mmrobins.com

I just received the fourth issue of Make Magazine and I’m in love. It’s a quarterly magazine, but each one is packed with enough projects and cool stuff to try that it’s more than enough for 3 months. I haven’t really even made anything that was part of one of their feature articles though. I’ve never been much of a hardware tinkerer, but I’m excited to start… Once I have the TIME! (more…)

Civ 4 is here and I’ve had most of a weekend to play with it.  The most obvious improvement is the graphics.  I’m pleased that with Civ games, graphics improvements add to the gameplay and aren’t just there for show, like they are with most games. (more…)

I’m making this post with the del.icio.us (how I store my bookmarks/favorites), Flickr (where I store my photos).  So far I like Flock, and am going to keep playing with it.  You can drag your public Flickr photos into a blog post, which is kinda cool so I’m going to do that right now (a picture of me looking SOOO cool).  There’s things that could be slicker (able to login to flickr to drag private photos, better formatting of the picture you drag into your post, spellcheck in the blog post would be huge), but it’s already pretty slick.

UpdateOkay, after posting that last bit I went to look at it and it’s not so slick. It converted all my html so that it displayed as text. I guess this is cool if you only write text, but I’m used to doing some html formatting. There doesn’t seem to be a setting to let you type in html. It also very badly aligned the photos, so I had to go back in and fix that up. It’s got potential though.

I haven’t tried the rss aggregator, but I really like using BlogLines so far. With Bloglines I can check my feeds from anywhere and don’t need an installed program other than a web browser.

I haven’t made a cent since the first day. If anything this AdSense experiment has shown me that writing almost completely for myself, unless I have people reading this using RSS feeds that don’t register as a page view in the AdSense stats. Of course, I started of mostly writing this blog for myself, followed by friends and family, so I’m not surprised that my traffic is so low.

I think to make AdSense worthwhile and effective I would need a blog about a specific topic, and then I would have to do some work to get links to the blog, join networks, maybe have some sort of marketing campaign. In other words a lot of work.

You can get an interesting comparative sort of idea of how much your blog might be worth in advertising based on some numbers from AOL’s purchase of the Weblogs, Inc blog network. I was surprised that my former political blog www.ministryotruth.com was worth about $5000 according to them. Of course, it really isn’t worth that if nobody will pay me for it, but it goes to show me that I had a few more links than I thought. It was too much work though and it didn’t turn out to be as collaborative as I had hoped.

• Reading: Monsters and Magical Sticks: There's No Such thing As Hypnosis by Steven Heller & Terry Steele

I think I found out a small part of how Google prevents you from just going to your own website and clicking ads: they just ignore a bunch of clicks all coming from the same source. I’m sure this is obvious, and I wasn’t trying to run up my ad revenue by clicking my own ads, but in testing my ads I did click on them a lot, and my revenue for yesterday was nada. Zilch. Zip. Not even the 7 whole cents that I made the first day. I think I was the only one visiting my blog though.

It seems like they don’t update your daily earnings until the end of the day. I’m sure there’s forums or guides out there that explain all this, and I may invest the time to read one if I ever get serious about using this kind of advertising, but for now I just want to get a feel for how it works.

My coworker Dennis and I frequently have discussions about politics, business, and technology and where all are heading. Dennis raised a good point to me the other day: since he and I are so constantly exposed to ways technology is being used, why aren’t we thinking up some new way to use the internet as a business platform. The main driving force behind this questioning was the book “The World is Flat” by Thomas L. Friedman. (more…)

I finally got Tor working. I never tried very hard before, but I didn’t realize until reading some good setup instructions that you need to also download Privoxy and configure some things. Tor basically works by routing your internet web page requests through other computers so that your IP address isn’t available to remote server.

It’s cool that it works, but it really slows down web suring depending on who you end up routing through. One time I turned it on I ended up routing through a server in Germany, and web pages loaded painfully slow then. I turned it off and back on and got a server at Brown University and that was a little better, but still noticeably slower. I’m considering trying to setup a Tor server just to see if it would work, but probably not unless I find some more time.

• Listening To: Jason Webley

I’m still trying to figure out how I want to organize my blog content. WordPress comes with built in category support, but I’m finding that I don’t like using categories. I seem to have a tendency to make too many categories when I think that I should just stick to very general categories. I’m trying a plugin called Ultimate Tag Warrior that lets me assign del.icio.us style tags to my posts. I think I like this better since I can add new tags without having to go to a tag management page, unlike categories. This folksonomy style of tagging seems promising to me, but I’ll try it out for a while to see if it works better than categories, or if it just enhances them.

One of my servers stopped working with Microsoft Update. So I searched Microsoft’s knowledge base. I didn’t find anything helpful. So I contacted Microsoft’s tech support. They told me to register a bunch of dll’s. One of them didn’t register, mscml3.dll, so I searched Microsoft’s knowledge base again. No luck. Then I found a blog post that solved the problem for me. And he’s using the same wordpress theme as I am. Kinda creepy. I love that everyone can publish solutions to their problems and share them with others so easily now. Major props to DjLizard.

Finally! (more…)

• Reading: "Agile Web Development with Rails" by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson