Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

The Renaissance Revisited
September 24, 2006

Berta in Renaissance attireOn Saturday, we took the kids, Mary Ann (Berta’s sister), and Ryan (her husband) to the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire in Mount Hope.

We used to go every year, but it seemed like we were seeing the same show every time, so we haven’t gone over the past few years. They have since added many new things, and have chagned the show a bit. But I think they may have started to give in to the commercialism of it a bit more than what it used to be all about.

For the uninitiated, the Faire is basically a 20-acre area that has all sorts of recreation from the era of the Renaissance. Everyone there dresses in period clothing and speaks with an accent. The actors are all quite friendly and usually try to immerse you in their fantasy. One of the best things about the Faire is that it’s not just something you go watch, it’s something to take part in.

But it seems things have changed a bit. Maybe it’s just from my perspective, but it seems like a lot more people come to the faire and expect to be entertained rather than participate in the fun. It also seems that people spend a lot more time eating and shopping than they do at the actual attractions. This is not so surprising, since the joust this year was pretty weak, too.

Help Defeat the Sploggers with AntiLeech
September 22, 2006

I had an online conversation yesterday with an acquaintence of mine. She was alarmed to have found that her entire site’s content had been republished by some other site!

Apparently, their site had been sucking on her site’s RSS file for quite some time, and managed to download a sizeable chunk of data, which they subsequently republished with their own ads strewn about. And she’s not the only one by a long shot.

If you’re not aware of this phenomenon, it’s generally referred to as “Splogging”, for “spam blogging”. The idea is usually to re-blog content form other people’s blogs to gain emphasis on their popular terms for your splog site.

For example, if I wanted my site to be a popular search result for “student loans”, first I would install a blog on my server. I would then use some software to aggregate, say, the Technorati feed for posts tagged with “student loans”, which gives me a rich bed of content to start populating my site. Using some some dodgy plugins sold by less-than-respectable authors, I can even have WordPress do all of this work for me.

Then, I sprinkle a few links onto the splog that point to my money-making page, and voila! Instant PageRank!

The bottom line for bloggers is that your popular content will be stolen and used to fuel a link farm that profits someone else. How nice. So what do you do to combat it? I have a suggestion or two.

Nextel Beeping Madness
September 21, 2006

Can you go anywhere these days without hearing that fripping “beedeep!” that those Nextel phones make?

Back while Berta was pregnant with Abby in 2001, we were deeply concerned that she would be out somewhere when “the time” came, and rather than deal with the tedious details of dialing numbers, we found the one-touch instant-connect feature of the phone very appealing. This is the feature that makes that distinctive “beedeep!” sound.

Planet WordPress and the Dashboard Feeds
September 21, 2006

There are a bunch of folks who don’t get it or don’t like it, so I figured I would take the time to explain Planet WordPress to the extent that I can, since it seems that I’m the one that usually causes the most problems with duplicated feed items, etc.

Planet WordPress is a site that aggregates feeds from a number of users who have contributed to the WordPress Open Source project, or who provide good sources of information on WordPress, its themes, or its plugins. Planet WordPress produces a feed that is displayed in the Dashboard of most WordPress installations.

Is This a Job?
September 20, 2006

I signed up for a Monster account a long while ago, and my email address escaped into the ether where it’s impossible to get your address removed from these mailing lists.

I recently received the following email looking looking to fill a new position. See what you think: