I’ve being following Michael Sica’s blog for many months now. Michael was building a Project Management tool named Unity. Recently he decided that it’s better to drop it and start over.
Along with his friend Jeff Marder, they intend to build a brand new product. Their efforts will be described on their blog.
Personally, I think it was a good decision and I wish them best of luck!
I stumbled upon Wikimedia’s page about the servers they are currently running.
We are talking about 100 servers running MySQL, Apache, Squid or misc stuff. It’s impressive and it tangles my mind how all this stuff works together! I would love to read such a detailed description of an even bigger / more complex data provider, like Google, Yahoo! etc
Not even two months ago I was writing about increasing spam on this blog. Back then I installed Hashcash which indeed solved the problem.
Hashcash sends me an email whenever ~20 spam attempts are blocked (whenever it’s spam log gets to 8kb actually). I am now at the point where I receive about 10 such emails per day! That’s more than 200 spam attempts per day, more spam than I receive on my 5 or so email addresses. Fortunately Hashcash can be configured to either not send emails or keep a bigger log before sending.
Well, I really do have more important things I should be doing. But I was bored and somehow I found myself at the Wordpress Theme Browser, looking at all the available themes.
So, I downloaded a theme I liked (from H P Nadig), installed it, customized it and there it is now, live at http://rapidsignal.com/blog/.
I knew some people make good money from AdSense and the like, but I always thought “good money” was something like maybe a couple thousand dollars per month. I just happened to read this on problogger.com:
Adsense earnings for August - $15,849.73
I was shocked to read that number. And it’s not like he has the most popular blog of all… He has some 400+ Bloglines subscribers when JoelOnSoftware has 15.000+, kottke.org has 7.200+ and Russell Beattie has 2.700+
Update: Darren has 20 blogs! The above amount is coming from all his blogs.
I was reading an article about Palm’s fall (through Slashdot) and I remembered how fond I was of this company.
The first palm I ever owned was a B&W Palm III. It was light-years ahead of anything else, with lots of software and a battery that would last more than 2-3 weeks! I even wrote some software for it.
Anyway, the thing is I was thinking of buying a Treo, because it seemed a nice device, but the new Treo will be running Windows (!) so I guess I’ll check other Windows devices as well (and probably find something better).
Interesting article from Cringely, where he argues that Google punishes you for lowering your amount per day in AdWords. The experiment went like this:
$0.10 per day for about 15.000 clickthroughs / day
$1 per day for more than 15.000 clickthroughs / day
$0.40 per day for about 1.200 clickthroughs / day
In truth it was a bit more complicated as all tests were done to an identical test site, but it all leads to these numbers.
My latest obsession as far as games go is Urban Dead, a massive multi-player web-based game with a zombie theme.
The city is dying. Some months on from the first reported outbreak, military quarantine units have closed Malton’s borders, and are moving in to eliminate the looters, to forcibly evacuate those civilians who still refuse to leave their homes.
The city is dying, and the urban dead are filling its streets.
The nice thing is that you can only do 50 clicks per day (roughly 5 minutes of gameplay) so it’s not a time sink. But I would really love to have the time to play World of Warcraft.
Jakob Nielsen analyzes the results of a study about the conversion ratio of 1 mil. Google ad clicks (with a high 4% conversion rate). The interesting thing is that 5% of sales happened after a month from the initial visit. Another 5% was in the 12 - 30 days window. I always thought people forget quickly, so either they buy at once or never come back.
Just saw a very clever business card design over on smallbusinessbranding.com.
Original designer is here.
I just finished reading High Performance MySQL for the 2nd time. This book is full of insightful advice plus it’s relatively small (because information is packed). I rarely read IT books more than once, but this one had a lot of things I missed on the first pass.
Comment spam has increased lately on this blog. I had enabled the comment moderation word list but this has two problems:
a) Some comments still get through
b) All comments who fail to pass must then be moderated by me
I looked for good plugins and Hashcash seems the best solution. The only problem is that wp-plugins.org is down right now…
Today, as I was reading my feeds (through Bloglines), I was bothered for the first time by the number and types of ads. I think Gizmodo’s were the worst (black on orange). I hope this is not a sign of (bad) times coming. I understand why some sites must put ads on their feeds, but now I must develop new abilities in ignoring them (just like I ignore web site banners).
Lots of email (100+) and a ton of blog posts and news. And I’m only subscribed to 70 or so feeds. I wonder how some people follow hundrends of feeds…
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