It’s not good when you wake up in the morning after a bad storm and discover that your computer won’t boot up. But it’s really bad when you find that the other computer won’t boot either, and then when you pull your 10-year-old third-string backup system out of the garage so you can get online with a text-only browser and at least get some troubleshooting documentation, you realize your router and cable modem are both dead to the world. That was my Saturday morning. Read more »

Thought I’d share this, since it reminds me of my attitude in school.  Only problem is: in the real world, sometimes you can’t finish every assignment on the bus on the morning of the day it’s due, so it’s a bad habit to develop.

JQLife

I mentioned a couple weeks ago that since getting the hang of CSS and discovering jQuery (a Javascript framework that’s a huge improvement on a language that feels like it was created by government committee) I was starting to enjoy web programming again.  Several nights ago, I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to work on something new.   In about three hours, I threw together a little game based on something I played once on the Commodore 64, and got it functioning. Read more »

Sitting tends to be hard on my back, and I do a lot of it since I work at a keyboard.  So I’ve been interested in alternative ways to work for a while.  I looked into those kneeling chairs where you sort of half kneel and half sit, but people who tried them said they felt good at first but eventually just transferred the pain to other places.  The chairs where you sit on a beach ball sounded the same way.  The only way to try either of those long enough to really test it is to buy one, and then you’re stuck with it. Read more »

Unlike a lot of the people of my generation who got into computers and programming, I didn’t grow up with one.  Home computers were still kind of an oddity then, and the price tags made them seem about as accessible to me as having my own jet plane.  So my first programming experiences were fairly short and pointless: some character graphics stuff on Apple systems at College for Kids at QU; fiddling with Pascal on a visit to Purdue when I was 16; and finally some real Z-80 programming on the Sanyo CP/M machines we got at St. Thomas in my senior year.  Computer class focused on word processing in Wordstar and saving our work to disk, but somewhere I managed to run down some info on the Z-80s registers and assembly language, and did some simple programming like a tic-tac-toe game.  I even remember programming on paper, writing out the lists of instructions that I’d type in later when I got access to the systems again. Read more »

One question I get asked a lot is, “How do I start a web site?” or, “What’s it take to get a web site?”  Which is the kind of question that I have to answer with more questions, after first saying, “Well, it depends.”  It depends on what you’re going to do with it, whether you plan to sell stuff on it, how much traffic you expect it to get, and so on.  In some cases, you might even be better off getting a blog at Blogger or an Ebay store and not having your own web site at all.  So it really does depend.

But in general, if someone wants to start a web site, there are a series of steps that every new site owner will need to go through.  We’re dedicated to the idea of helping people do as much of their own website work as possible, so I’ve written up a how-to that covers those steps in some detail and posted it on our webmaster site (see the link earlier).  I hope people find it useful.

One thing that’s kept me from diving into the social networking systems like Twitter and Facebook is their ephemeral nature.  Twitter saves posts for maybe two weeks, and that time frame is getting shorter as the service gets busier.  I don’t know how long Facebook saves things, but I don’t think there’s any easy way to search back through them anyway. Read more »

This week I tried something new that I’ve been meaning to for a while: online affiliate marketing.  The idea is that you find a product that’s being sold online that offers an affiliate fee, and market it yourself, taking a cut from each sale that comes through you. Read more »

Something that bums me out about blogging (and makes it easy to blow off) is the lack of real conversations.  On Usenet, you can pick a group like rec.games.bridge and find a bunch of conversations (threads) going on.  Any decent newsreader will show each thread in a tree form, so you can see who’s responding to whom, and follow the conversation logically.  You can jump in and respond at any point, and when you come back later, your own posts and any responses to them will be threaded right along with the rest.  If you’re using a good newsreader, you can even have it display direct responses to you at the top, and then other responses in threads you’ve posted in below that, and so on, so you can see the stuff you’re interested in first.  Web forums have some of these features, though I haven’t seen one yet that has all of them. Read more »

I finally moved my blog a few days ago, and I checked it seven different ways to make sure everything was working and links from the old site would redirect to the new one—but I forgot to check the old home page, which stayed broken.  Hope it didn’t drive away too many new visitors!

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