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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I’ve probably said this before, but blogging is a strange business. Running any web site is, really. When I was in the pizza delivery business, sales traffic was pretty straightforward. We’d open at 3pm, and it’d be slow until the supper rush started about 5, and then it’d be slow and steady through prime-time, then die until a flurry when the bars all closed. On weekends, there’d be more sales throughout the evening and from the hotels. On Sunday evenings when the college cafeterias were closed, the store on the campus side of town would get hammered. If we put out coupons for something in particular, we’d sell more of that. And so on. It was all pretty predictable. Read more »

I wonder if I could make this fit on the back of my business cards…. (Click on it to see the original full-sized at XKCD.)

Image from XKCD.com

When a foot doctor goes to his family reunion, he probably gets asked to diagnose someone’s scalp condition; and I always ask my tire expert brother-in-law about mechanical issues, figuring he’s more likely to have run into them before than I have.  So I suppose it’s only fair that “computer experts” get the same thing.  But if you ask me to fix your PC or diagnose a Windows error, be warned that I’ll be doing exactly what this flowchart says, while trying to look like I know what I’m doing.

(Despite the title, this is a technical screed, not a religious one.  You have been warned.)

I started using FreeBSD about ten years ago.  A new client had it on his web servers, and I was impressed enough by it to start running it on my own machines, including my desktop.  In the late 1990s, the various Linux distributions were like fraternities making floats for a Homecoming parade: they turned out some impressive work, but you had to put up with a lot of drunken brawling to get there.  I bounced from one Linux distro to another, never really satisfied with any of them.  The BSD community seemed more mature (I saw a poll once that said FreeBSD developers were ten years older on average than Linux developers)  and it showed in the software.  I liked the stability of the software and the release process and the way it was all designed.  It just seemed like the free Unix operating system (OS) for grown-ups.

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