Too busy to post?

Yeah, the big move, the new job, the househunting... And a new blog, of course. All have taking up a lot of my time - and taken me away from being able to post here.

And I have great new stories to tell you, too: hotel electronic key cards, my wife's GPS navigation system, my hand-held GPS, my new work technology.... But I'm going to have to put this blog on hold for now until things settle down I think. Same goes with my website, which needs updating in a serious way since the job and residency changes....

Could this be the way it begins? I get to "busy" to do about this stuff? Now, in ten years, will I realize I've been too busy for so long that I'm out of the loop? Maybe I've reached my adult-life tipping point...

Tracking visitors and blog hits: Feedburner and Google Analytics

With nearly 50 posts on my blog, I got to wondering if anyone was actually looking at it. Not that that is the point - the point is simply to get into the practice of using Web 2.0 applications and, like the subtitle says, "keep up with new technology and the evolving web." But still, it'd be interesting to know, right? And, investigating how to do it is a learning experience in itself.

After a bit of searching around, I put my blog into Feedburner (another Google aquisition). While I was at it, I also added a bit of HTML code to my www.ericbolstridge.com pages so they can be tracked by Google Analytics. My GoDaddy hosting already supplies decent tracking and report stats, so I don't know how useful that will be, but I signed up for it anyway to see if it would provide any additional information.

Since registering with Feedburner, by the way, my Blog has one hit (and I think that was me).

More Skype

So I've installed Skype on my PC here at work and it's working like a charm. Trouble is, I can't run my webcam on ericbolstridge.com at the same time as I'm doing video chat with Skype. You'd think that software would be smart enough to split the signal or whatever. So, I think this will create a problem of some sort, since I will be using the webcam more for Skype now and the website won't have a feed. I think I might change the "webcam" page of ericbolstridge.com to a simple invitation for folks to call me on Skype... but that's not really the same as the anonymous looking that a webcam allows...

Anyway, Skype works great, and I even got a microphone working, too. So now I can video chat with my friend down the hall (who is in reality so close I could simply shout, but that's not the point!).

My wife also downloaded Skype and installed it on our home PC. Her webcam is working, too, so now we can see each other with a much much better frame rate then we could using Yahoo! Messenger. I need to get a microphone hooked up at home, still, though. It's a little cumbersome to use, but overall, I say "Yay, Skype!"

The webcam returns to ericbolstridge.com!

Hooray! The webcam is back on ericbolstridge.com! Thanks to my devoted wife, who found me new and improved FREE webcam software, my web-cam is back online! I'm using YawCam, from www.yawcam.com. I needed to go back into my GoDaddy account to remember the right way to type in my FTP server address, but that was no big deal. Simple install and the webcam is back! Woo-hoo!

Camperino.com goes online

Most of my friends and family like to camp, and back when I was in college I had a Geocities website called "The Camperino Website." I would post stories about camping trips that me and my pals would take and I used the site to semi-coordinate trips with people. Many new friends were made and many adventures were had. But that was
literally 10 years ago.

So, I was talking to one of my best buds about bringing the Camperino website back into existence. Maybe branching off my ericbolstridge.com page. Well, he would have none of that! (this friend does website junk for a living, btw) So, he reached out and grabbed his laptop off the kitchen counter and with a few deft strokes on his keyboard and a mouse click or two, Camperino.com was born!

I think we'll set it up much like the old Camperino website, with blog-type entries, trip announcements, etc. Maybe we'll let anyone post trips and invite folks to come along. Should be fun. I think we'll definitely have it up and running for the 2008 camping season. Yay, internets!

Web Cam software expiration

So, my Web Cam software, Biromsoft Webcam, was downloaded on a trial basis. It works awesome, automatically linking to my web server at GoDaddy.com and uploading an image every few seconds via FTP. Works great! So, of course, when the trial period ended, I clicked "Buy It!"

I paid my $29.99 via paypal to a company called ShareIt!, which I now know is a middle-man company that accepts payments on behalf of independent developers. So, they got my $29.99 and allegedly notified the Biromsoft folks that I had made the purchase. According to ShareIt! I was to receive my verification code by email within 24 hours.

Well, much more then that went by. So I emailed ShareIt! and I emailed Biromsoft. No response for over a week. So, I clicked through PayPal's "Resolution Center" thingy that sends another email... The next day I called American Express and had them retrieve the money.

Thankfully, AMEX is awesome about this stuff, so I got my money back with limited hassle, but I'm pretty grumpy about the whole experience. Here's this great software that I was fully willing to purchase, but because of some glitchy something or maybe just bad customer service, I don't get to have a web cam and they don't get my money. Such a lose-lose. Ah, well.

Web Cam on EricBolstridge.com

Hahahaha! Yeah, it's been a while since my last post, but it was worth it. I downloaded a couple software applications to see if I could get one to solve my webcam question, and I got this one from Biromsoft to work! It's set to my cheap Labtec cam and is uploading straight to my server that I have through GoDaddy! After getting the image uploading (the frequency of the upload is variable), I then had to get the HTML in there to refresh the page. That kinda sucks, because it's not a true streaming feed - it's just refreshing the webpage automatically ever few seconds.

Also, I have a slight concern that I might exceed my "upload" capacity or something like that, but since I'm not actually adding tons of images and only overwriting the same one, I don't think it will be an issue with my account limitations...

Anyway, what fun!

GoDaddy automated payment

My GoDaddy account is still auto-billing me $7 each month for hosting ericbolstridge.com. I decided I'll bite the bullet and pay for a full year to get the couple bucks off. I'll see about calling them this afternoon to make the change (they are surprisingly nice and very helpful over the phone). But I'm always a little scared of anything "long-term" with internet / phone / whatever stuff. They always seem to come back around and bite ya in the ass...

Google Snippets Redux

Ah, well. I thought I had solved my http://www.geocities.com/ericbolstridge problem, but when I Googled "Eric Bolstridge" this morning it came up as the fourth result (behind ericbolstridge.com and this blog). Last night I posted links to some items I sent out to my Freecycle group. The links were to photos that I was hosting on my geocities page (since they have the oh-so-easy upload). I'm guessing that the few people that hit those links made my geocities site jump up in the ranks. So my brilliant "No Snippet" Meta Tag didn't work after all.

Looking into things, I'm now theorizing that Google is getting the site from Dmoz, the open directory. I listed my geocities pages with them way back in the day. So, I sent a correction to them, asking that they remove the site from their listing. We'll see what happens.

EricBolstridge.com

I now have 19 videos up on my website, thanks to YouTube. The quality is satisfactory, I think, so I don't think I'm going to bother with uploading and embedding Quicktime videos hosted on my site. Pretty sweet. The website is still fairly ugly, just barely past acceptable, but at least all the links work now, even though most lead to an "under construction" page. Perhaps in the near future I will find some excuse to spend a week with Dreamweaver to create a page that is actually good looking.

Web Cam on EricBolstridge.com?

I did a redesign of my website, EricBolstridge.com. All I really did is change the font and background, but hey, it looks a lot better and now it has several pages that I can add content to as I get around to it so whatever. I went ahead and added a page for "Web Cam," too. I'm going to look into how (if) I can stream images to the site from my desktop webcam here at work....

Embedded video and automatic charges

A couple updates for ericbolstridge.com:

First, I finally changed ericbolstridge.com to have my lil' demo reel on the main page. I was having some trouble getting into the FTP client from home, but no problems from work. Must be the uber-security the wife has set up at home. Anyway, I also added dead links to what will eventually be a page with my resume and more video samples. I also put CoasterRadio.com on there, just for kicks. I've been doing some reading about embedding video on websites, and it seems that the way to go is to build 'object' tags for embedding Quicktime and not use WMVs at all. So, I think I will try to get my videos all over to Quicktime and re-upload them.

Second, I got an email from GoDaddy that they automatically charged my credit card for another month of hosting! I know I definitely did not sign up for an automatic renewal, so I investigated a bit. I couldn't find any setting in my account to turn this off or preventing it form happening again, so I guess I'll have to live with paying the $6.99 a month until I decide to investigate hosting options. I'm fairly satisfied with the whole having a website thing, so I will eventually look into a long-term hosting plan with someone.

Google Snippets

A big part of this whole getting myself online thing was a motivation to get my old college Geocities website out of the top spot when people Google "eric bolstridge." Well, I've definately done that with my new pages, this blog, as well as updating my IMDb profile. But what really did it was simply going to Google and looking into how to force the solution.

Google bots troll the internet grabbing snippets from sites, and it doesn't update those snippets too often for unpopular sites. That's why my old Geocities page still had the old description. So, I added a tag ([googlebot metadata=nosnippet] or something like that) to my geocities page that would make the bot not list the site. Then, I requested the Google bot please re-scrape my site. A couple days later, the site is gone from Google. Yay!

MySpace.com

Hey, I'm on MySpace now. See my page here. I got my site name, added a video, a couple pictures, got a song on there, whatever. Tom (a friend who MySpace controls and you automatically get on your page when you join), has Mickey Avalon's song Jane Fonda playing on his page (featuring lyrics like "f- me f- me, you know you want me"). It's somewhat interesting to me that MySpace is fully accepted by mainstream society despite its explicit and easily accessible content.

On the www.ericbolstridge.com side of things, I activated my webhosting account and should be able to upload a bit of content.

ericbolstridge.com

I bought a year of ericbolstridge.com from GoDaddy, as well as a month of web hosting. All together, it cost me like $9. If I can figure everything out well enough, I'll sign up for a longer period and get a reduced price on a long-term agreement.

That was about a week ago. Since then, I haven't done much to get my website actually doing anything. Today I played around with writing something in straight HTML (a skill I used to have way back when), but I didn't really get far. I made a lame template using the Yahoo! Geocities Page Wizard, but that just sucks. I'll see about getting that up on there for now just to practice uploading and making my webpage "live." I suppose having something ugly up there will be something of a motivator for creating something better.

I was able to get the Sonic Roxio MyDVD software working how I wanted it to, by the way. I made a "real" DVD today, with chapter markings and music on the menu and everything. So that's pretty cool.

YouTube attempt

Well, I uploaded a video to YouTube using the settings they recommend and it turned out kinda crappy and the audio is all out of sync. I checked out a couple forums and such and seems there's lots of theories and explanations for both problems. In general, motion and "video information" are not handled well by the conversion to Flash (the format that YouTube presents videos in). Anyway, as another step in learning a bit about YouTube, here's an attempt at posting an embedded YouTube video:



Cool. In other news, I took a DreamWeaver 2004 class a year or so ago, but I've forgotten a lot of it. Next on my list is going to be to buy my domain name and see about getting a website up. I should be able to figure out how to get some hi-res videos on the internet for all to see that way.

Why I have a blog

I was in a meeting yesterday and we went off on a tangent about online networking and one of the older folks in the group was all confused and said "what's Friendster?" No big deal, right? Well, after some friendly quizzing, we found out that they were completely bewildered at the very concept of most of the web 2.0 sites. Myself, as well as a couple of other people in the room under the age of 30, tried hard to not be condescending in our explanation of things. As the conversation continued, some of the middle-aged guys in the room remained suspiciously quiet and a couple working moms chimed with comments like "yeah, my 14 year old daughter is on her MySpace all the time! I have no idea what that's all about" and "is it like AOL?"

Is this me in ten years? I think it could be. I'm paying attention to the new stuff, but I'm not quite participating. Whatever it is, it's time to play catch up to make sure that I don't start down that slippery slope to being totally out of touch. Time to take an inventory of things. I'm not too far behind on the curve - I've kept up pretty well: I have a Blackberry, I own a Yahoo! group, I use PayPal, I dropped my Hotmail account for Gmail account back when it was tough to get Gmail account. But this is stuff that's been around for years. Heck, I've been on eBay since 1998.

I need to get on board with the new stuff. I need to jump on this web 2.0 stuff. I don't understand iTunes. I need to buy my domain name, create a MySpace page, get some videos on YouTube, and of course, start a blog.

I don't want to be clueless in 10 years - my kid is going to be zapping pirated media back and forth to his friends and the new guys at work will be laughing at my inability to use the new websites or files or gadgets... I'm not sure if it's a scared of being old thing or a scared of being clueless thing. Maybe the older you get the harder it is to understand this stuff. I guess I'm about to find out.