Hiccup
Posted on February 13th, 2007
Two weeks ago I had a hiccup with DNS (old zone got deactivated before the new one was live) and a few caches led to resolution problems. Amazingly enough, Feedburner has problems with stuck DNS caches, so this resulted in more than a day of outage for my syndication feed.
Interestingly, the traffic has still not recovered. I guess some of the random people who’d subscribed got errors in their readers and unsubscribed.
Tags: meta, network
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Today’s quiz meme
Posted on February 4th, 2007
Tags: blogging, funny, meta
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This blog is now Safely Ignored
Posted on January 29th, 2007
About a decade after putting up my personal website, I’ve finally come up with a name for it.
Wither “Safely Ignored”? Jason and I had just finished trying to introduce some clients to the 21st century and the whole Bubble 2.0 universe. This included the usual cluetrain rambling about conversing with your customers rather than shouting at them, and a lesson on long tail markets. All part of the usual attempt to shake marketers of their old “push the message to the golden consumer” habits.
Afterwards, we engaged in a bit of catharsis among ourselves. Sure, there is money in the long tail and it’s never wise to ignore any person with an important message, regardless of how obscure they seem.
But not everyone has something important to say. And the short tail of highly-influential people are still more likely to spread any given message. There are still a lot of people out there who have small audiences and nothing groundbreaking to add to the conversational market… witness most Usenet posts from aol.com, most pages on Geocities, most posts on MySpace, and most little personal sites like this one. We may be safely ignored.
Tags: blogging, marketing, meta, web
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Aggregating myself
Posted on January 21st, 2007
Apologies to readers subscribed via RSS or email (all 33 of you) for any spam recently with posts entitled “Daily Bookmarks”. I accidently live-tested a new feature I’ve hacked together, where a nightly process will automatically post the bookmarks I’ve saved during the day as a blog post.
I hope to offer a feed that does not include these auto-generated posts before I add more that include bike ride log summaries, weekly music charts, restaurant reviews, etc.
Tags: meta
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Fearless
Posted on January 20th, 2007
In July of 1995, I finally got around to registering some domain names for myself. I didn’t even have my own servers, but I saw a sort of land grab taking shape and wanted to homestead. Among others, I grabbed phobia.com, merely because I thought hostnames like agora.phobia.com for mail services and arachne.phobia.com for that new web thing would be fun. (I didn’t think to reserve my own name until much later.)
I later moved my personal website from nyx.net to phobia.com, where it resided for nearly a decade before I decided to center my personal brand on the trademark I was born with. It will still take years to move away from “phobia”, if I ever manage to change every online account I left its footprint on.
Late October 2006 I sold it for a tidy sum to a fellow who is big in the “internet real estate” industry. There was some drama as I got larger offers after already agreeing to the sale, but I decided my integrity is worth a few grand, even if only escrow.com would have thought less of me. He turned around and sold it for nearly twice as much, but that appears to have been to a subsidiary for the IRS’s benefit.
I’ve not been made wealthy overnight, but it will sure help pay for the wedding.
Tags: meta, personal
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