Category: the soapbox

  • Sometimes I could just kill the internet

    Yesterday, all my sites were down for almost the entire day. Probably longer, actually. The issue stemmed from a server resource spike that started sometime in the afternoon on the previous day. Whatever caused the spike caused the process to hang indefinitely. Attempts to reboot the server did not succeed (despite the DreamHost backend telling…

  • WordPress isn’t a commercial success…wait, what?

    Read this.  Then come back.  It’s okay, I’ll wait. WordPress.com Blogs Garnered 23 Billion Pageviews in 2010 It’s the last paragraph the bugs me. The five-year-old company may be experiencing remarkable growth, but it has yet to become a commercial success. The startup reportedly makes around $1 million per month from premium and hosting services,…

  • Google America

    Google America

    If you were to take a poll today of approval ratings for Barack Obama, I can guarantee that the number of supporters in this country of our President is far surpassed by the number of people who use Google services on a daily basis. How did this happen?  How did we become so complacent?  How…

  • Don’t be Google: A battle-cry for Net Neutrality

    Don’t be Google: A battle-cry for Net Neutrality

    By now you should have heard about the closed-door talks that Google isn’t having with Verizon that absolutely wouldn’t destroy Net Neutrality as we’ve known it (and Google has argued for it) for the last several years. Here’s the rundown: The New York Times published an article that Google and Verizon were nearing an agreement…

  • web site security

    i was listening to the replay of the teleconference hosted by WPSecurityLock (with special guests from GoDaddy) in light of the recent wave of website hacks that affected hundreds of sites not once, but twice.  it was actually when they were talking to a customer (one who had been hit twice) that a concern was…

  • Caution: Beware of Fireballs

    are there any regular readers out there?  anyone who might know about the whole upstart blogger and twitter/genesis rocket debacle?  a few?  well, good.  if not, check the archives for a refresher. the short story is that over the last year i followed, became entangled with, and then uncovered all sorts of unsavory things about…

  • Twitter kills bulk and automated unfollows…and we’re disappointed why?

    yesterday, SocialToo announced they were discontinuing the auto-unfollow feature associated with the services they offered.  this more or less confirms my own suspicions when i went to clean out the people @ArcanePalette was following a few days ago and get rid of the spammers, marketers, and others that, from a reading and using Twitter standpoint, weren’t really adding…

  • lightning never strikes twice. unless you’re a spammer.

    they say that lightning never strikes the same place twice.  that’s a good thing, because if you happened to be an idiot out in a lightning storm holding a weather vane in an open field unlucky enough to get hit once (and walk away),  you probably wouldn’t want to be the guy out in a lightning…

  • nine inch nails fans kick ass

    a couple days old (sometimes it takes me a few days to catch up in my rss reader), but i wanted to get back on the music openness topic and throw this out there…from nin.com: For 12 months, a core team of dozens of fans and a network of thousands spanning the entire globe pooled their…

  • How not to use Twitter

    I’m done.  Seriously, I’ve had it.  I’m done with the lies and the hype and the spam and the spin doctoring.  I’m done with “twitter methods” that promise thousands of followers and fame and fortune and all they really deliver is spam, affiliate marketing, and zombies – the precise thing they claim to avoid. You…