This Old Blog

This blog is now ten years old. A full decade. The first post has an official date of 8 May 2005, but I know that it's actually earlier than that. That's because when I first got into this blogging thing with Blogger, I was fooling around with some of the Blogger settings and managed to wipe out the original blog along with about a half dozen posts. Fortunately for me I still had all that content in a cache and thus reposted it all a second time. So when folks ask how old This Old Blog is (a.k.a. BlogBeebe) I just say a decade and then move on. Some folks, like Kirk Tuck, look at a lot of posts over a long period of time and announce that they're trimming the posts back a bit because they're old and as a consequence they're a burden on moving forward. I look at This Old Blog as a living historical document that shows my attitudes and the times they were shaped in over the last 10 or so years. Are some (many to be honest) of them embarrassing? Obsolete? Sure. Bu...

Not sure why, but a few a-hole sites out of Russia decided to ping my original post about referrer spam. So I removed the original post from back in late November 2013, right before I stopped posting to this blog for a good long year in 2014. I've waited about a week to see if the numbers would drop, and sure enough they did. A lot. Now that they're gone I decided to put it back up, more or less, with updates. And while I'm at it I decided to freshen up the content a bit, with a Youtube clip from where the lead photo came from. Referrer Spam What Is It? Referrer spam (also known as log spam or referrer bombing) is a kind of spamdexing (spamming aimed at search engines). The technique involves making repeated web site requests using a fake referer URL to the site the spammer wishes to advertise. Sites that publish their access logs, including referer statistics, will then inadvertently link back to the spammer's site. These links will be indexed by search engi...

I had to change the theme of my blog because the prior Blogger theme, named Dynamic Views, heavily dependent upon HTLM5, Javascript, and CSS, was failing to properly load all the time, especially with ... the latest version of Chrome. That's right, the latest version of Chrome wouldn't properly render Blogger's most sophisticated blog theme at all, or at least, not on any of my versions of Chrome. And I'm talking about Chrome running on Windows 8 and several Linux distributions. I don't know what was up with that, but when one part of Google (the part in charge of Blogger) isn't paying attention what another part of Google is doing (the part in charge of Chrome), such that one (Blogger) can't work properly with the other (Chrome), then it's time to make some changes on my end. Such as picking a less web-technology-challenging (read: buggy) blog theme. I remember when I picked Dynamic Views. It was cool and had all sorts of cool effects. It was too ...

You're looking at a screenshot from my Nexus 7, Google's 7" reference Android tablet. It's a screenshot of my blog with the tablet in its default portrait orientation. I changed my blog's default layout from 'magazine' to 'classic' because 'classic' displays best on the tablet. In magazine mode the blog crammed everything onto the page, regardless of its orientation. It made it very difficult to read and navagate. If you selected a story, it made it very hard to scroll up the story. If I may borrow a phrase and mangle it a bit, magazine layout is very finger unfriendly, while classic isn't. This layout also has the added benefit of showing the blog's navigation bar off to the right. There's just a smidge of irony in this selection of classic, as it was never originally designed for touch in mind, but for an earlier time on the web when simplicity was held in higher regard. I changed up the color a bit from tan to green. It...

Yeah, I changed the blog template yet again. In the period of about a week. First it was stuck on this blue template for years. I don't remember what it was called. Then one day, I got a wild hair ('cause that's about all that's left on my thinning scalp) and switched the blog over to Dynamic Views. I thought I liked it. It was full of tricks that only Google Gears and HTML5 could provide, cross-browser tricks like expanding panels on top of the main blog, or special compositions like 'magazine', which I actually liked. But after a few days of living with it I came to become truly annoyed with its behaviors, especially on portable devices such as my Android-powered phone (Gingerbread 2.3.4) and my Android-powered tables (ICS 4.0.3). Dynamic Views might look just dandy on a regular browser with a classic OS underneath, but on a portable device such as a tablet it was slow, sloppy mess. Which I found rather amusing, considering all of this came from Google....

A Series of Tubes After writing about my Twitter encounter earlier in the day with Wil Wheaton I sat back and waited with morbid interest to see if web traffic would increase. Sure enough it did, but in a way that's baffling and a little bit concerning. I use Google statistics to track site hits. Most of the time the statistics make sense. For example, several of my posts about the Olympus E-P2 and E-P3 generated quite a few hits. But there are times when I look at the statistics Google is generating and they make absolutely no sense at all. Today was one of those head-scratching events. I've been writing in this blog since May 2005, and at this point it has over 1,000 posts (1,056 including this posting). The subjects range all over the place. And its popularity has varied widely over time. I know, for example, that during 2007 and 2008, when I was writing pretty extensively about Linux, my site was in the hundred thousands as far as popularity was concerned. It's s...

I don't normally keep track of such things, but it looks like I've lost two followers in as many days. I hit the all-time high of 23, and now I'm down to 21. I don't know who left or why, but I won't loose any sleep over it. For those who stick around, thanks. For those who leave, good luck.

Minor tweaks to the blog. The number of stories listed has been cut form five to four because of all the photos I like to lard up the entries with. If the page is still too heavy, I'll cut down the number of entries to three. Added a little set of check boxes at the bottom labeled "Reactions". There are three; funny, interesting, and cool. Maybe I should add one  labeled 'sucks'. The top ten monthly entry list on the side was removed. I've been getting some odd page view numbers lately, so I wanted to remove that and see if the numbers shift. And there's a search box for the blog powered by Google. Since hitting 822 entries with this post I decided to add a search capability rather than depending explicitly on the category cloud. Carry on.

Normally you're supposed to finish a book before you write a review of it. Well, I've just started to read Mira Grant 's (a.k.a. Seanan McGuire ) "Feed", and I'm only up to chapter 4. It's a zombie book. I hate zombie books. Well, maybe hate is too strong a word. More like I try to avoid them. As I said I avoid zombie novels. It's fairly trivial to do so; I spot books with dark colored covers combined with garishly drawn zombies and/or zombie killer illustrations, and just automatically steer clear of them. But "Feed" is different. "Feed"'s cover is a dirty white, with the RSS feed symbol at the top, drawn in blood (well, printed to look like it's drawn in blood). That's what caught my attention, and then kept it. It didn't come across as your typical zombie book. The front cover alone got me curious enough to pick up the book and start reading the back cover. There wasn't much information there, and I would ...

I had to go into Blogger settings (Settings | Comments) and disable (Hide) back links. I got up this morning and went to check certain articles in my blog, and as I scrolled down to the bottom I noticed odd back links to stories that had no contextual link to the posts. Turned out that all of them pointed to a 'blog' somewhere in China that looked to be built from ripped-off content from other blogs. I started to remove them, one by one, until I hit one of my posts that had over a dozen of them. That's when I went into Settings and just disabled the feature. It's a real shame, too, because there are actually some good back links worth preserving. But the overwhelming majority seemed to be spam links to other bogus sites, so I just disabled the entire feature. And as usual, Google shows I'm not the only one: Another Layer of Blog Spam: Backlinks . There are others, you can find them all yourself. But this guys comment at the end of his post gets to the point: retain ...

I wanted a category cloud like those I've seen on other blogs and other sites. The new Blogger has a category listing feature, but nothing like a category cloud. Well, Google is your friend, so I went googling for 'blogger category cloud' and sure enough the first page contained a link to phydeaux3 and the provocative entry " Setup and configuration for New Blogger Tag Cloud / Label Cloud ." Read phydeaux3's blog entry through first, then follow the directions, primarily cutting and pasting. The only thing I did was to change the title from 'Label Cloud' to 'Category Cloud', but that was it. Oh. One little gotcha about this interesting hack. If you go back in and edit in HTML mode then all the code in the Labels widget gets wiped out. If you edit the widget (change the title with the Blogger tool) the internal code gets wiped out. All the other code snippets hang around. Just look to the right to see the results.

I had the Digg widget off to the right, displaying the top 10 stories about Linux. It was good for a few days until I noticed that blog page rendering slowed down significantly while waiting for the Digg widget to finish loading. I've removed it and now the page is rendering faster again. I may turn off more widgets to get back more performance.