 I'm getting fed up with Blogger's constant technical failures when it comes to FTP blogs, and their complete inaction on fixing the reoccurring problems. FTP blogs are blogs that are hosted on any website other than Blogger's blogspot.com domain. I'm an FTP blogger because my blog is hosted on my own personal servers (at mikesussman.com). Blogger (owned by Google) is constantly having problems with FTP blogs and they're snail-like in responding to issues that affect thousands of their most dedicated bloggers. Last week I was unable to post to my blog for several days, and yesterday I was unable to upload any images, which is a common problem. And the part that bugs me most is hundreds of bloggers posting about these problems on the official blogger help group and being completely ignored by Blogger with no responses for days. I've been loyal to Blogger since January 2001 but I'm tired of these reoccurring problems. I need to look into other alternatives. One is to move my blog to blogspot.com and either recreate my navigation to mimic the look of my website (it wil be difficult to get those pulldown menus to work on Google's servers) or to embed my blog within the rest of my website via a cheesy iframe (yuck). Another option is to completely ditch Blogger all together and install WordPress on my server. It would be a piece of cake to set up (auto-install) and they have a feature to import Blogger blogs. The downsides of that option would be learning a new system, re-customizing the look again, and being responsible for technical maintenance and upkeep - but maybe that last part is worth the extra effort. Labels: blogging, rant
As I just logged in to Blogger, I noticed that my last post was #300. Woo hoo. Labels: blogging
I haven't written anything in my blog since vacation, but I've been jotting down notes on subjects I want to talk about when I get a chance. That chance isn't right now but I'm warning that a small avalanche of trivial posts will soon be comin' all at once. Labels: blogging
I hope this is just temporary situation but I'm just finding it hard to find the time to post to my blog lately - basically since starting my new job. I didn't used to blog during work hours at my previous job so that's not the issue. It's that I'm rather disconnected from news and information from outside of work during the day now. So when I would normally have time to blog at night after the kids are asleep, now I'm just catching up with the latest happenings at that time, and by that time I'm usually too tired to blog my rambling thoughts. (P.S. - Despite my statement about being disconnected during the day, I am enjoying the fact that I can now usually get home in time to see the national news (NBC).) Now I swear I'm going to stop talking about work all the time and start blogging about other stuff (like family), but I do have a few interesting work related tid bits to report today. Yesterday I went out to shoot my own video for the first time since 1998! At first I was nervous about being out of practice but it was just like riding a bike and everything went fine. But my story is that I went out again today to cover a press conference and in just my second trip out, I ran into three different ex-colleagues. One I knew worked for CMS, another I knew but wasn't aware that she worked for CMS now, and the third was a channel 9 photog whom I never knew before because I didn't work in the News department, but we talked shop a while before the presser got started. Anyway, it didn't take long at all to start running into people I've worked with in the past. My other little story is that my new co-workers found out that I play disc golf, and that I always keep my disc bag in my car. So after work was over, a couple of us headed outside on to the football field (we're located at an old school) and had an impromptu disc golf competition, which was a fun ending to the day. Labels: blogging, work
Last night I was reading an article on LifeHacker which was recommending a free webcam software called Yawcam. This is the exact same webcam software that I discovered earlier this year and which I used to run BoomerCam. A few months ago we moved some furniture around so Boomer no longer has a "perch" in front of the window anymore, but the camera has remained in operation, just pointing basically nothing. Since I've been using the Yawcam for a while, and I could recommend it to others, and provide an example of the software in action... I decided to post a comment to the article (the first comment) and I included a link to BoomerCam (along with a disclaimer that Boomer wouldn't actually be seen).  LifeHacker is among the most popular blogs on the entire internet, garnering over 500,000 visitors every day from all over the world. In less than a minute I heard a little beep sound that tells me when somebody is viewing the webcam. And then another. And another. Realizing that this was just the beginning of a massive wave of coming BoomerCam visitors, I decided to give the viewers what they really wanted. I quickly cleared off the table which the webcam was pointing to and threw Boomer's pillow on top. I then got Boomer and put him up on top. He was confused at first (and Hobo was jealous) but pretty soon he just laid down and went back to sleep. Every time I heard another beep I would reach into the shot and wave, which was quite often. According to comments on the LifeHacker article and on my original BoomerCam blog post, people seem to like me waving to them. I later added a "Boomer is dreaming of LifeHacker" thought bubble to the shot. The beeps kept coming. At times it was as often as every few seconds. And it just kept continuing all night long, well past when I went to sleep. My computer was still beeping constantly when I woke up this morning. Since we couldn't keep Boomer up there all day we eventually replaced him with a jack-o-lantern. And I'm now writing this blog post over 24 hours later and it's still going, and going, and going like the energizer bunny. On a normal day my website gets about 100 visitors, viewing about 200 pages. In just the past 24 hours since I posted my comment on LifeHacker, over 800 visitors have visited my website and viewed over 1,400 pages... and still counting. Even though I get nothing out of this spike in traffic, it's pretty cool to see so many people visit. Labels: blogging, dogs, internet
 Dear "any website visitors who subscribe to my blog's RSS or Atom Feeds, including anybody who may have added my blog feeds as a widget to your iGoogle or MyYahoo homepage", Sorry for the trouble, but can you please unsubscribe from that old blog feed and replace it with my new blog feed? 1) Unsubscribe (remove) my old blog feed 2) Click on one of these links subscribe to (add) my new blog feed  RSS/Atom Blog Feed   The old RSS and Atom Feeds (yes, two different feeds) were hosted on my server, and technically they still are, but for many reasons not worth mentioning I've decided it would be better to utilize FeedBurner instead. I've actually been using FeedBurner to resyndicate for years but never as the primary source feed. Thanks for the help. Of course, anybody else who didn't previously subscribe to my blog feed before is encouraged to click one of the links above too to add my blog to your newsreader or homepage. If you use iGoogle or MyYahoo as a customized homepage, you can add my blog as a widget and it will automatically update whenever I post something new. That way you don't have to keep checking here to manually see if I wrote something new. I'm looking at you, Amy. Labels: blogging
A little over 24 hours ago I blogged about making the family into characters from The Simpsons. Then our friend since high school, Dee, prompted me to make a version of her from the late 80's. Then I read on Chris Rooney's blog that he liked what I did and duplicated my process of Simpsonizing himself and Photoshopping it into a real photo. (His is hilarious because unlike my beach shot, you can totally buy the visual perspective of his home office background.) Then the domino effect continued as one of Chris' regular blog readers was inspired to copy what Chris had done and post it on his blog.It's like Six Degrees of Separation. Where will the chain end? Ya gotta love the power of blogging to help people around the world all waste their time in the same stupid ways. Labels: blogging, funny
One of my favorite blogs is Lost Remote, which focuses on emerging trends within the television industry. Unlike typical industry oriented publications, it's not all stuffy business reports. Lost Remote is brief but well written, current, insightful, and often witty commentary about upcoming technologies and other factors that are shaping the television industry. So there's my praise for Lost Remote. Now I'll add pay a special tribute by stating that Managing Editor Steve Safran is the Laziest Man in America. Labels: blogging, television
Just a quick note for those who may utilize my atom feed to read my blog, perhaps in a newsreader. Since I was just recently switched over to "new blogger" there are some things I need to fix up. In the next few days I'm going to go through all my old posts and add blogger labels to them. These will replace the del.icio.us trick I used to get 'categories'. In any case, the way Blogger's feeds work, posts are ordered by the last time they were updated rather than the date of the original post. So for the next few days people using my atom feed will see old posts from years ago appearing as if they were brand new. This includes the blog widget at the bottom of my homepage and other sites which aggregate my blog feed. So no, I didn't just buy another house, I didn't just win another award, we didn't just get another new dog, and I didn't just get another role in a movie. Sorry to disappoint, but it's just me doing blog maintenance. People who just read this on the regular blog section of my site won't notice anything. Update 4/27/07: It took me the past two days but I finally finished fixing all of my old posts. Everything should hopefully be back to normal now. Update 5/10/07: Sorry, I had to fix a couple of dozen posts again. Apparently it's okay to use multiple words on a blogspot blog but it causes problems if you have an FTP blog like mine. I should be done for real this time. Labels: blogging
 After months of waiting, Google/Blogger has finally allowed my account to be migrated to "New Blogger". I'll have to test out all of these new featues. Since I FTP-publish my blog to my own domain (instead of the far more common practice of using blogspot.com for hosting) some of these new features may be unavailable to me. Updates: - Uploading posts from Blogger to my servers seems to be a lot faster now.
- Labels work (see below) but I'll need to use a 3rd-party script to get a labels list in the sidebar. I'm currently using del.icio.us to do this same thing but it would be better to use Blogger's label function because it will display all the posts with that label, in their entirely, rather than just showing a list of post titles only.
- I was hoping that uploaded images would be hosted by Google's Picasa like it does for blogspot Bloggers, but I'll still need to host my own uploaded images.
- That cool dynamic hierarchical archives list that blogspot Bloggers get to use appears to becompletely unavailable to me. My current Archive list will still work fine but since my Archives list is so long already, it would've been nice to be able to collapse previous years, and also to have the number of posts displayed next to each month.
Labels: blogging
I visited The Internet Archive a few days ago. The Internet Archive is an amazing internet resource which "was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format." In other words, it takes periodic "snapshots" of millions of websites and stores them online for historical preservation. It's pretty cool. Want to go back in time and see... In any case, I can't even remember why I was visiting the Internet Archive in the first place but I plugged my own website into The Wayback Machine. Other than laughing at how horrible my site used to look, I discovered that IA had historically preserved most of my blog posts from 2001 and 2002. Of course this is only important to me, but that's exactly what it's here for. I gathered up more than 50 old blog posts, and I've now re-posted most of them again! (Some weren't worth recovering). Check out my recovered archives: Reading my old posts seems to reveal something about the me I was six years ago. Style wise, I apparently never gave any of my original blog posts any titles (but I gave them all titles when I re-posted them), and for some reason I rarely wrote more than a sentence or two. Have I simply just become long-winded? Seems so. I blogged a lot about tv awards, baseball, and fantasy sports. I blogged a lot about playing softball (I managed my own team) and several times about purchasing our first new home. On my fourth anniversary we said we were planning a trip to Las Vegas or Mexico for our 5th. It's sad to see that after 10 years we still haven't done that. I find it interesting that I never blogged anything about the September 11th attacks but I don't think I was consciously avoiding the subject. Other interesting posts include Maegan breaking her collar bone, wild speculation about a mysterious revolutionary transportation device, me becoming an uncle for the first time, and best of all... the swarm of killer bees. Thanks Internet Archive. Labels: blogging, internet
This is just a quick test. I'm sending this message as an email. If it works it should post to my blog automatically. And since I have no other story to tell right now, this is the perfect opportunity for me to say... "Hello, Dee!" Labels: blogging
 There is a fascinating story developing in Albany, New York. In 2004 a blog called Albany Eye began covering the world of local news media in Albany. It was well written and often highly critical of the local television, radio, and newspaper outlets. The website became extremely popular, winning several awards as the best local blog in the Capital Region. [link] [link]But Albany Eye was also controversial and a mystery. The blog made disparaging remarks and harsh criticism of the local news media but was written anonymously. So who was the secret Albany Eye? With great insight into the workings of local newsrooms, speculation strongly suggested that blogger behind Albany Eye must be an insider, somebody working within the media itself. Taking pot shots at your competition behind a veil of anonymity is bad enough, but since Albany Eye attacked all Albany news organizations, he/she would also be guilty of treason for sabotaging his/her own employer. Then this past December Albany Eye slipped up. The unknown mystery blogger accidentally posted a big exclusive news story that WNYT-TV (the local NBC affiliate) was working on for their noon newscast hours before the segment actually aired. Not only was it now obvious that the blogger must be an employee of WNYT-TV, but only a limited number of people had access to some of the specific details found in the Albany Eye blog post so the list of suspects were quickly narrowed to just a few. Even the Times Union (the local newspaper) began investigating and it didn't take long for until they caught the individual responsible for leaking the exclusive story, not to mention the years of previous attacks on the local media. The name hasn't been made public and it's not essential to this story. The station forced him/her to shut down their popular blog immediately. But where one mystery ends, a new twist brings a new mystery to this story. Since the Albany Eye terminated his blog at Blogspot.com, somebody else immediately swooped in to snatch up the recently vacated popular website address. Now the Albany Eye blog is back up and running again. It's got the same name, same look, and same harsh commentary on the Albany media scene - but now a new mystery blogger in charge of it. So now who's the new Albany Eye? Read more about this subject at timesunion.com.
Update: It's now later the same day that I posted this and already a new interesting twist that just happened moments ago. The old Albany Eye has replaced the new Albany Eye. Aside from a different bio section and distinctly different writing style, the new AE which appeared about a week ago was technically a brand new blog posing as the original blog. As such it had lost all of it's previous post in the archives from before he/she was caught on December 15th 2006. As of a few minutes ago the original AE blog is now back again, along with years worth of old posts in the archives. The second to last post is the notorious December 15th goof where he/she prematurely posted an exclusive photo of Trey Anastasio's arrest. The last post on January 5th says, "Thanks! A million thanks to everyone who supported Albany Eye since 2004. We will be away until further notice." So, what, is he/she back again just to quit again? WTF? Labels: blogging
 Blogger (owned by Google) is making everybody move all of their accounts to a new "improved" system using Google accounts. The migration has caused a lot of problems for other bloggers and I've been avoiding this move for months. But time is running out and I have to take the plunge now, risking the complete loss of multiple blogs. I backed up my files to be safe (not knowing if that would ever actually help me) and began the migration process. Then came this error message:
Could not switch you to the new Blogger
Thanks for your interest in the new Blogger in beta. An error has occurred that has prevented us from switching your account at this time.
Well I haven't actually lost everything yet but all Bloggers must migrate soon but I can't. And what's worse is that every time I retry this migration process I risk losing my blogs again and again. And it's not like this error message gives me any clue as to what the problem may actually be. I sense further frustrations ahead. If you don't see a new post from me for a while this mandatory "upgrade" may be the reason why. Wish me luck. Update: I wasn't able to update the new blogger until April 19th of 2007. Labels: blogging
For those who are not internet savvy, no, I did not spell the word delicious wrong. del.icio.us is an extrememly popular social bookmarking website. Like other social-networking trends that are popular among teenagers (like myspace.com), I just didn't care about it at all. However I found an awesome blogging trick that allows me to organize my posts by categories (also known as tags). Since I use Firefox and I already installed an extension called Greasemonkey, all I needed was the third ingredient of a del.icio.us account to add categories to my blog. What's great about categories/tags is that it allows you to easily find related posts that may interest you but which aren't listed anymore because they're older. At the bottom of this post you'll see that I added the category tags of "blogging", "Internet", and "Webmaster" to this post. Clicking on any of these links will send you to a page which lists every other related post with similar category tags. Plus you'll now see a cool category list in the right sidebar of my blog. Wow I blog about Maegan a lot. P.S. I find it interesting that del.icio.us is actually the domain name of "icio dot U-S" (like this domain name is "mikesussman dot com"). Then they simply made a prefix directory called "del" (like you often add the usually unnecessary prefix of "www" to other websites). It's amazing that this creative mistreatment of the domain naming system ever caught on. Although it seems that enough people didn't "get it" because they needed to also buy the more traditional website address of delicious.com which forwards you to del.icio.us. Labels: blogging, internet, webmaster
"So you recently started blogging?" Nope. I actually started blogging a long time ago, long before anybody ever heard the word blog and certainly before it became popular. My blogger profile says I started in January of 2001 so I've been doing this for five and a half years already. To put this in perspective, I was blogger number 129,287. Over 26 million bloggers have signed up after me, putting me in the top 0.4% of the earliest bloggers in the world. Can you say trailblazer? The reason nobody knew I had any blogs (yes plural) is because I haven't been using them in the conventional manner. The Maegan Says section of this website is actually a blog, and I have other blogs which aren't even listed. I've had a News section on my homepage for several years where I occasionally post about things that are going on with Patty, Maegan, or myself. Rather than upgrading that script, I simply decided to replace it with this blog instead. Now in addition to the occasional news update, you will finally be able to read my trivial ramblings on whatever boring subjects I feel like writing about. Hallelujah. Labels: blogging
Once in a while I stop in to let everyone know I'm still here. Earlier this month we all went to Florida. It was great. Lately I've been working on my newest website, The Dugout. Also, softball season begins next week. I'm sure other stuff is going on but I can't think of it right now. I promise that after I revise my website this summer, it'll get updated more regularly. * The blog entry above was originally posted in March of 2002, but was just re-posted from backup files in 2007. Despite the promise above to regularly update the website, this is apparently the last time I posted to my blog until 15 months later.Labels: blogging, Florida, vacation, webmaster
I found a copy of my very first blog entry ever while looking through some files on my hard drive. For historic preservation I am reposting it below and syncing this post to the exact day and time of the original. Well here goes my first blog. Blog is short for "web log". I read about blogs in US News & World Report and figured that would be a good addition to our website. As defined in the article, "a blog is a frequently updated Web page consisting of brief, dated entries, with new ones pushing the old to the bottom of the page. Most catalog the author's chronological musings and are often a mix of personal journal entries and links to whatever caught the blogger's fancy." I doubt I'll post entires every day, but it should be a good way of keeping up with what Patty, Maegan, and I are up to. Labels: blogging
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I'm getting fed up with Blogger's constant technical failures when it comes to FTP blogs, and their complete inaction on fixing the reoccurring problems.
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