it looks like there is something new. To be accurate, I do update the quotes and the contests widgets several times a week, so i guess I am not a total bluffer, but by and large the javascript serves a massive combination of messages and images with little help from me.

Widget warriors

In order to spread the word of The Pisstakers and also give some free entertainment and link love and content to others, I have made the codes available for download. I would like to thank the following folks for giving widgets a try and notching up traffic for everyone with a link onboard.

ABC, installed and wrote a short post too about the contest widget.

DisregardMe blogged about the contests widget, as did the mighty Contests Blogger

ClearSpring have a widgetizing site for all things widgetal

Sha had a contest widget but it dried up?

I Eat Snowman Poop has a cool Humor blogs widget on display

Dating legend, Mimi, has a contest widget for her readers to drool over

I didnt manage to get a forward and back arrow on the contest widget in time for the Win a Wii contest site. Sorry.

Linda has a contest widget despite it clashing with her color scheme.

Sandee spotted a discrepancy in the code for one widget. Thanks for paying attention.

Claire has the funny quotes scrolling through her sidebar. Her own sweaty thigh quote is quintessentially English.

Lord Likely banned me from his sidebar - thankfully along with everyone else with a widget!

The Widgets Lab put the contest widget through its paces. Room for improvement.

The funny quotes widget was dumped on Saturday night. Excellent result.

Larry went Hmmm and installed a funny quotes widget. He never looked back.

There should be a funny quotes widget lurking behind this blogger's doors, but they are closed now.

Celebrity Insider and Mikes MoneyMaking Mission are both busy but still have room for a static button, as do the unrelated Rag Box and the Owen Wilson fan, Shadowscope.

And the guru of the internet, Peter has the Necessary Skills and the room for Funny Quotes.

Callie Ann keeps on blogging and has a Funny Quotes widget with her own quote included - The village called, they want their idiot back!

Howard may be incorrigible like a kitchen gadget, but his funny quote widget is going strong.

Plakkerdeklap visitors had a good chin wag over the quotes widget. Translation anyone?

Paint me a Happy Smile has a sense of humor too, as well as loud music that launches when you land on the site. (Worse than too many widgets, that!)

Funny quotes occupy the top notch themed blog of Terri terri. The widget doesn't even make her place look untidy, so it must be quite well styled!

At last, Last Minute Lyn got a mention for installing the quotes widget.

No widgets but fantastic urban photos!

And finally, The Book project has a little banner of Ed. Awwwwsome.

So there you go, plenty of activity. If you want some action, check out the contest widget here, and the rest here.

About a year ago I made the first steps into web hosting. I didn't know a thing about setting up a new domain, ftp-ing was just a mildly amusing acronym and MySQL, re-directs and 404 Not Found pages were just meaningless words. A good job I found A Small Orange (ASO).

Everyone on the tech forums raved about them, and they even had a waiting list. I felt quite chuffed when I waited up til 12.00 and 3 seconds and bagged myself one of their daily quotas. (I suspect it was more about great marketing than practicalities, but they had a good thing going and I wanted a slice of it.) I took a gamble and signed up for their not quite totally crazy cheap package at $5 a month.

You may wonder, how could I go wrong? but you really can go wrong, big time, if you pick the wrong hosts.

Dreamy daniel hosting

The big trap is falling for huge numbers - Sign up, sign up - 250GB of bandwidth, 30GB of storage, all for $10 a month yadda yadda, oh yay. It appears to be a thinly veiled scam that will most likely see your site installed on a server that is jam packed full of other sites also living under the illusion they can do what they like within these ginormous capacities. Somewhere along the line, though, these massive theoretical figures they quote mean nothing, because once a server is working flat out, they just put a brake on everyone's usage. This can often leave sites high and dry, loading sporadically when there is a gap in demand.

It is hard enough getting visitors in the first place, but to know your web host is driving them away because they are badly serving a thousand porn sites alongside yours, is a bit demoralising. And if you are trying to make money off your site, the wasted $10 just adds insult to injury.

At least with ASO, I know (or I believe I saw a log that showed) that there are 50 sites on the same server, and we all operate within practical (not theoretical worse case) limits that the server can cope with when we come close to our individual thresholds. With my package I have 400MB of disk space and I can use up to 10GB of bandwidth a month. With 200 MB of material installed and no more than 4GB of bandwidth used last month, (or 8000 visitors / 30000 page views in real money) it is a plenty big enough package so far and I suspect would serve most blogs, handsomely for years.

Technical support

Another issue many people have is the lack of help when they have issues with their site. As it happened, it wasn't critical that I was clueless about setting up a domain, and there is plenty of help getting your head around MySQL, re-directs and 404 Not Found pages. However, when all else fails (ie the technical terms get too much to bear) ASO have been unbelievably helpful to a numbnutz like myself. I can only assume they don't get many problems and their staff sit around praying for something to do, because they have spent loads of time helping me out.

I hope I don't get anyone in trouble, but one guy set up my mail forwarding for me, I gave him my password and let them muck about with whatever needed mucking about with. And recently I had trouble with firewalls and god knows what and I didn't have a clue how to solve it. The ASO guy said, I can't help you because our support doesn't stretch that far, but if you do this, this and this, you may be good to go. Needless to say, it went!

And they have the ubiquitous C-Panel where you can easily organise your site behind the scenes, upload files, run email... and Fantastico is a one-click wizard for totally painless installations of software, like Wordpress, Joomla and dozens of other scary-looking PhP / MySQL nightmarish-to-novices dealios.

The imperfections

It wouldn't be right to say that if you sign up to ASO you can expect a flawless 100% experience, because we are talking computers, right! Servers need to be maintained, so it seems like most days the site isn't accessible for a few minutes. I think this is more annoying to me than to visitors, because it seems to coincide with Mrs Ed screaming that we need to go out after I have foolishly said, Just a moment, it won't take 2 seconds to publish this article. Maybe for $10 you can enjoy no downtime or domestic ear ache whatsoever?

In conconclusion

All said and done, I don't think you can go too far wrong with A Small Orange. You can start small and know they will expand to meet your needs, to the point you can have your very own virtual server all to yourself. Having said that, the last time I looked, they were out of those too, due to demand. Perhaps one day in the future I will have to wait up past midnight to get a slice of that action?

As everyone is into transparency these days, I should say I get nothing for writing this in terms of hard cash, but if you happen to mention The Pisstakers when you sign up, I may get a month or two credited to my account. But that isn't why I am writing this. ASO rocks!!!!

About 5 years ago I bought the best Apple laptop I could afford. The titanium painted 1" thin computer cost me about $3000. It is the one with the spec on the right.



It is almost embarrassing to say I am so pleased with such a slug, but it is the truth. It runs the latest greatest operating system from Apple at a pretty good lick, especially with a new 7200RPM hard drive to help out. And most importantly, it has only let me down once in 5 years, hence the new hard drive!

Since year 4 of owning it, I have constantly threatened to buy a new Mac. Who keeps computers, especially laptops, for more than 4 years? Old technology has no place in the modern world, yadda yadda. They said the same about Concord, but the bottom line is, it does the job. Or does it? Look at the spec of the computer on the left. Insanity.

Without getting too deep into the bottom line advantages of Intel processors and different sorts of RAM, the Mac Pro tower with Intel inside has about 6.5 times more processing power than my Titanium (Motorola crippled) laptop and 4 times as much RAM. It can run multiple external monitors to my one. In theory, it is a complete techno monster that could gobble up my computer in a nano-second without even drawing breath. But...

I still only type at 120 words an hour.

The wireless connection at my house is still crap whatever computer I use.

Updating my blog takes the same time on an old machine as it does on a new one, because it is my own internal processor that is old and rickety.

I can't carry a tower from the office to the lounge and surf with the computer on my lap and my feet up on the coffee table, at least not without doing some serious damage.

I am the weak link in this tech age, a fact that not even the fastest computer on earth can change.

So, although I would love to prance around town saying I have a flashy Mac Pro, I will continue with what I have. That means I get to pose in coffee houses, dude, for the forseeable future. I can continue to tap on the shiny slightly worn keys of my laptop over lattes. I can revel in the design where all my connections are hidden away at the back of the laptop, and if anyone baulks at the the rust spots, I will continue to explain that it adds character.

Aye, rust is proof that they don't build 'em like this any more.

Stockholm Syndrome, anyone?!!!

How old is your "production" computer?

I came across Highslide photo gallery, clicked on a thumbnail photo and thought, "Where is the obligatory blacked out background you get with Lightbox and the other javascript photo galleries?"

Seems like you don't need to go that route to get overlaid photos on your screen. And with the options for commenting, sizing and styling, plus dragging images, it looks like Highslide has all that a discerning blogger could ever need for a high class and user-friendly photo gallery.

Just need to get some decent pictures and you could be in business!

If you have spent more than 2 minutes on a PC, you will no doubt have been faced with a computer glitch that doesn't sort itself out in an obvious way. After a couple of frantic clicks and curses, most of us re-start our computer, a move that solves 90% of all computer issues. However, in terms of trouble-shooting, it is like starting at Z and working back to A in one giant step, not the ideal way to interact with a binary 0's and 1's-driven machine. Even when you do the right thing, you can still fail. I know, twice, from recent experience.

Troubleshoot junk mail

Occasionally, I feel moved to properly sort out a problem like funky junk mail issues, and as a restart won't do it, there is no option but to troubleshoot in a logical way. Oh, the pain. The aim is to start from the top and work back, or more accurately, start from the top with dialog boxes, and drill down. So, in the worst case scenario, if all else fails, you should end up in an obscure library file, the exposed heart of your PC pulsing as you work, ready to delete the ultimate file and solve the problem.

It sounds scary getting under the hood of your PC, but deleting some code in a darkened locale should be a logical step after a trip through a long list of logical moves that solved nothing to that point - so what's the worry?

It is another thing to end up at an obscuro file by accident, or as a friend of mine is wont to do, dive deliberately into the nether regions, high on ignorance and hope, ready to delete something he doesn't understand. That is scary!

After a proper troubleshoot, my mail still ended up in the junk instead of in the correct boxes, but at least I had tried and failed correctly!

Vanilla troubleshoot

Yesterday I was trying out a forum package, Vanilla. It is a lightweight app which you can style and then spice up with a series of extensions, like Firefox. Not your average forum layout!



Vanilla has an option where a commenter can type in a link to a Youtube video and the software automatically embeds the video in the comment. Sounded nifty, but I couldn't get it to work. How I wish I had gone into a red misty fit from the start and gone straight to Z to solve it!

Like a logical troubleshooter I followed the relevant thread on the Vanilla support forum, working from post 1 on toward post 98. With each pertinent tip I tweaked and uninstalled and ticked boxes, and made a little progress, but the progress was not in the direction of embedded videos.

Good job I have a sense of humor. 2 hours later I got to post 78 and it suddenly dawned on me that the tone of the helpful posts was changing. The helpful guys weren't quite so bullish, the keen troubleshooters were getting resigned to failure. The final nail in the coffin was post 96 - the fricking new version officially doesn't work! Cheers.

In conconclusion

You can learn a lot from troubleshooting correctly, it is like an investment in the tools you are using.

And ferretting around in a program can help you put issues into perspective. There you are ticking boxes and copying and pasting and cursing, but imagine how much work has gone into actually "inventing" the software you are trying to troubleshoot. That is quite a humbling thought, and has saved my computer from a flight out the window a few times.

Not to say it isn't a ball acher when troubleshooting ends in failure, but the silver lining is an app like Vanilla, a very interesting forum option that does most things except embed Youtube videos.

What is wrong with this picture? Or more to the point, what happened?

Did Swicki shrivel and burn? Have the enterprising team taken the venture capital and run like hell? Is Swicki a defunct dead-end web 2.0 fly by night idea? No, definitely a big NO to all the above. Ed, the dumb ass deleted the Swicki bubble from the search side bar!
It is back and visible.

check out the thepisstakers swicki at eurekster.com