So, I killed my MySpace page. I was getting spam and invites from random pron people. Plus, their services are redundant considering I have a blog and website elsewhere...
Maybe this is an admission of how much I actually don't get it, but I'm not into the whole online social networking thing, either, which would be the only other reason to have a page....
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Google Reader
After asking around, I realized that I didn't necessarily need to download something new to start enjoying the splendor of RSS feeds - Google has it built in to their suite of apps. So, I signed up for Google Reader, added a handful of RSS feeds from my favorite sites, and I'm rollin'.
I read a comic strip, check bargains, get a couple blog feeds, and even have Snopes.com sending me their feed. Not bad. I'm a fan of the RSS, but it doesn't work well if the site owner doesn't have their feed set up nicely. Like for Snopes, you get the headline of the story and the content, but no photos or handy "genre" icon. But for everything else, I'm no longer going to the original sites at all, just checking the content on my Google Reader. Wow, I'm so mod-er-in.
I read a comic strip, check bargains, get a couple blog feeds, and even have Snopes.com sending me their feed. Not bad. I'm a fan of the RSS, but it doesn't work well if the site owner doesn't have their feed set up nicely. Like for Snopes, you get the headline of the story and the content, but no photos or handy "genre" icon. But for everything else, I'm no longer going to the original sites at all, just checking the content on my Google Reader. Wow, I'm so mod-er-in.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
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...
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
What is an RSS feed?
The topic came up at work, and I knew the most out of the three or four of us that were chatting together. I knew it was "some sort of subscription thing where you'll get automatic alerts when there are updates to a site or a podcast or something." So, I felt kinda okay knowing that much, but of course, it made me realize I really don't know about RSS feeds.
So, now I do! A little research, a little checking things out, and now I know that RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and you need a "feed reader" or an aggregator to use them. I asked around and looked into what those are, and I'm making it my goal this week to download Mozilla Thunderbird so I can get on board with pulling in RSS feeds, as well as possibly accessing my Gmail accounts through there. My buddy was telling me that he uses an aggregator for his IM, too, so maybe I'll ditch my Yahoo! Messenger and go through Thunderbird for that as well (if it has that capability... We shall see).
So, now I do! A little research, a little checking things out, and now I know that RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and you need a "feed reader" or an aggregator to use them. I asked around and looked into what those are, and I'm making it my goal this week to download Mozilla Thunderbird so I can get on board with pulling in RSS feeds, as well as possibly accessing my Gmail accounts through there. My buddy was telling me that he uses an aggregator for his IM, too, so maybe I'll ditch my Yahoo! Messenger and go through Thunderbird for that as well (if it has that capability... We shall see).
Monday, April 9, 2007
iTunes download
Long time since my last post, I know. But that's a good thing, I think - there's less for me to "find out," right?
Anyway, the wife got an iPod shuffle from her mom, so we got the ol' iTunes on the home computer. I tried iTunes on my work machine and it wouldn't install properly - either a work firewall thing or my pc here just sucks, I dunno. Anyway, at home, we got it downloaded okay and had to go through a nice two days purge / conversion of music that we had on there. In the end, we both played around with it enough to create some playlists, some "special" playlists, get music to her iPod and even burn a stack of CDs. I'm going to see if I can subscribe to a podcast or two to figure out the whole subscription and RSS thing, too.
Anyway, the wife got an iPod shuffle from her mom, so we got the ol' iTunes on the home computer. I tried iTunes on my work machine and it wouldn't install properly - either a work firewall thing or my pc here just sucks, I dunno. Anyway, at home, we got it downloaded okay and had to go through a nice two days purge / conversion of music that we had on there. In the end, we both played around with it enough to create some playlists, some "special" playlists, get music to her iPod and even burn a stack of CDs. I'm going to see if I can subscribe to a podcast or two to figure out the whole subscription and RSS thing, too.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
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.
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