Owner: Useful Concept URL:www.usefulconcept.com Join Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 17:09:47 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: Technology, Reviews, Commentary and More. Site statistics:Click here
Time to get something done. 2007-04-20 19:56:00 I found a great blog entry with an idea on how to be more productive. Basically modify your hosts file so that your favorite sites are redirected to 127.0.0.1. then create a schedule that rewrites that hosts file every 15 minutes. Even if you manually modify it to visit one of the sites 15 minutes later it goes back to localhost!
Brilliant!
Read more:something
Pageflakes Feeds 2007-04-19 22:32:00 In my recent quest to up the profile of my blog I have been adding my feed to various aggregators, directories and such. One site I came across is a pretty nice start page / portal called PageFlakes. In additon to having a nice portal home page tool they also have a good RSS reader and they allow you to make any 'flake' into a widget to embed in any other site. I submited my RSS feed to them to included into their pack of feeds and they accepted. I kind of wished I spent more time in my tags I suggested, as it doesn't look like I can modify now.
From their email:
I am writing you to let you know that your Feed Submission to the
Pageflakes
Gallery has been successful. Your RSS Feed is now available
to all Pageflakes Users in the Community Site at:
http://www.pageflakes.com/Community/Content/Feeds.aspx?Sort=0
cfunited 2007-04-19 16:05:00 Speaking of conferences I just booked the hotel for CFUnited. Once again I booked the hotel too late and I wasn't able to get a room at the actual conference center. I will be a couple miles down the road instead, which is really really frustrating. Plus the conference rate has expired as of April 14th, so when I made my reservation over the phone they wanted to charge me $240 a night instead of the $180 advertised rate.
I went back to the cfunited site and found a link that still applied the conference rate and got it at the lower price, so I am happy (ish) about that. I will try to call in a month or so and see if I can get moved over to the main hotel. Would certainly be nice.
coldfusion conference on Cruise boat 2007-04-19 15:07:00 Is there any interest in having a small to medium sized conference
on ColdFusion or perhaps web development in general, but on a cruise boat? It is often done in other industries, why not in ours? In doing a bit of research I see that someone has done it or tried to do it a few years ago. I wonder how it went...
If there were sufficient interest I wouldn't mind investigating further. Couldn't be too hard to put together something on a small scale. Something large like cfunited would certainly be another story.
Read more:Cruise
Removing BlogCatalog 2007-04-18 20:07:00 I have decided to remove BlogCatalog from my blog. The performance is poor often, and it slows down my page load times because of it. I also find it of little value right now. There are some interesting blogs on the site, and nice people but for the most part it is filled with people pushing 'make money with your blog' type blogs and begging for link sharing, etc.
I am keeping mybloglog for now. I find it is a bit more social and interesting and has a larger user base I am not sure what the future will hold for it beyond a novelty. Yahoo may do something interesting... only time will tell.
Samsung SCH-u740 Review 2007-04-18 01:44:00 I have been in dire need for a new cell phone for some time now. I have been using a Treo for a VERY long time. I started with the Treo 270, then the 300 and finally a Treo 600. All of them had significant hardware and software problems. I can't count the times I had to send one back for speaker issues, mic issues, etc. In fact they finally stopped letting me. So I had to fix them myself. Yes, I had to take apart my 600 a few times to properly insulate the phone from the battery interference. No more expensive Treo phones for me.
[More]
Read more:Samsung
Why we want you to be Rich - Review 2007-04-16 16:19:00 Why We Want You to Be Rich is a book written by Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki. Most people know Donald Trump by now, either from his TrumpTowers or the Apprentice TV show. Robert Kiyosaki has other books out in a series called Rich Dad Poor Dad.
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Automatic more/ with BlogCFC 2007-04-13 00:39:00 I wanted to have BlogCFC automatically add the more/ tag into my blog posts. I first thought that I should count the chars of the post, and if over a certain size add the tag somewhere in the middle. However that really didn't offer much control or predictability.
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I'm On Vacation! 2007-04-12 23:48:00 Just a quick note to let my loyal blog readers know I may not be posting much for the next 4 days. Jen and I are leaving the surprisingly blustery New Hampshire seacoast to visit family in Naples, Florida. Warm weather here we come!
On a related note I will still be reading email, so fire away.
Read more:Vacation
They Might Be Giants - Dial A Song 2007-04-12 02:31:00 A group of us are going to see They Might Be Giants
in a few weeks at The Stone Church. I am a fan of TMBG and am really looking forward to it. For my Birthday last Friday Jen bought me a CD with 20+ of their songs. It is titled Dial a Song. I am embarased to say I had no idea what the reference was for. After reading up a bit I am just floored about what they did with an answering machine in the 80's.
It seems that shortly after they started as a band bad luck had befallen them. They were unable to play out much and had wanted an outlet for their creative ideas. The answering machine had just come into popularity and so they thought it would be a great (genius!) idea to record snippets of their song ideas on it, and just let it play for those that called in. They published the phone number in ads for local Brooklen/NYC papers and became near instant celebraties. The number is (718) 387-6962 and is still going today. They cal
Need for an RSS Aggregator Service? 2007-04-10 19:29:00 I find myself really wanting to build my own aggregator of RSS feeds. I use Google's custom home page for my rss needs, and for the most part it works pretty well. But I dont' want to add all the RSS feeds I like to it, just not enough room. What I really want is one box that I have display a merged version of 10 different feeds. These are my friends and such who only post once every few days. It would take less space and offer an easier interface for me. Am I alone?
I think there could be a real value in a web portal that you can send a list of feeds and it will create a custom merged feed from. It would have its own page but also be available as a feed for whatever needs. You can do this with Yahoo Pipes, but pipes has issues that prevent it from being as useful as it could be. A it isn't easy to find aggregations that already exist. B it is quite slow. C the interface is intimidating to all but techies. D I c Read more:Aggregator
, Service
RPM Challenge Jukebox Powered by Flex 2007-04-08 03:58:00 For those that don't know RPM Challenge
is a great project that pushes bands and individual musicians to write perform and record an entire new album in the month of February. It started last year as a local thing in the seacoast of NH and had 160+ bands complete and entire album.
This year it went international. Well over 2000 bands signed up representing every continent including Antartica. Of those that signed up 860+ bands completed an album. That is 860+ new albums made of independant music. The listening party was last week and happened in major cities all across North America, as well as 6 venues in Portsmouth NH simultaniously. I participated the first year, but wasn't able to complete an album this year. Next year for sure!
Well, the long and short of it is that most of the bands that completed the challenge allowed their music to be heard. Each selected their top track and that track is now on a jukebox. The jukebox is p Read more:Jukebox
Toyota Prius Review 2007-04-07 20:47:00 I have owned my ToyotaPrius
for a few years now. Its a 2004 Prius Black and sexy as hell. I still get a fair number of questions about it. They are either 'How does it work?' type of questions or 'Do you still like it' types.
First, I should mention that we are actually a multi Prius family. I put my Prius on order and two weeks later my girlfriend at the time (now wife) put one on order for herself. Little did we know that her parents had also ordered one. A few months later all three Prius were delivered and we were happy as clams. Me with my Black, Jen with her Red and Jens parents with their Silver.
The photos of black prius always have tinted windows like that. The car isn't that cool looking though without the tint. I didn't tint them, but secretly I want to. HOT.
To date none of us have had any trouble with the cars. They work exactly like they are supposed to. I have only done basic maintenance.&nbs Read more:Toyota Prius
Making Money with Agloco? 2007-04-07 19:02:00 I have seen a few blog posts lately about a new company called Agloco. This company has a tool being released in the next couple days that you attach as a toolbar onto your browser. Based on your browsing you earn money from advertising viewed.
The twist here is that you don't earn it directly. Instead the company distributes its earning to members based on their usage. Also based on their referral group.
The way the referral group works seems a bit like a pyramid scheme to me. I refer you all to the system. You refer it to others, etc. They all become part of my group and add to my participation. Not sure what the payout breakdown is exactly. Honestly I don't think they are either.
Still it is an interesting idea. I have decided to sign up and give it a try. You never know. You want to take a look? Here is the link.
Read more:Money
Spiffy New Design for Blog 2007-04-06 03:09:00 I was so tired of my lame looking blog I decided to do something about it. I found an open source design by NodeThirtyThree to use. The original design was only two column. So I made it wider and added another narrow column.
I use BlogCFC (thanks Ray) as my blog engine and so I opted to upgrade to the latest version of BlogCFC at the same time. Upgrading was simple enough, as was integrating my new design.
Please let me know if you see anything off. I have tested in IE7 and FF but I don't have IE6 here to test with.
Of course when I decided to do all of this I also decided to upgrade my server to BlueDragon 7. I did have a few programming quirks to fix, but mostly things that BD 6 did that it shouldn't have done and were fixed in 7.
All in all it has been a good 24 hours!
FCKeditor with BlogCFC and protecting tags 2007-04-21 00:44:00 I added FCKeditor to my blog the other day, and I am quite happy I did. One thing the editor does, however, is alter things like the < more/ > tag. So I have been looking around this evening for a way to protect those tags. I found a few people asking for the functionality, but very little that seemed conclusively to work. Time to do some google searches.
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where does one draw the line? 2007-04-24 03:50:00 I am getting much more traffic to my blog after my recent efforts to do a make over. That is great, don't get me wrong. I am also getting a lot of emailed requests to link, promote or review sites or producuts I have no connection or interest in.
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Google Adsense API for ColdFusion? 2007-04-23 00:09:00 I see that Google
has released the API for adsense to all developers now. I have a possible project to use it with and haven't found anyone that has done it with ColdFusion
yet. I will not have a chance to play with it for a few weeks at least, but I will be sure to post here and release the CF API if no others have been found before then. If you know of one, post a comment!
For those that are not familiar, you can use the API for many things. One is to share revenue with other users. So if you have a site with many content contributors you can let them create adsense accounts (or use their already existing) and specify the percentage shared. It is a good way to encourage user participation for many sites. You can set the shared % that you keep from 0-75%. Plus you get a bonus if the user reaches certain milestones within the first 180 days.
Read more:Adsense
, Google Adsense
google search clusters and pagerank 2007-04-28 20:31:00 My blog is getting some odd search traffic patterns. I see that for a given hour I may have 5 or more people search on 'hp dv9000t' and come to my blog entry. Then no searches at all. Then hours later another cluster. Those searches are done by different people, different browser, ip, os etc. I have been trying to figure out why they come in clusters for a few days when I found out that my google page rank may be going from 5 to 6.
Is moving to a PR of 6 a possible explanation? Google's servers are numerous and so when you search it is likely you are hitting different servers at different times. Maybe the cluster is from a server with a PR of 6? Seems far fetched to me, but it is the only thing I can think of at the moment.
Home Renovation no no's 2007-04-27 21:28:00 Jen and I are no strangers to home renovation. We are, however, quite aware of our own limitations in knowledge and skill and are more than happy to call the experts when needed. I love these sorts of sites who show photos of home projects gone horribly wrong. Some of the photos you need to read the description to understand completely, but photos like this speak volumes.
Read more:Renovation
DataMgr Rocks! 2007-04-27 00:59:00 IF you haven't already checked it out you really should give DataMgr a look. There was a ColdFusion meetup (all online) meeting where Steve showed off DataMgr and answered questions. I think I must have said 'damn, that would have saved me time' at least 15 times.
At first I thought it was mostly for getting DB structure info, creating and altering tables, etc. But there is real power in the data management, relationships, etc. Watch the recorded video (to be posted shortly). Check out the demo, and download the code today. This would have saved me so much time last month. I have half a mind to rewrite a lot of my code to use this now.
Read more:Rocks
Continue with Kontera 2007-04-26 18:28:00 I was just writing to my friend Chris and discussing my use of Kontera when I realized it may make for a good little blog entry. Kontera is the service that adds all those extra links in my blog text and if you click on them a little pop up opens to show you an ad.
Basically for every 100 or so page views I figure I get .01 - .30 dollars. Right now I just don't have enough traffic to justify the busy look that the links give my blog. I do wish this blog generated 100,000 page views a day, but that just isn't going to happen. So should I keep it or give it the boot?
Read more:Continue
CF Conferences 2007-04-25 16:35:00 I will not be able to make CF.Objective this year. Just wasn't in the cards. I am, however, excited to go to CFUnited again. If you haven't been to CFUnited you should try to fit it in. There are great sessions for all experience levels and the networking is also fantastic. It really helps to have a few other developers outside of your organization you can chat with about CF from time to time.
IF you are already planning on going, book the hotel now. The main conference hotel is already full, and I am stuck 1.5 miles down the road. Bummer man.
Read more:Conferences
Static Publication of Dynamic Content 2007-04-25 01:31:00 We have a client who needs to take the content and pages of our Coldfusion CMS and store the information as static HTML on another site and possibly server. Whenever we get a request like this I like to find a way to build the functionality into the core product if it is feasible. In reviewing their needs I found a few possible ways to go.
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Read more:Dynamic
, Content
Poll, Rating and Comment Widgets for your site. 2007-04-24 15:20:00 I found this handy little site that quickly and easily lets you add a poll, comment area or rating to any page on your site. You simply add two lines of js code. I am doing a poll. On adding those lines you view the page. You are shown an admin interface to add/remove poll options, and how it expires, etc. Viewers of your page see nothing until you have saved your options.
Read more:Rating
, Comment
Spam Stock Tracker in the Press 2007-05-01 19:01:00 This summer we should be seeing some good press for my Spam StockTracker
. Be on the look out for Kiplinger Personal Finance magazine as well as something from Consumer Reports.
On a side note I have done a quick update to the design, and plan on adding more features to the site shortly. A lot of the spam is from old ticker symbols that have changed (though the values are all real time). Any suggestions, let me know.
Read more:Press
Johnchow.com review 2007-05-01 18:37:00 For those that don't know Johnchow.com is a web site with lots of tips on how to make money online. Some I think are good, some are what we would term as 'evil' and some just don't apply to a blog like mine. One thing he will do, though, is link to any blog that review
s his. I figure, why not. Maybe get some traffic I wouldn't otherwise get, and all that jazz. To do so you just do a quick review and link to his blog (as I did below). He has one interesting post about the blog day of silence that happened a couple days ago and how it could be used for link baiting. I hadn't even considered it... but I am not surprised by anything these days.
John Chow dot Com is blog that helps you make money online. If you do a review of his blog, he’ll link to you so his readers can check you out.
I've got blog juice! 2007-05-01 03:19:00 On a rather silly note I ran the blog juice web site against my blog again today. When I ran this last year my score was 0.9 and last month it was 1.2. So I am improving. Still not sure what blog juice is... but I have more of it now!
Google Adsense API Headers with ColdFusion 2007-04-30 18:14:00 This weekend I was having trouble connecting to the GoogleAdsense
API. I was certain my headers were set up correctly, and yet google responded that my headers didn't exist. Turns out I had my namespace incorrect. Once that was rectified the API was easy to get at. I haven't played with the data all that much, but they sure make it easy thus far.
[More]
Read more:Headers
, ColdFusion
, Google Adsense
consol game idea 2007-04-29 17:36:00 We had a small party last night and somehow all got around to playing guitar hero and dance dance revolution on our xbox360. It was a lot of fun and I got to thinking that a great idea for a game would involve both.
Why not make a game that had the guitar, and dance pad at the same time. Throw in some karaoke and maybe some of those motion sensitive drum sticks? Make it really fun for a whole group to play at the same time. All the equipment already exists I believe. It would add a whole new level to the 'family band' idea. Note: Dad, if your reading this tell your clients!
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