Does your blog have unsavoury "friends?"

You are known by the company you keep. If your blog links to a bunch of dicey websites it could tarnish, if not ruin your reputation. Courtney Tuttle put me onto this little tool that evaluates your linkees. Check out Bad Neighborhood.

I was a little surprised to see that one of the sites I linked to that I thought was a blogging site had a lot of dicey keywords in its earlier posts that raised the red flag, and a couple of my posts even had tags that set off an alarm. In the case of one post I had the word pharmaceuticals --I guess that's a taboo subject now-- and if you want to find the other one you can run bad neighborhood against my blog -- I'll leave it in for you. Other than that, and a surprising 404 (which will be history shortly) no real shady characters around here. Your mileage may vary.

Print your Blog!

Yes you read it right... Print your blog. Of course you could always just print the web pages, but this widget delivers my recent posts as a high res PDF, and it can do the same for your blog. When I don't have time to write a full blog post, I just spread something cool like this. Of course this is the free version--you have to pay for your lovely graphics and logos to be included. My insight and prediction for the future: This sort of company has a limited life span. PDF-izing features will be incorporated as part of the next generation of blogging software, just as they are in the current generations of MS Word and Open Office (like MS office suite only FREE in case you never heard of it.)

Geek Events In the News

Note: This clipping is strictly for entertainment purposes, is 100% fictitions and facetious, and has no connection with any news media or individual living or dead bla bla bla...... You can get your own fake clipping like this free from getclippings.com.

Zend Framework Chronicles Part I

Ladies and germs, this blog is going to take an extreme turn in the geek direction, which was, after all, it's original charter. Geeks will eat it up, but if you don't care for dorkage, I can actually be quite normal at times, and you should read some of my other posts by searching for non-geeky keywords. The decision has been finalized to rewrite the legacy style code of TixRUs to leverage the power of frameworks without forcing it into the rigid confines of a Content Management System (CMS) such as Drupal, that you then have to find modules for or program your own. The framework has been selected. And the winner is..... (drumrolllllllllllll)
ZEND FRAMEWORK Zend Framework seems to suit my needs. I considered CakePHP and Symfony, both strong contenders, and CodeIgniter, which some people love, and I had downloaded and played with a few homegrown ones as well. But the bottom line is Zend is backed by big bucks, it aint going away, the documentation is excellent, there are ways to make it integrate with Smarty, (which I am heavily invested in), it has a great deal of action, a large userbase, bla bla bla. Zend Framework is considered a heavyweight, and it has a learning curve. In my experience most things with learning curves tend to be worth it in the long run.

So today I installed it on my brand new virgin virtual server (that was a piece of cake, no wait, was it a piece of zend?) Anyway it was EASY. Then I went through
Mitchell Hashimoto's very nice video presentation and got the whole thing going, with a few curse words tossed the way of my stark unpadded webserver config file along the way.

I won't tell you where my new server lives for the time being, because I don't have the directory structure set up quite the way I want it yet. But in the next installment I should be making it a little bit more secure, and if you want to follow along with me and see a bare bones scaffolding start to look like a web app it might be interesting. I'll be tweeting about it as well.
That's it for today.

RSShugger: a clever way to get publicity

RSShugger is yet another blog directory I have found. It's not Web 2.0 -- it's pretty old school and refreshingly simple. Hey not everything has to be a widget. Rsshugger is not huge yet but I predict they'll grow. They request an honest review, so here it is: The usability issues I see is that 1) the control panel link is not a top tab. It's up at the upper right ONLY and I had to look for it a little. 2) sometimes it's not spelled out what's going on and the verbiage leaves the casual reader in the dark. I can imagine what the backend of this looks like and figure it out, but to most people the back end of a website is a mystery. 3) when you submit your blog feed it isn't at all obvious that anything happened because it reposts the same page. And another thing is that they toss register links on the pages displayed to the already registered. But these glitches aren't hard to iron out and I'm sure Rsshugger will evolve.

Gee, I'm thinking, what a trend! Maybe I should make my own blog directory on the theory that sometimes you can make more money selling pans to prospectors than you will prospecting yourself. On the other hand, I think this whole "make money off your blog" thing is a fad that has already peaked. 10 years ago everybody was trying to "make money off your website." Essentially the same ideas were used, only now, with Web 2.0 it's easier. If truth be told blogs are nothing but websites, when you get right down to it. A few folks will make lots of money, the rest will quickly get sick of not making money and give up. As for me, I just want reads when you get right down to it. When all these wannabe blog tycoons go away, that will leave the rest of us focus on the core of blogging, which is really just a 21st century way to have a journal. Anyway, it's easy to join Rsshugger and we'll see how it "pans" out. [Horrible pun, I know, totally intentional.]

What Type of personality are you?

Well there I am, summarized for all the world to see into a neat little bar graph. If you want to see how you stack up, go ahead and click the widget. It will take you to mypersonality.info where you can take the test yourself. It's fun, fast and free and you'll get a nice little widget souvenir like mine for your own blog.

I have taken these things before, including the full Myers-Briggs (which is way bigger, way more official, and 4 choice questions, and not free, I'm sure, though I never had to pay for it. The results are always the same. I am in a tiny minority -- the Introverted Intuitive Thinker Perceiver. This is what the site says about us:

"INTPs are logical, individualistic, reserved, and very curious individuals. They focus on ideas, theories and the explanation of how things work. They are especially adept at discussions and debate. They have the ability to focus intently on a subject. They appreciate and respect intelligence in others."

I was told once that INTP's are only about 3% of the population. This site says that 4% of males and 1% of females fall into this square on the grid. That makes me a very small minority. I have the same problems as any other minority -- I don't fit into mainstream culture. So can I please have some minority funding? PLEEEEEASE? Right, like that's gonna happen.

Just for fun I added the multiple intelligence tests. Woops I almost said multiple personality. Well big surprise. Music is my top intelligence. And I feel a great need to do more of it.

How much is YOUR domain worth?

My Site is worth
$88,572

How much is
your site worth?

This is FREE domain valuation from your friends at dnscoop.com. They use data from Alexa, Google, your domain registrar, and other sources. We are apparently a Google page rank 5 -- that's darn good considering the limited amount of traffic we get. On the other hand we have a phenomenal conversion rate! When people come to TixRUs, they are pretty set on buying tickets and they successfully convert more often than not. Google favors sites such as TixRUs that are provide a great deal of useful content, even though our SEO is only what little old me can do here and there.