Category Archives: Discourse.net

This blog is hosted at dreamhost.com. On the whole I've been happy with its low prices, although as this blog grows I chafe more an more at the limits on processing times imposed by the virtual host controller on my shared machine. I am no longer able, for example, to kill off more than a few spams at a time via mt-blacklist; I can't rebuild the site without having a crash except on the dead of night on federal holidays. It can get frustrating. But it is cheap. And the real problem is that movable type and some of my favorite plugins are rather resource-intensive.

Nevertheless, I do find it a little worrying to see the management at DreamHost crowing about how easy it is to make money off folks like me. So much money that they are going to hire a bookkeeper.

PS. If you are looking for very cheap and on the whole reliable blog hosting, tell them “froomkin” sent you and I get a kickback.

Something is messing up this page on Safari, and (not having a Mac to test with) I can't figure out what on earth it could be.

The problem pre-dates the addition of the clustermap in the right margin (which will start functioning tomorrow, if all goes well). As far as I can tell, it also seems to be unrelated to the previous change, the addition of the Google page rank graphic in the right margin. I've seen a screenshoot and both of the outside columns are overlapping the center one, leaving a wide swath of blank stuff where the two outside columns should be.

I know that my HTML isn't completely standards compliant; some day I'll move to wordpress and do a better job. In the meanwhile, if anyone has a suggestion as to what might be the cause of this problem, I would be grateful for advice.

According to Blogstreet, this blog has a “rank” of 437 out of the 103,159 blogs on its list and a BIQ, or “blog influence quotient,” of 164 (something to do with how many “top ranking” blogs link to you). [I saw “BIQ” and thought it was something about brains, another manifestation of a common American fallacy, that of equating intelligence with popularity. Some crowds are wise, but are all?]

I don’t know what any of this Blogstreet stuff means, and I suspect that I’m not going to try to figure it out: one could spend far too much time navel gazing about what is, for me, part hobby and part soapbox, and surprisingly little connected to my academic pursuits. (If we had drinks, it perhaps it could be the virtual pub.)

Naturally, not everyone approaches the medium in the same way. I went to a conference a few months ago and met a guy who introduced himself to people there as a blogger, even though he had a real job at a nice university, which struck me as a more salient fact. (Then again, his blog is indeed highly ranked. But so is his university.) I thought that was a little odd. Later, I did him a very tiny favor and he said “just for that, I’ll link to you” as if it were a big deal; that seemed a bit odd too. And then, of course, he didn’t…

No doubt some horrible trademark violation if used seriously. Googlification via Logogle.com (Hmmm. Trademark…) via boingboing (who call the process “Google-fying” and the end result a “Googloid” logo).

Another thing I've done to prepare for my trip is to line up a superb guest blogger. I'm only going to have limited Internet at best while abroad, so Jonathan Weinberg will be minding the store. Jon and I have several things in common. Among them are some intellectual sympathies: we're both part of the tiny number of Administrative Law teachers who write about ICANN and the Internet. (They're not that many of us around, which may explain why ICANN is run so badly.) We are co-editors at ICANNWatch. And — although this is now a larger group than it used to be — we're both part of law-professor faculty couples.

In addition to being one of the nicest people in law teaching, Jon knows a whole lot more about the FCC than I do. He's an expert on RFID. And he's clerked for two people who sat on the Supreme Court. Jon writes interesting and very readable articles, the most recent of which are listed after his official bio.

Jon will start Thursday (or earlier if he likes). I'm sure readers will enjoy his company as much as I do.

The amount of comment spam that gets past my blocks and filters is much less today than it was six months ago. But the trackback spam is fully making up for it. In the last week I have deleted hundreds of spam trackbacks — and received only a handful of real ones. (Do trackbacks TO me that I record here really give other sites any meaningful Google points? They shouldn't.)

It's very interesting to see who links to this stuff and what they make of it. But the trackback ecosystem must surely be on the brink of collapse.

If only technorati were a little better…