Category: meta

I’m switching my comment provider to blogger, so for the next while please excuse any weirdness with the blog / comments.

Update: The new comments are up and running – though it’s still pretty sketchy. For now I’m keeping the old comments enabled in the archives. We’ll see how long I keep them.

I think more blogs should have trackbacks. What is a trackback you ask? Well the Wikipedia defines it as a system “that alerts and allows bloggers to see who has blogged about his or her posts on his or her blog. The system works by sending a ‘ping’ between the blogs, and there[by] providing the alert.”

In other words it’s a nice way to keep up with what other bloggers are saying about your posts. So far, I haven’t had any trackbacks (except for the ones I pinged myself), maybe that should tell me something. Anyway there’s a possibility that it’s just because not enough people know how to use trackbacks. I want you to know, though, it’s easy to ping a trackback – and you don’t even need to have trackbacks on your site.

The process goes something like this (assuming the trackback is from Haloscan): You read something on someone’s site that you would also like to write about. You then write a post on the same topic on your own site. Now you want to add a trackback, so you just copy the trackback link from the other persons site to the clipboard and ping it at Haloscan. To do that, first you must login to Haloscan and secondly Click on “Manage Trackback” in the navigation bar. There you can click on “Send a Trackback Ping”. Fill out the pertinent data like the URL to ping (the one on your clipboard) and your permanent link URL and then your trackback will be on its way. It sounds a lot more complicated than it is. Really.

Haloscan has a graphical tutorial, but in the meantime here is a list of other sites that also support trackback pings:

• Bloxsom
• Blojsom
• Movable Type
• Radio Userland

Update: I got rid of the trackbacks. The problem with trackbacks is that they allow comment spammers or in this case trackback spammers to change the content of your site without your permission. I had tons of trackbacks on my stairway to heaven page and many of them were unrelated and, for whatever reason, that just really bothers me.

The XML Feed for the site is now up and running thanks to Blogger’s Atom Feed. I just downloaded Macromedia Central to use as my news aggregator. I really like it so far except for the fact that some of the weather and movie features only work around your zip code and not around a postal code. Hopefully they update it for us Canadians, but in the meantime I’ll stick with it because it’s sweet.

Update: I’m now using Mozilla Firefox with Sage XML reader. It really IS sweet.

Update March 2025: I’m now using this RSS 2.0 Feed.

My first post on the new blog. I intend this to be a place where I can post and not have to worry about editorial censorship.

Update: I’m bringing some of my older posts from the last blog here. It’s a lot bigger job than I had imagined; hence the reason it is taking so long to do it.

I was thinking that in the remote case that my Dad ever decides he would like to post a link to a website that he has found, he probably doesn’t have the slightest idea how. So here are some simple instructions. It is probably easiest to copy the link into the clipboard. This is done by highlighting the address in the address bar, right clicking and clicking copy. Then type out the following example but paste in your address instead of the http://www.cnn.com. (right click then click paste).

This is a link to <a href=”http://www.cnn.com“>type link word(s) here</a>.

Any of the red letters can be changed but in order for the link to work, all the black text must be typed exactly and the link must be exact as well. The previous paragraph, with no colors added comes out looking like:

This is a link to type link word(s) here.

I hope this helps.

I was about to setup some stuff with my web server this morning when I accidently typed http://www.one2host.net instead of http://www.one2host.com. What I discovered is that some guy, timmbbo(at)yahoo.com, has a site dedicated to sharing with the world how bad one2host’s services are. I wish I would have known about his site before I signed up with one2host. Anyway in the remote chance that anyone is thinking about setting up their own domain and reading this site, then a good review site is 100 Best Hosting Companies (one2host didn’t make the list.)