Category Archives: Discourse.net

Jakob Nielsen is an authority on web design. When he writes Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes, one should at least pay attention.

By my count, this blog only clearly adheres to two three of the ten rules, and totally fails at least three, arguably five — and doesn’t do too well on the last two either.

1. No Author Biographies [arguably FAIL] (I do link to my homepage…)
2. No Author Photo [arguably FAIL] (ditto)
3. Nondescript Posting Titles [FAIL sometimes]
4. Links Don’t Say Where They Go [FAIL sometimes] (I do try to be conscious of this one, but I get sloppy sometimes).
5. Classic Hits are Buried [FAIL]
6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation [PASS]
7. Irregular Publishing Frequency [PASS]
8. Mixing Topics [FAIL MISERABLY]
9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss [FAIL] (Tenure is nice)
10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service [PASS]

Should I change my ways?

PS. Please treat this as an open invitation to make any other blog-related comments/suggestions.

Incidentally, it’s clear that I’m also very bad at publicity: last night at dinner, one of my colleagues asked rhetorically if I had a blog, and seemed taken aback a bit when I said that well, yes, I did.

Today I deleted some comment spam. A daily task. But this spam, although it carried the traditional link to a commercial web site, was a bit odd. This is what it said:

No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.
No way. No comments. No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.No way. No comments.

– Sara Corner

I got about half a dozen of them.

More generally, my spam is less of a pain since I turned off trackbacks for everything but the most recent items.

The LA blackout seems to have taken the site down with it. Supposedly Dreamhost has an emergency backup system, but it seems to have failed completely. Probably FEMA-approved hardware…

Update: Details if you care…

The site is up and down like a yo-yo today. Sorry about that. I’ve initiated inquiries as to why.

Several students have told me that they’ve tried to email me at U.M. but the mail has bounced. At first I was skeptical, since I’m getting email, but one student was kind enough to send me headers, which led me to this CBL Lookup Utility. The CBL is a self-styled “composite blocking list”. They do provide a form for removal, but as I’m not the owner of the machine that has the blocked IP number — it’s upstream from me — I’m not about to try to fill it out.

I reported this to the help desk and they’re “working on it”.

Meanwhile, if mail to me bounces, there is a rarely-used backup: myforename.mysurname@gmail.com (be sure to replace myforename with michael and mysurname with froomkin). I’ll try to check there occasionally.

I know that several readers of this blogs are fellow customers of Dreamhost. I’d like to ask you a favor. Dreamhost.com has a nice system by which users can vote on the service improvements they would most like to see implemented. As they put it, “Votes (strongly) influence what gets implemented, but do not 100% determine it!”

I’ve just contributed a suggestion for something I need, and I’d like to ask fellow customers to vote for it please: ‘Offer a “high cpu usage” plan.‘ If they’d do this, I could rebuild the whole blog without timeouts, and I could also fight spam more effectively.

You get to the voting booth by going to your web control panel, logging in, click on “home” in the top of the left column, then “Suggestions”.

That takes you to a page asking you to vote on a large number of suggestions, with the newest at the top. Currently ‘Offer a “high cpu usage” plan’ is third from the top. Every customer gets 40 credits worth of votes, and suggestions ‘cost’ 2-5 credits based on difficulty. Mine will cost you 4; you get the credits back if they decide to do it, or if they decide not to do it. Meanwhile, you can always take the credits back and repurpose them for a different suggestion later if you have something else you want more. So if you are not currently using your voting credits this will cost you nothing more than the time it takes to make a few clicks. Thank you.