Posts Tagged “site”

It’s no secret that I have a movie theatre for a television and that we enjoy watching movies at home. But I’m also the parent of a small child and we have a fairly strict policy of what we allow our child to view. Still, we enjoy getting cozy on the couch for a good family movie. So the issue becomes WHAT to watch. The challenge is to find movies that are clean and appropriate for her while at the same time are able to hold my interest.

As I said, we’re careful about what television shows she sees. I’ve even vetoed some Blue’s Clues episodes because of the way they often handle conflict, encourage entitlement, and promote drama and whininess. And don’t even get me started on The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and how they routinely teach ‘scientific’ principles that defy the laws of physics.

Everything she watches is played off TiVo, giving us the ability to skip over commercials. Although I must admit that it is mostly so we can avoid her falling for kids advertising and wanting every cheap toy that is pushed in her face. So we simply remove the pushing. We also don’t watch any non-kids shows when she is around, which basically amounts to ‘when she is awake.’ And if the TV is playing live-tv, it’s always on the food channel – which has proven to be a completely kid-safe channel.

For movies, as a general rule I believe in the MPAA rating system. G-rated movies are probably fine for her.  PG, or Parental Guidance, means that it might or might not be appropriate – and we need to pre-view the movie to know if it’s cool before she sees it. And I figure she can probably watch PG-13 movies when she’s 13 – but we’ll see when we get there. With only G movies to choose from, the short list gets stale fast. The problem with the PG rating is that it’s too wide a range – movies can be fine for 6 year olds or barely appropriate for 12 year olds. Overall I think there is a serious shortage of good family movies. And it’s a genre that is not target by indie film makers, which is why I have a passion to try to eventually fill that gap.  But I digress…

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Just an update on the wordpress virus.  After several hours of research followed by 3 or 4 hours of fixing, I’ve wiped out the virus and cleaned up the database.  I also implemented guvnr’s 10 tips to make wordpress hackproof.  (Ok if that’s not offering a challenge to all the hackers out there…)

The main advice everyone gives is obviously to update to the latest version of wordpress and all your plugins, but once infected it’s too late for that plan to help.  Other tips are to of course use a strong password and to disable the default admin user account.  But first I had to remove the ‘back door’ admin user – which was giving the virus access to my site. Then I went through the 10 tips closing up vulnerabilities where possible.

One place where I almost hosed myself was that somewhere in the process I accidentally reduced my admin account’s privileges to that of a normal author, without first creating a new admin user.  After that blunder, logging back in as admin was impossible – so there was no way to create a new admin user.  Ultimately I had to hack back in to my own site (via the mysql database) and create a new user with admin capabilities.  Ahhhh, technology!

Let’s just say that I won’t be doing any more business with dreamhost.  And I can’t recommend that anyone else do business with them either.  Without getting into the details they are responsible for tomorrowland.com being down for almost two weeks, and never showed any concern about it, or a real reason why it was shut down, which has lead me to finally move away from them and shared hosting to a dedicated server at another company.  Of course this brings new technical challenges, like maintaining a whole server, but it should be fun and educational and I expect that now we’ll be good for a while.

October 20, 2008 – now

Five days shy of a year ago I reinvented my blog, decided to extend myself some grace, just try to have fun with it, and focused the site on all the technology that’s in my life and makes our lives more fun.  Back then I made a commitment to myself to update my blog every day.  Except for weekends, holidays, and the occasional day here and there I did a good job keeping it up for quite a long while.

But for the most part blog posts were written very late at night.  And daily blogging wears on a person, especially when you see various levels of success (and failure) in terms of traffic, and basically no revenue from ads.  So over time my updates slowed and eventually came to a stop.

And let’s talk about ad revenue for a moment.  Because in my opinion Google AdSense is a scam for honest site owners.  (By honest I mean following the contract and not clicking on your own ads and not trading daily clicks with fellow bloggers.)  In the past year, from October 22, 2008 through October 15, 2009, Google AdSense shows that I gave them 103,994 page impressions.  Not too shabby.  In that year I had 225 clicks and earned $83.28.  However, because Google won’t cut a check unless you reach $100, I’ve not seen any of that green.

I also have other ads on my site.  I have an amazon ad that I made myself which links to Amazon using my associates code.  That ad has probably been there fore about 6 months, was clicked on about 5 times, and never resulted in a purchase, meaning no revenue.  I also had an ad for dreamhost, which also never resulted in any revenue.

This has led me to the idea that I might as well remove all the ads and just do it for the love.  The fact is that I’ve only ever had the goal of using the ads to cover the cost of the site.  And of course the cost just shot up 5 fold because of the server change.

Traffic

I won’t be shy with the rest of the numbers… On an average day (before the takedown of ’09) I got about 400 unique visitors (as reported by Google Analytics), which I feel is a decent following.  In terms of web traffic and server usage this is a very small site.  To put it in bandwidth terms, last moth I used about 75 GB of bandwidth.  Again, a very modest number.  I now have a whole server mostly dedicated to serving this site.

Grace, Success and Failure

Grace came from the fact that I had been getting hung up on the possibility of making mistakes and it was causing a serious block.  So I decided to give myself the freedom to make mistakes, misspell words, have bad grammar, etc.  And luckily when I started no one was reading anyway, so who cared if I made mistakes.  The freedom is why I can write this entry off the cuff.  Because if I had to plan it out and write it properly it would never get done.  Grace to move forward and not care what people think.

Success and Failure is often self-judged by page views.  And once a random post gets a ton of hits overnight, that becomes the new standard by which all other posts are judged. What is weird is that the posts that I expected to get picked up by engadget or gizmodo and do well usually didn’t.  It wasn’t something that I could control.  And some of the posts that I put the most effort and love into also didn’t get a lot of hits.

The biggest hit is my review of the Sony Webbie HD camera, which as of today has been hit over 42,000 times.  And of course my dell mini 9 leopard install was also a hit at over 12,000 views (plus about 20,000 on youtube).  Oh and my favorite is a post where all I did was ASK if anyone has opinions on Plex vs Boxee vs XBMC.  That post has hit over 4,000 times and has high results in google.  And actually that one has made me want to focus more on the discussion of home media players, which I still plan to do.

Some of my ‘failures’ (ok, let’s call them disappointments) would be the Cat Genie review, which I worked hard on, and the paint on screen stuff – wow I worked REALLY hard on those posts.  But another disappointment was the first Podcast.  Without the 42,000 hits on the webbie camera post, these other numbers would have seemed respectable to me. But in comparison they’re poor and disappointing.  Perspective?  This post will get read about 10 or 20 times, and most people wont read this far.  So blogging has to be done for yourself and if people read it fine, and if they don’t fine.

The Podcast

The most recent change came in June when I posted what was supposed to be the first of many video podcasts.  I worked extremely hard on the video, had to put myself out there by being on screen, and then worked on customizing my own video player module.  I still have many plans for video and hope that they’ll be the future of this site.  But it will take me accepting the mentality that I had a year ago with writing and apply it to the videos.  I can be a perfectionist when it comes to video because it’s my field.  So we’ll see where that leads me over the next year.

I know… the site has been quiet.  Click to read why…  Read the rest of this entry »

Like many others, I downloaded the beta of Safari 4 and am trying to get used to the new window layout.

One of the new features shows all your top visited sites as a grid of thumbnails. While on the surface it’s an interesting feature, it’s a bit annoying in it’s current state.  It also raises some interesting questions about things like “are advertisers paying for impressions for ads that are only shown on thumbnails?” But that’s probably a topic for a different post.

The feature also falls in line with a new trend at Apple – which is to take control away from the consumer and make certain choices for them. I originally thought of this Top Sites page as a cool way of keeping track of the main sites I want to visit each day. However, the way Apple sees it your Top Sites are explicitly the pages that you actually visit the most. Rather than giving you a list-view of sites and allowing you to drag pages into there from say, your bookmarks, all you can do is rearrange pages, and remove the ones you don’t want to see in your top sites. When a page is deleted the next most visited page is animated into place. It’s an annoying task to try to get specific pages on there. BUT NOW there’s currently no way to a secret way to manually edit those Top Sites.  (SEE UPDATE AFTER THE JUMP!)

SO! If you want tomorrowland.com to be one of your Top Sites you’ll need to start visiting us more often and convince the Safari 4 gods to make it one of your Top Sites.

But there’s more.. When I was trying to organize my Top Sites I accidentally deleted tomorrowland.com, which is certainly MY Top Site. So HOW do you get it back?

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In 1997 I had an idea for a website. My concept was to make a place where non-technical people could fill out a form and it would build a sub-site for them. I wanted it to be futuristic. A place or a land of the future, where people could have a digital home and connect with friends and family. My first thought for a domain name was FUTURELAND.COM, but at the time it was taken. So instead I registered TOMORROWLAND.COM. I’ve owned that domain name ever since. In 1999 I had a slight legal scrimmage with a certain theme park company, but my council helped me retail the domain name. The truth was that my use of the name TOMORROWLAND.COM was not in competition with a division of a particular theme park. No market confusion had happened up to that point – and it still doesn’t. I didn’t then and I still don’t get email at that address from people looking for something else. I get virtually no walk-on traffic. Like I said, I’ve had the domain name for almost 15 years – back before most people even knew what the web was. And for the record, TOMORROWLAND.COM, along with other web sites and intellectual properties, is owned by Bad Weasel, LLC.  It is, of course, in no way related in any way to any theme park or the gigantic mouse-run entertainment company.

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While it’s been quiet here the last few days at Diffusion (at michaelsmith.tv), I’m actually working on prepping 4 different posts all at the same time.  Everything has been in a state of almost being finished, but none of them are done enough to publish the posts.  Here’s a quick status report of what I’m working on:

1. On Monday I got ahold of a Harman/Kardon AVR 254 7.1 home theatre amplifier. Then Wednesday I bought new speakers to go with it. So I haven’t posted on it yet because it’s not fully set up.  Remounting the new 5.1 speakers is enough of a job but now I also have to find room for the 2 additional ones.  One of them is requiring me to run a wire under the hardwood floor.
2. That has lead to an article about 5.1 and 7.1 but I’m still researching it a bit. It may be folded into the same post as above, but again, still working that out.
3. The folks at Paint On Screen liked my bog on screens being overrated so much that they sent me a gallon of their product.  I’ll be testing it side by side with the white paint I’m already using.  We’ll be painting half the wall on Saturday, testing Saturday night, and then finishing the job on Sunday.  Will the $200/gallon paint out perform the $30/gallon paint?
4. The new Sony Webbie HD camera – unboxed and reviewed.  I’ll also be posting some actual .MP4 files so you can see for yourself if it’s good or not.  Surely it’s worth the low $200 price tag, but check the RSS feed to find out.

My wife chatted me a few minutes ago and asked if I was going to “lose my chip”.  It’s a joke regarding my recent commitment to posting something new every day on my site. The reference is of course AA and how you get a chip each week or month that you stay dry.  I admit that in the past I’ve struggled keeping up with things like this. But I’m on my 5th week and this past month has been good for me. I use the calendar (scroll down on the sidebar to the right) as a way of seeing my progress.  The text is green for each day that I’ve posted. Read the rest of this entry »

Today I installed a new comment system called IntenseDebate. It provides better functionality for comments, comment threading, reply-by-email, commenter profiles, reputation points and comment voting.  It should be a bit more fun than the old system.  To take full advantage of the new system sign up for IntenseDebate by clicking on Comments below.

Someone also recently asked about commenter avitars. IntenseDebate allows you to either upload an avitar to your profile there or use a gravitar.

So go ahead and click “Comments” below to see how it all works…

I had originally intended to focus this blog solely on tutorials for After Effects, Final Cut, DVD Studio Pro, and other pro video topics.  But recently I decided that I needed to broaden the scope a bit.  I still intend on having tutorials as a section of the site and to offer advice and help here.  But it fits my personality more to keep things less formal and much more flexible.  In other words I’ll get to it when I get to it.  It’s my site so I’ve giving myself the freedom to do whatever i want here.  And giving myself some grace about things like spelling and grammar – and I ask that you do as well.  I’m not a professional writer but I have a lot of useful information and ideas that I want to make available.

So here begins my theme of “out with the old and in with the new,” which I’ll be blogging about for several posts.