The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition
Thu, August 20th 2009 at 08:49pm
I do not want to get into Game Reviews just because I do not play enough to have a comparison benchmark, and because there are tons of game reviewers already. With that said though I just had to atleast post about The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition. This is not even really a review, because there is no way I can be objective about this game. It really is the thing that got me into computers as a kid, and has always been one of my favorite game series. more »
Technical Difficulties
Mon, August 17th 2009 at 08:03am
It seems my page started having some technical difficulties last night, even though as far as I can tell nothing changed. The function call to the comments link seemed to be crashing the script on the front page, so I removed it for now and will reinsert one piece at a time and see what did it.
Update: 8/17/09 10:22am: I was referencing a custom file in my theme, and for some reason PHP did not like that call anymore. So I copy & pasted it into the template direct. Seems to be working now.
New Ubuntu Wallpaper
Sun, August 16th 2009 at 12:03am
Was just playing around in Photoshop and this wallpaper was the result. Just thought I would share.
Ubuntu at Night 1920x1200 Wallpaper
Thanks for Visiting
Sat, August 15th 2009 at 11:46am
After upgrading the site I decided to spend a little time actually tracking visitors to the site, which I have not really done in the past. So I signed up for Google Analytics installed the small blob of JS code and let it go.
The amount of data Google Analytics let’s you track in an easy way is pretty amazing. You can see entrance and exit pages, which links on a page were clicked on and a whole host of other things. It’s a huge step up from the standard Webalizer I used to use, which basically just shows how many visitors you have.
Anyway, I was actually quite surprised how many people visit the site (apart from me debugging 
) and just wanted say thanks for coming and I will try to post some more useful stuff soon.
I was also quite interested how many hits very old posts were getting. A lot of hits were going to “node/36″ which is a 404 now and linked to an old wallpaper I posted while playing around with Photoshop. It showed me how important old content can be when moving a site. If nothing else it can act as a gateway to get people into the rest of the site.
Just because I forgot about something I did a few years ago does not mean Google forgot about it. I just wish all the CMS systems will settle on a standard URL format so it would be easier to migrate to new systems and map old URLs onto you new system.
What is Pubsubhubsub?
Wed, August 12th 2009 at 12:02am
After watching TWIg (This Week in Google) Episode 1 about a week ago found out about Pubsubhubsub. It sounded interesting because it seems like this protocol or something like it is going to be important to Google Wave in the future. I have not had a chance to play with Google Wave yet, but from what I saw its goal is to do everything in real time, including interactions with websites, blogs, forums and comments.
With the current polling syndication system this is impossible to do without polling every website you are interested in multiple times a second. Pubsubhubsub is building on the current syndication spec and adding push notifications to it, thus allowing real time updates from any enabled site with a syndicated feed. In this post I am going to go over a little more of what I have learnt about PSHS and what it does and how to enable it with Wordpress. more »
FriendFeed Bought by Facebook
Mon, August 10th 2009 at 01:34pm
Wow pretty big news for a Monday, it seems that Facebook has bought FriendFeed outright. Noone is sure exactly what this means for Friendfeed right now, but it is pretty big news.
I actually only started using FriendFeed on Saturday, but just from a few hours of use I was quite impressed by what it lets you do. The whole site feels very “instant” unlike many other sites that rely on RSS feeds, or even Twitter requires refreshing and polling every minute or so.
The biggest thing I am worried about though, it that FriendFeed seems to be a bit of a testing playground for developing social technology. For example, in my earlier post about Google Wave tech they are the first site to use the Pubsubhubbub to get instant updates from RSS feeds. If FriendFeed goes away it seems like the tech savy crowd it currently has, and the more bleeding edge environment might go away.
What I Hope Happens
Hopefully Facebook will be smart about this, they should leave the FriendFeed website alone and allow the team to continue development there. They should just try to focus on integrating some of the more real-time stuff into Facebook like the instant comments and great aggregation features of FriendFeed.
It just seems like it would be a mistake to dismantle the FriendFeed community when it is such a good place for development to continue and new technology to emerge.
Also, by keeping FriendFeed separate hopefully we will not be subjected to all the questionable ToS agreements Facebook comes up with.
This could be a great thing for everyone, it could mean that Facebook is finally opening up a little. Lets hope it works out like that.
The Google Wave is Here?!
Sat, August 8th 2009 at 10:32pm
I was just listening to This Week in Google episode two and they were discussing PubSubHubBub which is a Google Code project implementing push notifications on the web. The basic idea is that instead of having multiple clients poll your website feeds for new posts you site will push the content out immediately when you post it. So for example if I have this enable on my site when I hit the publish button my post is stored on the server, and simultaneously a ping is sent to Pubsubhubbub (terrible name fyi) with the new content. That is then pushed to anyone who is subscribed to the feed.
With Google Wave everyone is focused on the application, and will it replace e-mail. But for me the Google Wave application is more of a technical demo than the whole architecture. If the Google Wave application fails it does not mean that Google Wave the architecture fails. The Pubsubhubbub project is a perfect example of this, we are already getting Wave functionality today without even having the Wave application. If you use Feedburner you can already enable “PingShot” which use push notifications to instantly push your posts to compatible sites. Right now very few sites support it, I believe Friend Feed is one of them. But when this sort of technology catches on it will already implement one of the biggest features of Wave which is the instantaneous updates from the web.
When this is made two-way then people will be able to instantly post comments on your posts from their consuming applications, and even collaborate on Wiki style pages from Within Wave applications.
So in short Google Wave is more of a way of doing things than one application, or even one protocol. And while it will not replace e-mail anytime soon, it will certainly change the way we do things on the web.
Short URL’s
Sat, August 8th 2009 at 03:49pm
After installing WordPress one of the first things I wanted to do was make a custom Short URL generator for the site. However after doing a quick search for plugins I found out two modules that will do what I need. The first creates short links for all the posts on the site, the second provides a directory of links to external sites. Both modules route all the links through a custom domain I bought. more »
Moved to Wordpress!
Fri, August 7th 2009 at 11:54pm
If you have been reading recently then you know that I have been having a few problems configuring Drupal 6 after upgrading from version 4.7. After looking through many configuration settings, and all the modules needed to do what I wanted I could see that Drupal was too much for what I needed.
more »
Digg.com – Sponsored Stories?!
Thu, August 6th 2009 at 09:02pm
Digg.com has been one of my daily sites for a long time now, I really like the idea of community submitted stories and the community “Digging” the stories to promote them. This is both good and bad because the community can be full of a bunch of idiots who just keep posting the same photo of a Tiger swimming in a pool, or they can post some undiscovered gem I have never seen before. But good or bad it’s always been about the community.
Digg.com adds Sponsored Stories!
Today for the first time I seen a Sponsored story on Digg. It makes it to the front page with only 4 or 5 votes. This is too much now. We already have to put up with the flash ads popping up on each page and now companies can pay to get their stories on the front page.
It’s not there all the time, it pops up randomly when you visit. But this is not a good sign for the direction Digg is taking. I know they have to make money, but this seems like a line that they should not cross. In my mind it’s like a news paper selling articles to corporations and letting them write the material.
