It's my blog. My only blog.
December 06 2006 06:08 PM Lewis Sellers
I'm happy for Cynthia. She's been increasingly interested in journalism this last year or so. (That's why 10-east exists in the first place after all.) So it seem appropriate that she's now the new webmaster for the local Grainger Today. Starting in a week or so anyway.
She might be writing the occasional article for the paper as well.
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November 29 2006 11:49 AM Lewis Sellers
It's no great secret that I'm not happy with any of the domain names used by our little community site. Though I have grown rather attached to 10-east.com and citizenj.info. The problem is that domain squatters seem to be sitting on most every domain that might make for a good name. Eventually we'll come up with something memorable and unique of course for the final and permanent name for the site.
In the meantime, I ran across an interesting article on the keys to a successful citizen journalism site at the Poynet Institute. We've done most of these, or are working on them. :)
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November 28 2006 06:01 PM Lewis Sellers
Then DO NOT use any websites that offer to do domain lookups for you to look to see if the domain is available. Just type the url in directly in the browser, or use a program that can do what is called a "whois" for you. (The Network Utility app that comes standard on the Macintosh will do this for you. On Windows the program called "Sam Spade" is fairly good at this as well.)
Why?
In recent years a huge scam called (by some) "domain kiting" has really taken off. Basically, spammers and their ilk are using the 5-day money-back requirement of all domain name purchases to automatically buy up 30+ million domains a year esssentially for free. And where are they getting the suggestions for these domain names their computer programs are automatically buying up? You guessed it. Apparently some websites are feeding the domain names you're looking up into these programs, which buy them … and then you have to buy the domain from them at a much higher price.
So keep your domain names to yourself, until the very last minute. FYI.
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November 13 2006 02:07 PM Lewis Sellers
Well, we haven't (or I haven't at least) had much time to work on or promote the site recently. Doesn't mean you just can't go ahead and use it as of course. :) Maybe we'll get around to doing that properly by the year end. Just as well. It could use a bit of time to be tested and have all the rough edges smoothed out.
In other news, Cynthia Rosenberry is (among other things) taking over as the regular webmaster for graingertoday.com. The position was previously held by James Zachary. If you hadn't guessed by now, she's also the webmaster of this site as well.
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November 10 2006 07:10 PM Lewis Sellers
I was glancing through the logs for this site (citizen j) just now. Know what most people are googling for that brings them here? You guessed it. Cows. In every shape and form, they're coming here because someone mentioned they have cows for sale.
(Oh, and of course lots of people visiting are interested things like politics and pottery and the like … but it's the cows man. It's the cows that are the big draw. :) )
Speaking of cows — trivia side note: Ever see www.fatcow.com advertising in Wired Magazine? Their name came about because, when I was working on their original website many years ago (before they had settled on a name), I posted a photo of some local cows sitting under a tree. Moo jokes insued. For weeks. It just seemed appropriate after that I guess.
Yep, the original fatcow was a Grainger County cow. :)
Anyway... back to to work. Ug.
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November 08 2006 03:27 PM Lewis Sellers
George Walker Bush is the Anti-Christ.
Yes, I mean the actual Anti-Christ. Yes, the One from the Bible. End of Times. War. Famine. Pestilence. Death. All that. Yes, that one.
It's just something I've pretty much come to terms with over the last few years. And I'm fine with it. I mean of course, I stopped watching television about three years ago because I was sick of watching where the world was going and what was happening, and having to stare at his face all the time. But other than that, I'm fine with it.
Why? Well, true, there's lots of evil been done, and still more to come, but at the end of it all, in a few years, there is supposed to be a thousand years of peace on the Earth. That doesn't sound so bad. I suppose you just have to look at the bright side of things.... Yea, sure, so a false messiah is walking the earth, destroying everything in his path, subjugating the world … yadda, yadda, at least we know that, one way or the other, it's not going to last. And there will be some nice times ahead. A few years out anyway ...
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November 04 2006 10:21 AM Lewis Sellers
I want one! Yes, I know. The $100 laptops are supposed to be children's laptop, given out by the millions to kids around the world for education purposes, but I still want one. Or two.
They're just so very cool.
laptop.org
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October 29 2006 12:19 AM Lewis Sellers
I listen to a lot of music. Most of the time I'm sitting down at the computer I have my headphones on and iTunes just constantly running. And usually after a couple days listening to something new I'm rather tired of it. And only occasionally ever go back and listen to it again.
Which makes it so strange that I've been listening to the same couple CDs for the last 3 or 4 weeks. Muse. A british group. Seems like a lot of the good music (and tv for that matter) is coming out of Britan these days. (Or at least not from the States).
Sing for Absolution , Citizen Erased , Black Out , Hoodoo , City of Delusion , etc. Lots of intelligent lyrics backing some strong music. That's rare. The "intelligent lyrics" part. I usually (inwardly) cringe when I start understanding the lyrics of a song because I know it won't belong til I understand how dull and uninspired the subject really is. It's what ruins a cd for me.
But there are a few … a rare few than have that true artistic gleam. Fitting name all in all.
Check out the Sing for Absolution video on their website. (The song is about something else all together, but it works with that storyline as well, strangely.)
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October 28 2006 07:46 PM Lewis Sellers
I should probably mention … I'm the person who's responsible for writing the PHP/MySQL code that drives this entire website, as well as handling all technical issues that may relate to it and continually updating and improving it's functionality.
If there's a "feature" you'd like for the site, I'm the one that's going to end up implimenting it.
These days I mainly develop on a dual G5 Apple Macintosh running OS X 10.4, but have been programming under Microsoft Windows as well since it first came out. (This site, as they say, was "made on a mac". Well. Partly anyway. There are Mac, Windows and Linux machines scattered about the place and site has been on all of them at one point in time.)
I have a degree in computer science. I'm engaged. Hi Cynthia Rosenberry .
Cats we have. Three. (Susy, Smiley and Waddles). I do also, however, have a funny Betta fish (Koo) and Chinese Alage Eater (Scrubby). Both of whom I worry about daily as to whether they're going to end up killing each other in a territorial dispute. There's also a Belgian Sheepdog turning in frantic circles, round and round, near the door. Don't know who's dog that is, but I think he's signalling about something. :-)
Though I've generally voted Republican by default, I've gone through phases of voting for Democrats and Independants (ie, the Green Party) as well. These days I'm thinking seeding a completely brand new party all together might be the best idea, long term. All the current parties are disappointing (and untimately ineffective) for one reason or another.
I'm rather into the new Battlestar Galactica TV series at the moment... And a copy of Space Colony I picked up at the last minute to add to Cynthia's goodies on her recent birthday. Mistake that. We both got a wee bit addicted. :) Course since it's usually a couple months inbetween "gamings" for us both I guess it's not too bad.
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October 28 2006 07:30 PM Lewis Sellers
I plugged Cynthia's Wacom tablet into my mac and started scribbling a bit. They're fun to play with once you get use to the pressure sensitivity. I'm thinking about making this the new logo for citizen j. Whadda think? :-)
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October 27 2006 10:36 PM Lewis Sellers
I'm now going to talk about my fish... Some more. Hey. Come back. ...
This is "Koo". He's a red Betta. His name comes from the classic Russian science fiction film Kin Dza Dza. (As to what the word "koo" actually means … well, that's a long story. And it would rather much ruin the film if I just told you.)
His tank-mate (Scrubby) is a scared orange bottom feeder that mostly hides in his hollowed out conconut I gave him. (From which he stares at me with one eye day and night and day … and night … It gets creepy after a while.)
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October 27 2006 10:10 PM Lewis Sellers
That was a strange photo of me (I said to myself) when I saw it. I look like I'm possessed … or have just seen Jesus or .. something.
(I'm actually just looking across the road up into a cave out front of our local artisans/hillbilly-potters.)
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October 27 2006 10:06 PM Lewis Sellers
. I just haven't had the time to post any blogs (or articles) lately. But now that the site is more or less done that should be changing. Yes. Me. Rambling on incoherently. Can't wait can you? Didn't think so.
Now that the codebase has settled down we're going to clean up the graphics and general layout. Make it pretty. Soft.
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October 27 2006 12:56 PM Lewis Sellers
What else is there to say? Until the last few years I always considered myself a Republican without question. Even when I didn't vote that way (Perot, etc) it was because of the individuals involved, not because I didn't believe in the basic principles of the Party itself. But that's changed... because they're obviously lost their way … in some orgy of self-absorbed corporate greed.
As for Reagan … Even when he was technically breaking the law, it seemed to be towards obviously good ends — helping people. He was a good man.
I miss him.
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October 20 2006 09:10 PM Lewis Sellers
We stopped by to visit my cousin Bill Cannon while we were down in Florida earlier in the year. He'd just recently moved down there with his family after being up in Chicago (brr) for the last few years. Rarely see him these days.
We went out of our way (by several hundred miles) to try to catch the Pluto Express as it was launched from Kennedy. No luck though. Delays. Naturally of course, as these things will always happen, it finally got off the ground just about the time we pulled out on the road heading back to Tennessee. :)
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October 20 2006 09:09 PM Lewis Sellers
It predates this website by a few weeks but... Cynthia make a small website for local organic grower Jerry Baird.
LakeView Farm
If you like feeling dwarfed by stalks of corn, it might be a place to go by and visit.
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October 18 2006 07:12 PM Lewis Sellers
Been spending the day mainly going over the site and working on it's SEO. That is, it's "search engine optimization". Or how easy it is for search engines to just eat the site up and digest every lovely word. (And get higher page rankings.)
Mainly today this means tweaking the title algs, the keywords here and there as well as a whole lot of other little things. Including a suggestion or two from:
Basic SEO Community Tips
The site already is doing something major in this area — Pretending that it's just a big collection of html pages. (ha.) It's actually a few tens of thousands of lines of PHP functions. Completely MySQL database driven. It uses htaccess and mod_rewrite to pretend it's HTML so all the pretty search spiders won't be scared to crawl over it.
And crawl they do. Continously. They're all up and down the site in the logs. I've been letting them show up in the php-based unique visitors logs because I'm curious what they're doing … but I guess I should just go ahead now and start filtering them out because otherwise the visitor/session logs get a bit crowed after a while.
Back to pouring over the site of the Most Important SEO in the World.
(Yes. I know those keywords show up in a backlink search — It's called sucking up.)
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June 19 2006 10:53 PM Lewis Sellers
It's been a few years since I was the webmaster of a community site. Back in '97 - '98 though I was the webmaster of (and programmer for) the original javascripts.com. Unfortunately for the site, after it got bought out by earthweb.com, it promptly lost all it's unique sense of flavor (and quirkyness).
I must admit a large part of that sense of oddness, well... cough cough was my doing.
Back to the point — I'm sure programming tutorials and articles will start showing up on this site soon enough though.
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June 17 2006 06:45 PM Lewis Sellers
At the moment we have an urgent need for articles from the Republican stand-point. We're about to flip over and capsize from the weight of all the left-wing articles.
Thank you.
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June 10 2006 10:04 PM Lewis Sellers
Apparently we're doing work on a third political website as of today. (That is, three different candidates.)
I'm beginning to sense a pattern emerging here... hrm.
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June 10 2006 03:31 PM Lewis Sellers
For technical reference: There is what we call a caching mechanism that is implimented for this entire site — this includes all blog pages.
What do I mean by that and how does it affect you?
It means that the first time anyone ever looks at your new blog, the page is created on the fly by the code that drives this site which first pulls all your blog information from the SQL database server that the site uses. (If you're not technical, just let your eyes glaze past that last part. The details don't matter.)
The important part is that it then saves the generated page as plain html. Anytime after the first time that someone looks at your blog post, they're getting the cache html version.
The reason we do this is speed. And responsiveness. By caching the pages the site can stand a much higher load of visitors than without. (It gives a 5X to 20X boost to the site currently. That will probably increase as the site become more mature and optimized).
The single downside to this is that sometimes, just sometimes some of the pages seem to be stuck. You update something and they don't seem to change no matter what you do.
That's my fault. The caching mechanism is somewhat complicated. It is almost entirely automatic these days, but on occasion there might be an older page or a section that has not been properly marked and so the cache for that area doesn't get purged when you make changes (as it should be).
If you encounter such a situation, let me know and I'll look into it.
NOTE: The areas where you edit your content are not cached. FYI. Only the public areas.
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June 09 2006 09:35 PM Lewis Sellers
Someday in the not too distant future formatting notation is going to have smiley/emoticon support....
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June 09 2006 09:16 PM Lewis Sellers
Anyone reading it?
Anyone at all?
sniff
(Ok, that's a guilt trip simply to try to get someone to test out the "post a comment" option a few times to verify it's working correctly. :) )
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June 09 2006 08:58 PM Lewis Sellers
It's a blog. A real blog I tell you.
Finished writing the new blog code for the site.
Trying it out....
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