Results tagged “blogging” from The Daily Nugget

I updated the blog template to have a very simplified html markup and achieve all of the graphic elements using only cascading style sheets and the default movable type style sheet classes. What does this mean in English? The blog is more easily readable using a mobile devices. I got tired of the blog looking like crap on my BlackBerry and having to scroll through all of my tags. Ultimately, the change gives better accessibility for all of the Nug readers!

I added the AdBrite ad service to my site yesterday and inadvertently turned on inline and full page ads. These obnoxious ads should be gone from the site by mid-day today. The only remaining ads should be the right side skyscraper on the front page and the top banner ads in the archive pages that have been there over the last two years. Sorry about that.

Okay, after nearly a month off I have decided to start blogging again. I was a little burnt out at work and needed to take a break from everything, including the Nug. Needless to say, the last three weeks without turning on my laptop have been fantastic and something that I really needed. Also, I finally caught up with all the Amazing Race 12 episodes I had on the TiVo, but will not be writing recaps for each one. I am pretty much done with that since it takes so much time to watch and type out each episode. I'll say one last thing, The Goths totally won me over and I was sad to see them go in last week's episode. For recaps of AR episodes, please read Reality Blurred's Amazing Race pages. They are witty and well written and I am sure you'll enjoy them.

A nice story on how to make money blogging. Step 1: forget about making money blogging.

The final release version of Movable Type 4.0 is now available.

My blogs have gotten 20 legitimate trackback pings in over five years and about 60,000 (no joke, maybe more) spam trackbacks in about the same time. I think it is safe to say that the signal to noise ratio doesn't warrant the CPU time that I am investing in filtering out the spam trackbacks. So until there is a better technological solution the trackbacks are turned off. You hear that you spammer bastards!?

The Daily Nugget is crippled because I started fooling around with the Movable Type 4 Beta without backing up my SQL database first. The website is a little screwed up right now and will remain this way for the next couple of months until MT4 becomes stable.

Zooomr is giving free Pro Accounts to bloggers for one year by following these simple instructions. Above is a picture of my old VW Jetta that I used in order to get things started there. If you have a blog, like to share pictures, and don't already have a flickr account, this may be a great idea. I personally think that I am way too invested with Flickr to make the change. Big ups to Jimmy for sending me the link.

I just completed the upgrade to Movable Type 3.33 and tagged *all* of the entries on the blog. I said I wouldn't do it, but I am glad that I did now. It's interesting to see the types of things I've blogged about over the last four years.

The Daily Nugget now has tagging functionality and is displaying tags for entries that I've tagged since the release of Movable Type 3.3 on July 13th. There's just no way I am going back to tag all of the entries on the website through June 2002. In any case, the "popular tags" cloud can be found on the left sidebar as well as a link to an index of all tags on the blog. This should make it a lot easier to find things. Enjoy and let me know what you all think.

Well, I've just upgraded to Movable Type 3.31 with no major issues except for a few search template changes to accomodate having two separate blogs now, the original and the moblog. Apparently the original blog wouldn't default to the default template after the upgrade to 3.31 and I had to explicitly set one up for the blog. Other than that, it was cool. The new version includes tagging built in, so look for a tag cloud in the future.

Well, I've finally stepped into the "future of web publishing" and setup a moblog on the Nug. I've been ironing out the kinks in the last couple of days and I think it's now ready for prime time. Moblogs have been around in full force since about mid-2000 and the term was officially coined in 2002 when the first moblogging conference was held. The moblog will allow me to document events very quickly using one of my two mobile devices: a Motorola RAZR V3 and a Palm Treo 650.

Technically, what I've created here is combination moblog and photoblog, since I expect that all of my moblog entries will have at least one photo. Hey, a picture says a thousand words and I suck at typing text messages on phones, so there. Please visit the moblog by clicking the photos at the top of the home page and let me know what you think. Enjoy.

In the last couple of months, 1and1.com has been lowering their CPU allocation per user account and overloading their servers. The result, server errors when trying to run Movable Type cgi scripts. It's getting to the point that I can't add a blog entry without seeing an error. Screw these guys, I will be moving over to GoDaddy.com in the next few days. Besides, they are even cheaper.

Technorati founder, David Sifry, has posted his quarterly State of the Blogosphere address. It is chock full of information regarding the growth of the blogosphere over the last three years. Technorati now tracks 35.4 million blogs and the blogosphere is doubling every six months, that's faster than Moore's law! The blogosphere is 60 times bigger than it was just three years ago. Currently a new blog is created every second of every day and 19.4 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created. Check out the post, if only for the cool charts and graphs.

I started The Daily Nugget in June 2002 and if memory serves me correctly there were only about 500,000 blogs at the time. Even back then, people marveled at how fast the blogosphere had grown from just a few thousand blogs in 1998. Blogger was launched by Pyra Labs in late 1999 and helped spark (pun intended, get it pyra and spark) the blogging craze. Movable Type was launched nearly two years later. Movable Type's server-based software is what I use to run The Daily Nugget today.

While I was going to school my posts fell off to about one per week. According to Technorati, only about 3.4 million bloggers currently update their blogs weekly. Based on that figure, I would assume that only 20% of those bloggers update their blogs daily. Either way, whether The Daily Nugget is updated weekly or daily, it is part a rare group of "old school" blogs that are still frequently updated. I would like to thank my readers--all 23 of them--for making it all worthwhile.

In order to weed out comment spam created by spam bots, I know require a passphrase to be typed into each comment form in order to validate the comment. Since almost all spammers use bots, rather than coming to your site to type in the comments themselves, this eliminates all the bot generated spam in the comments. Another new feature is the ability to subscribe to an email notification of new comments for a particular entry. This will allow people to track blog entries much like threads in a community forum.

Check these features out and let me know what you think.

I just registered fabiangonzalez.net and fabiangonzalez.org--now I own the full trifecta. I would like to thank the other Fabians that owned these for being cheap asses and not re-registering their domains. Gracias.

The blogrolling.com website's slow response time, down time, and overall malaise was completely killing my home page load times. Last night, I finally had it with the poor perfomance and decided to start using blo.gs to update and track my blogroll. Adios blogrolling.com, you won't be missed.

As promised, I used part of Christmas Day to create a new style template from the blog borrowed from my friends at the Golden Nugget Casino. Since I am pretty lazy about these things, this will most likely be the template I will use for the next couple of years. Let me know what you think.

The blog style was too bland and I was missing the orange and yellow of this template, so I changed it back. If I do decide to change the blog template again it will have to be to something equally as colorful as this one. I'll see if I get around to doing that during the Christmas break.

The Nug was feeling a little stale, so I changed the blog template to a new style. Some of you may remember that this style was the second runner up to the one that adorned the site for the last year and a half. I think that the black text on white background should make it easier to read--lemme know what you think.

A few days ago, I found a bug in Movable Type 3.2 Beta 2. The Search and Replace function had some serious issues, inserting spaces and creating excerpts into entries. Jay Allen and the engineers at Six Apart were able to track down the bug and correct it in last night's release.

I got mad props on the Movable Type Beta Blog for finding the bug and hopefully saving someone else the trouble of dealing with mangled blog data. Still, I have to thank Jay and the folks at Movable Type for all of their help and support. I can't wait for the final release. Rock on!

The Daily Nugget has been running Movable Type 3.2 Beta for the last couple of days and I must say that it is much better than previous versions. One great new feature is the way that entries are archived and named. It is much more efficient than in the past.

Unfortunately, my choice to use this feature has messed up some older entries where I used relative paths on images posted (i.e. "images/image.jpg" vs. "http://www.dailynugget.com/images/image.jpg"). Since I changed the location of the archives, relative pathing will no longer work. This means that I'll have to go back and manually fix about 76 entries, since the search and replace feature in the Beta does not appear to be working properly. *Sigh*

On the bright side, the administrative interface looks a lot nicer, but only the authors on the Nug will ever get to see it. If anyone has any questions on how the new features work, please let me know. Enjoy.

In case you haven't noticed, the comments board is gone and has been replaced by thumbnail pictures of my photo collection and Jimmy's mobile blog photos on the sidebar. Also gone are the Amazon ads that appeared on the front page. Although the Google ads on the individual blog entry pages will definitely remain. All in all, I think that this is a change for the better. What do you, my six devoted readers, think? Let me know.

My annual subscription to the Zonkboard comments board software expired and I don't want to pay the $10 per year to keep it going. Sadly, I found out that they no longer have a free version of their product. So after three years of service the Zonkboard is gone. As always though, please feel free to leave comments on the blog entries.

Unless you've been living under a rock you've heard about what happened to Mark Jen. Mark was fired from Google after he detailed confidential financial information on his blog. Google asked him to take the offending content down, which he did immediately. Then two days later he was fired from the company. Here's the story, straight from the horse's mouth.

Google is one of my firm's clients and I work at the Googleplex, the Google campus, almost every day. I can tell you that this has sent ripples throughout the company, particularly through those employees which keep their own blogs. The fear of being terminated for accidentally, or deliberately, disclosing confidential information is real--not just at Google. It probably doesn't help that Google does not have an official policy regarding employee blogs and what can or can't be written in them.

A word of advice to bloggers at Google, or elsewhere, don't post any company-specific information that cannot be verified by a public news source. If you do, there may be consequences. Good luck to all.

More news on this fiasco:
Do no evil? - News.com, 1/26/2005
Google blogger has left the building - News.com, 2/8/2005
A chat with Mark Jen - Jeremy Zawodny, 2/9/2005
Google blogger: 'I was terminated' - News.com, 2/11/2005
Have a blog, lose your job? - CNN/Money, 2/14/2005

I finally broke down and put some ads on the site to try and recoup some of the hosting costs. Chances are that I'll only make $2 or $3 a month from the ads, but it's better than nothing. Sad thing is that Google doesn't mail you a check until you've amassed more than $100 in your account. I have a feeling that's gonna take a real long time.

I finally installed the MT-Blacklist plugin to my Movable Type installation. This plugin will automatically delete comment spam and will allow me to return to unregistered and unmoderated comments on the blog. Needless to say, comment spammers can now all pucker up and kiss my ass.

The comment spammers still haven't let up trying to post ads in the comments of the entries on the site. Configuring the site to approve comments just means that I have to sift through tons of comment spam and delete them before they hit the site. I really don't have time for that! So now I've setup comment registration in which users register through Movable Type's free service called TypeKey to post comments on the site. I think that this will be a much better solution to cut down on comment spam--let's see how this works.

Well, I just finished upgrading from Movable Type 3.0D to the current version, Movable Type 3.121. Unfortunately, I kinda goofed and accidentally blew away all blog entries (and their associated comments) from 9/6/2004 through 9/30/2004 and all comments for entries created from 9/30/2004 through this entry.

This is really unfortunate, as this is the first time that I have lost data from the Daily Nugget since its inception over two years ago. The good news is that the new version of Movable Type is a lot more stable even if it doesn't protect me from my own dumb user errors.

Greetings to all! Melissa and I landed last night and are still suffering from a little jetlag. It's a ten hour time difference between San Francisco and Germany and we can definitely feel it. I was wide awake this morning at 3:00AM. Once I am fully recovered from the lag I will be back to regular posts, including the journal and photographs from the trip.

Thanks to Jimmy and Meerenai for keeping things running on the site while I was gone. Sadly though, I just spent about an hour and a half deleting comment spam from the site. The comment spammers had a fucking field day during my absence, but now all comment spam has been removed and the site has been completely rebuilt. Also, and I hate to do it, all comments must now be personally approved by me before they will appear on the site, this should eliminate comment spamming completely. Fuckers!!!

The vacation was great and very much needed. I found out about my promotion to the firm's management team right before leaving and I just found out my salary and bonus for the year. Things are well. Please look for the Europe trip entry after the decompression is over. Oddly, as excited as I was to leave, it's good to be back.

Since Jimmy's posts have been so well received, I thought it would be a great idea to make the Nugget more of a collaborative effort. I've just enlisted Meerenai Shim to join Jimmy and myself in blogging duties and expect to add others in the near future. Please make Meerenai feel welcome.

If you can read this it's because The Daily Nugget has completed its DNS transfer to my new webhost, 1&1 Internet. The best part is that my new webhost is free. Don't believe me, check it out for yourself. It's free for three whole years if you sign up before January 15th--check it.

It's hard to believe that The Daily Nugget is one-year-old today. One year ago, I created the first official blog entry using Blogger, but I quickly switched over to Movable Type as my content management system.

The Nugget has since grown to have its own domain, 399 entries, 290 comments, and is averaging 1500 unique visitors and nearly 7000 page views per month. That's a lot people finding The Nugget on the web, considering that, like Seinfeld, it's a site "about nothing."

Anyway, thank you all who have supported my endeavor and given me words of encouragement regarding this weblog. I hope that the site entertains you and you continue to check out The Daily Nugget.

Ok, so the overwhelming response from the Daily Nugget readers was that the new site layout was too bland and lacked color. Everybody said that the fabiangonzalez.com color scheme was original, vibrant, easier to read, etc. Whine, whine, complain, complain, wah, wah.

So, last night I decided to change the color scheme to one that matches fabiangonzalez.com much more closely. You gotta love the magic of cascading style sheets, it didn't take too long to change the colors.

Coming up with a new title logo was a little more difficult though. I couldn't decide on a font that would capture the feeling of the Nugget. Finally, I decided on a font called Plakatbau, from the Buro Destruct font foundry. You may recognize the font if you are a Radiohead fan, since it was used in their Kid A and Amnesiac albums.

Please enjoy the new site layout and let me know what you think.

What a perfect day to make a fresh start! I am not into numerology, but you can't deny today's date is cool, 03/03/03. The numbers are all prime, it reads the same forwards and backwards--it's deliciously symmetrical!

Anyway, the rumors of the Nugget's demise have been greatly exaggerated. The new and improved Daily Nugget is in a new domain with a new site layout (inspired by the Golden Nugget). Yes, just like a Phoenix from the ashes so has the Daily Nugget risen once more. Ok, I am still a big ass geek. The bottom line is that the Nugget is back!

By the way, if for some reason you are no longer receiving notifications, please let me know. I accidentally thrashed the notification list in the migration to the new hosting provider and I didn't drop you from the list on purpose.

Please be sure to leave me some comments on the new site layout. I am always happy to receive suggestions on improving the site. Thanks.

The new trend in blogging is mobile blogging, or "mobblogging." This is when people update their blogs using a cellphone or a Blackberry mobile device. The next big thing in mobblogging is audioblogging. This is where bloggers call a phone number and leave an audio message that is published to their blogs as an audio file. This may be done in lieu of or beside of a text message. Personally, I like blogging from my laptop--the old fashioned way.

I added a Zonkboard message board to the sidebar of The Daily Nugget that will allow users to post general comments about pretty much anything. Or as my friend J-Nort would say, "Shiznit for the peeps to tho up crazy shizzle on da Internizzle."

This of course is separate from the ability of posting a comment on the actual blog entries. The message board will simply keep the last 25 messages for review and allows users to post some of their own "Internet Graffiti." Check it out (on the right) and post a comment.

I changed the entire site format to allow for a sidebar on the Daily Nugget pages. I essentially moved the site off center by 150 pixels to allow for this extra sidebar which includes additional links and information. In addition, I changed the background colors slightly and the blog entry comments now allow HTML tags due to Larry O'Brien's comments yesterday.

It seems that a desperate blogger, Chris Peneguy (or is it Penisguy), couldn't think up an original thought this morning and decided to loot my blog for content in an insane bout of plagiarism. Check it out here in case he removes the offending entries. He stole my September 9th and 11th entries and posted them today as his own. While I am flattered (and I'm sure he's not the only one), I am also appalled at the lack of ethics that CEO's still possess even after the Enron and Worldcom scandals. Oh yeah, Chris is also the self-proclaimed CEO of his own company, what a surprise. Thanks for proving my point--America's CEO's are still lying scum.

I started having some problems with my blogging software,Blogger, yesterday. So today I started using blogging software by Movable Type. The new software inlcludes a lot of nifty features, including the ability for visitors to join a notification list and also to enter their personal comments on my nuggets--enjoy.

My friend, Mark Asher, gave me grief for not updating the blog, but I've been REALLY busy at work. Anyway, here are a couple of entries to make up for lost time.

Blogger Meet in Eight Days
Just found out that there is an International Blog MEETUP Day scheduled for Thursday, July 18th. I am probably going to be in Temecula at the time but may check it out locally--they are out here too!

Dead at 25 (Rant)
What would cause a successful 25-year-old programming phenom to take his own life?

It may have to do with the fact that many kids, of all nationalities, but specifically Asian kids, are sheltered by their parents so much that they don't develop social skills. As their lives become more stressful (i.e. jobs, bills, etc.) they are also pressured, by these same parents that stunted their social growth, to marry. They are pressured to learn social skills at a time in their lives when most people's social groups and skills are well developed. It's like sending someone to learn to swim in the high seas instead of a swimming pool.

The bottom line, parents should teach and enforce social behavior in kids at an early age or, at minimum, not stunt their children's social development.

"Relationships don't kill people--people with no relationships kill themselves."

After ironing out some technical difficulties, this is my first OFFICIAL entry to my weblog. I've been basically yawning through the NBA Finals series as the Lakers have punished the Nets consistently. The Lakers look like a bunch of high-schoolers that have gone down to the elementary shool playground for laughs. Lakers in four. I bet Shaq and Kobe already picked out the ring design--bling, bling!

My friend Santiago is back from Europe after having hit London, Amsterdam, Paris, Nice, Florence, and Rome. We watched Mike Tyson get rocked by Lennox Lewis on Saturday night. Mike was totally gracious in defeat--was he on Zoloft during the fight? There was no outbursts, no cursing, no biting--nothing. He got his ass kicked and he knew it. If he's dumb enough to blow $500 million--he deserves the discomfort.