Archives for April 2008

Is Mike Arrington Catty?

April 30, 2008 by

I certainly think it’s possible. You see, he can’t seem to help himself sometimes. Perhaps it’s just his personality? This latest bit, where he finishes calling Robert Scoble a sellout is a good example. Backstory? Way back in January, Scoble announced that he would soon be adding advertisements to his blog through his new employer. Today, he released the redesign of his blog and with it, those advertisements. Well, one advertisement to be exact. Robert has been sponsored by the folks at Seagate for a while now. Mike’s problem with it seems to only be that he has the advertisement on the blog.

If you ask me, it’s just another layer of transparency for Robert. We all knew that he was sponsored by Seagate. He doesn’t try and hide it. Now newcomers will know who his sponsor is as well. If you ask me, it’s better that the ad is there as opposed to it not being there and someone seeing a post where Robert talks about Seagate. Not that he would without disclosure. He’s pretty good about that. Much better than about 95% of the blogosphere. Better than Mike.

I’m not even that big of a fan of Robert’s. He talks alot about things like Twitter and FriendFeed that I really don’t care for. Most of his content is on similar subjects. I don’t do video very often, so I can honestly say that I’ve never watched one of his videos. For many, he’s a tech blogging superstar. A true A-lister. Many would call Mike Arrington the same thing. And in many ways, both are right.

I’m not sure whether there is bad blood between the two of them or not, but one thing is for sure, Mike is taking every opportunity to throw a little mud Roberts way. To me, that’s catty. But then, I’ve thought that of Mike for a while now. Of course, that makes me a little catty towards him. Oh well.

It just seems like Mike can’t decide whether he wants to write for TechCrunch or for ValleyWag.

Filed Under: General News Tagged With: , , , ,

Free Domain and Hosting from One.com

April 29, 2008 by

If you live in the U.K., Germany, Austria, Switzerland, or India, One.com is currently running a sale whereby you can get a free domain and hosting for the domain for 12 months. If you’re looking into starting a blog or are wanting to start a affiliate site, but don’t want to risk the money to see if it will work, this could be a great deal for you.

I don’t have any experience with One or their hosting, but they do seem to be somewhat reputable. Anyone else have any experience with them? If you’re in the US, I still recommend 1and1 hosting for your domain and hosting needs, but it’s hard to pass up a free domain and hosting if you’re in the above listed countries.

If I was in those countries, here’s what I would do. Go sign up for a domain and hosting. It’s free for 12 months, so you have 12 months to test anything that you want to. Put together a simple site with plenty of content and information on an affiliate offer of your choice. Maybe you use a script like BANS or the YEA mashup. Get the site set up and running. Then take the next 6 months to build links and promote. If you do it right, you could make a pretty good amount of money from it. And maybe it becomes worth it to pay for the hosting and domain after the free 12 months ends. Maybe you don’t make a dime and decide to drop both.

It’s a great way to test out a domain idea with very little risk. You can get your free domain and hosting at one.com.

Filed Under: General News Tagged With: ,

Adsense Deluxe, WordPress 2.5 and MySQL 5.0

April 25, 2008 by

Part of the issue the other day, when this site was a little more than broken, was that I had made the switch from a MySQL 4.0 database to a MySQL 5.0 database. You wouldn’t think that would be an issue. Well, that would be a wrong assumption.

First, I use a plugin called Adsense Deluxe. I’m sure that many of you might as well. It’s kind of a old thing that I implemented and don’t actively use now, but it’s still there in some of the old posts. If it breaks, the implementation simply reverts to a few comments here and there. Again, not a problem.

Again, wrong assumption. There’s something in the way that MySQL 5.0 runs the queries that causes an issue with the empty array handling that worked fine in MySQL 4.0. I’m no expert on MySQL, so I wasn’t able to figure out exactly what the problem was. What I do know is that rather than just breaking and being just comments, it became some very ugly MySQL error lines at the beginning of each and every page and post. Not very nice at all. All made worse by the fact that the plugin hasn’t been updated for at least two versions of WordPress. The fact that it works at all is probably a miracle.

Another issue that I ran into was that suddenly, the front page of this site was starting at the beginning of the posts (in this case August 24, 2005) and working it’s way up. So when I told it to show the 5 most recent posts, it showed the first 5. I changed the orderby and order settings in the call and it still did the same thing. A little research on the codex gave me a answer. There is an issue in one of the early versions of MySQL 5.0 that causes the database calls for the posts in WordPress to break and default to the first x posts. The fix? Update MySQL. No workaround.

So, with the both of the errors making the site pretty much unusable, I had only one option. Revert the database to a older version or update it to a newer version. Since there wasn’t a newer version, I had to reinitialize a new database as a MySQL 4.0 database and wipe the old database. This takes a little bit of time, but really isn’t more than a 30 minute job. What took the time, was the 2-3 hours it took for me to reach that conclusion.

Now that it’s all back on MySQL 4.0, the recent posts show like they are supposed to. Adsense Deluxe works like it’s supposed to. And all is happy here in thatedeguy land. Until the next update anyways…

Filed Under: General News Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

And We’re Back

April 24, 2008 by

It’s been a very long day.

If you haven’t visited the site (or tried) today, you probably didn’t notice that we weren’t here. The host transfer that I started way back when finally went through last night at about 10:30 local time. Unlike some people, I am in bed at that time. I didn’t even notice until I got up this morning and checked my email.

So, shiny new host for the site and nothing works. I’ve been playing around with databases and settings and files and seem to have finally gotten things to work. I’m not entirely sure what I did to fix all of it, but it’s going and hopefully will stay that way.

Hopefully, the site will perform quite a bit better now that we’ve got a new host. We’ll see, but I’ve got my fingers crossed. *I should note that I’m already seeing major improvements on the admin side.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, we made the move from Godaddy to 1and1.

Filed Under: General News Tagged With: , , ,
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