Archive for the 'The Web' tag

Technical difficulties

Monday, October 30th, 2006

Sorry about the downtime folks. Last week there was a DNS issue with my hosting company, which I thought was fixed. But I discovered it was happening again today. Basically this site wasn’t working if you went to ‘www.bloy.net’, but it was loading fine if you went to ‘bloy.net’ (without the www).

Anyway, the support technician promised me the problem has been resolved.

Happy (belated) Blog Day

Friday, September 1st, 2006

Yesterday was Blog Day. A day that was designated so people can get to know other bloggers and other areas of interest. To celebrate, bloggers are suppose to post a recommendation of fives blogs, so their readers can discover previously unknown blogs. I thought it would be a good idea to participate, even if I am a day late. So without further ado…

Mixed Signals: an NPR Blog - The tagline for this is “News breaks, music plays, technology advances, art happens, people think.” A good summary for a blog that has the quality you would expect from the people at National Public Radio.

Sierra Club Compass - Explore, enjoy, and protect the planet.

My last three blogs are written by people who can be very inspiring to me in my job (as a Web Services Librarian). All three write about the library technology field.

Keep up the good work folks!

Password paranoia

Monday, August 7th, 2006

I do all of my bill-paying online. The one downside of accessing your online accounts are passwords. Passwords should be strong, and also unique for each account you have. I keep mine fairly strong and unique with a system — basically I use a series of letters and numbers that is different for each website. I don’t want to go into details (for obvious reasons), but as long as I know the sequence, it’s a pretty easy system to use.

This morning I was reading an article about identity theft, and a specific case involving a stolen laptop. As I was reading the article, it occurred to me: even though I have that password system, I keep a file with that information my computer. That file has links to the websites, login names, and passwords for ALL of my accounts (including bank and credit card accounts). If someone were to break in and steal my computer…

I just finished removing all password information from that file.

How secure are your passwords?

Worst URLs?

Thursday, July 13th, 2006

Good Idea: Getting a domain name for your company.
Bad Idea: Not realizing the domain name can mean something else…

Leave the kids at home when you buy flowers or trees at the Mole Station Native Nursery. www.molestationnursery.com

Who Represents is a website where you can find the agent that represents your favorite celebrity. Just don’t forget the gifts when you visit. www.whorepresents.com

Get a custom-made pen from Pen Island. www.penisland.net

And last but not least, the website for an Italian Power Generator company. www.powergenitalia.com

Yes, these are actual domain names. Visit the Top 10 unintentionally worst company URLs for the full list.

Random links

Saturday, June 17th, 2006

Just a few interesting links I’ve come across lately.

Web stats for play bloys

Saturday, April 29th, 2006

I usually try to take a look at the statistics for this web site once a month or so. One of the things you can see in the stats, are the search phrases people used to get to your site. Every month, without fail, at least a couple of visitors arrive here by searching for the phrases “play bloy” or “bloy job.”

I’m going to make two assumptions here.

  1. These people can’t type very well.
  2. They did not find what they were looking for.

Of course by posting this entry, I’m going to get even more hits from swingin’ play bloys looking for bloy jobs. Move along fellas, nothing to see here…

Downtime

Thursday, April 20th, 2006

My hosting company was having severe problems with one of its servers yesterday — the server this website is on. The good news is everything has been restored and is back to normal. The bad news is emails sent to addresses on this domain from early Wednesday morning through about 5pm have been lost in the void. If you’ve sent anything to me, or the two other people with bloy.net addresses, you should send it again.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.