I was reading a post on Binary Moon today and felt compelled to leave a comment.  While doing so, I noticed something that said “dofollow” and clicked the link.  It seems there is a plugin I had not heard of called “dofollow”.

Written in the base code of WordPress is a “nofollow” command.  This means that when a search engine crawls your site it does not count the web pages entered by your commenters.   This has been in there for a while, and was done to combat the number of comment spammers who were over running the web.  However, with the addition of so many spam killers, I can’t tell you the last time a spam comment made it to the site.  And even if one does, I delete it within an hour or two.

Well, it seems the “nofollow” no longer makes sense, and someone wrote a plugin to turn it off.   It’s a nice way of thanking your commenters, and giving them a little link love for commenting on what you wrote.  Once installed, you can select the option for it to wait for a comment to turn X number of days old before it will remove the command, giving you time to delete any potential spam comments.

I have now installed it, and barring any hiccups, I will be leaving it there as a “thank you” to everyone who leaves a comment.  I highly recommend everyone with a WordPress blog do the same.

*sigh*

Okay folks, enough with The Last Supper already.

Someone has taken a 16 gigapixel picture of the painting so you can study every detail.  And, I admit, it’s fun to look at as you can see every crack in the wall it’s painted on to, but, really, is this necessary?

Can we just get past the whole The Da Vinci Code obsession and get on with our lives?  Yes, it was a “fun” book.  Not really a “good” book, or even a “great” book, it was fun fluff.  Nothing more.  Yes, the person to the right of Jesus has a bit of a feminine look to them, but this still doesn’t point to some great mystery.

The “floating knife” is clearly in Peter’s hand, and, yes, it is held at an odd angle, but it still doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

This is like the guy who reversed the image and “discovered” all sorts of “secrets”.   It’s a painting!  Yes, it is famous.  Yes, it is gorgeous to look at.  Does it mean it holds some amazing secrets about the life of Jesus?  No.  Does it mean Dan Brown’s book was true?  No.

I just can’t believe the amount of energy and technology that gets wasted on this non-story.

I got a chance to take a quick look around NBC’s new “private beta” site today, Hulu.com. This site has been causing quite the stir as it seems this is why NBC pulled their shows from iTunes, and if the current content is any indication, Fox won’t be far behind.

There are two types of videos on the site: Full length TV shows & movies and highlight clips.

I’m not sure what the strategy is here. There is an enormous amount of older shows on the site, most with thriving DVD sales, so you have to wonder why NBC would want to undercut their own sales. I can either buy season 1 of Arrested Development, or I can just go on Hulu and watch it.

Huh?

That’s not to mention there are some full length movies on there as well. Not that I really want to sit in front of my computer for two hours just to watch a movie, but the option is there.

I’m sure NBC has something up there sleeve with this, but what it is, I’m not quite sure yet. It’ll be great if you miss a recent episode though, or your DVR gets too full (as mine tends to do).

You know what I love about the Internet? Randomness.

The other day I’m doing my normal Gmail run when I get a note from someone named Dave talking about how he agrees with me about the wonders of compact fluorescent bulbs and he mentions I should check out his blog sometime when I have a moment. Well, as I visit, on average, 600+ websites in a week between my various jobs, what’s one more?

So I jet on by DavesDetours.com and somehow this guy has hooked up with Hanes to go around the country talking to people about how the stay comfortable.  However, I noticed as I watched the videos, very rarely does he ever get around to that question.  Instead he ends up doing things like arm wresting 50 Cent (and loses his watch to the rapper) or dancing with the FSU all-girls dance team.

In short… if there are any companies looking to sponsor a grumpy, middle-aged, over weight guy to travel around the country to promote your product… I’m available.

Seriously, how do you land a gig like this?!?  It reminds me a bit of when Jeff Probst was considering leaving the hosting gig on Survivor.   He said in several interviews that he wanted to leave, travel the world, see some sights, experience other cultures… it then dawned on him that he was being PAID to do this.  I want a job where I get paid to just travel around and do things.  Sure, it is work, but what a way to earn your living.

Anyway, if you get a moment, swing by Dave’s, it’s amusing.

So with two full days of playing with the BlackBerry 8830, what do I think?

I love it!

The battery life seems to drain a bit fast, but otherwise the phone is a dream to use.  And best of all, with my 7290, I was lucky if I got 1 bar of signal when standing next to the door of the warehouse, which was no where near my desk.  With the 8830, I’m getting 2 to 3 bars at my desk.  How, I have no idea, but I’m cetainly not going to argue with it.  No more going outside twice a day to check for texts!

The trackball is so much nicer to use than the  old trackwheel that used to be the standard on BlackBerry’s.  It makes navigation a breeze.

The full-color screen, use of ringtones, while old-hat to most, too bad, it’s new to me and I’m loving it.  Number 1 though has to be using it at my desk.  A dream come true for me.  I’ve been waiting years for a phone I could use all day.

Overall, a great little device, and I’m loving it.

I was cleaning my desk during this whole computer saga (the tower is back… it was wiped and is working fine), and I noticed something: Why do I still have a huge pile of blank 3.5″ floppy disks?

I haven’t had a computer with a 3.5″ drive in years, yet I have a stack of approximately 30 blanks that I’ve been moving around from office-to-office with me.

It just made me think about how important this format used to be to the computing world.  Everyone would have spares of these laying around, cataloged full ones, and so on.  And when you think about it, they only stored 1.44mb each, not even enough for one MP3 file.  Now I carry around SD cards that can store 2GB, and if I dropped them, I could lose them forever for not being able to find them for being so small.

Just makes me ponder where we will be a few years from now.  Will I look at my 2GB thumb drive and snicker?

Well, through no choice of my own, I’ve switched my BlackBerry and my carrier.

My contract with T-Mobile didn’t expire until April 2nd of next year, but since my BlackBerry 7290 stopped charging for some odd reason… I was kinda stuck.

Well, my parents had a spare line on their Sprint family plan, and I could upgrade to a BlackBerry fairly cheaply over there, so I went for it.  Now I’ll be using an 8830 which has more features and is, in general, is just prettier.

I should get the phone either tomorrow or Monday, so expect a full review at some point, but I have a feeling I’m going to like it more.

I swear I’ve gotten to the point I just despise computers.

This is exactly what my Dimension 5150 looks like, even down to the card reader.  Now, as far as I can tell, what’s going on is NOT Dell’s fault, but… Windows XP is just totally screwed up.  And I mean BADLY screwed up.  To the point the computer is going in to the shop and being wiped clean and everything reinstalled.

Now, yes, I thought about saying “Screw it, let’s go Mac”, but, this computer is only a little over a year old, and the XP install has always been a tiny bit funky.  So, I figure it’s worth the $90 I’m paying some techs to do all this (they’re also going to use an air compressor on it, and run some hard disk checks), and see if this one can be salvaged.

But I am just so darn fed up with computer problems.  They seem never-ending.  I will, however, say this has probably been the least stressed I have ever been over a computer crash due to my automated back-up, Carbonite.  I’ve talked about it before, so I won’t bore you, but what a peace of mind knowing my most important files are already backed up and just waiting to be put back in their proper homes as soon as I’m ready.

Never the less, it’s going to be a fun couple of days reinstalling everything.  The joys of technology.

Well, this is an odd feeling.   It seems I work for the #1 blog in the UK (the link keeps going up and down) and I didn’t even know it.  True, it was only announced today, but still, kinda cool.

When I joined Mashable, we were 12th on the Technorati world list, and since then I’ve seen us go to #9, and our current position at #8.  We have quite a way to go to become #7, and I fear we may get caught by those damned LOL cats at some point.

And I have to say it felt a bit odd being pointed out by name in Pete’s (the owner) post as I don’t feel I’ve contributed that much, but it was nice to be acknowledged all the same.  (for those who would like to take a gander, you can find a full archive of my posts here)

And the first cancellation of the season goes to… Viva Laughlin.

I can’t say as I’m surprised. As usual, we try to import a show from England and we totally botch it up. With Hugh Jackman involved I had some hope of it being a worthy copy of Blackpool, which I enjoyed, but, alas, it sucked.

They did so much wrong it’s hard to even begin to figure out where it went wrong.  I think namely the actors sang WITH the original singers was part of the problem.  The writing was flat, most of the acting was over-the-top, and it just didn’t catch the right vibe of the original.

Oh well, I kinda knew this would happen, but I still checked it out, and now I have one less show to worry about.

I’m trying desperately to get ahead on my various blogging projects, and I swear, it never works.

Daily Blog Tips did a great post on this a while back (seriously, every blogger needs to have this in their RSS feed). The post was about six tips for a more stress-free blogging life, and #4 really jumped out at me:

4. Write more than you publish

Like the simple but true ’spend less that you earn’ principle of saving, you can develop a surplus of blog posts by writing more than you publish.

Let’s say you wrote one extra blog post a week for one year. At the end of the year, you’d have 52 surplus posts: enough to put your blog on autopilot for almost two months! You can also dip into these surplus posts when you don’t feel like writing, or experience some other kind of blogging emergency.

I love this idea, and with a possible trip in my future (I’m not jinxing myself this time, and not saying a word until I have a ticket!), I need some surplus posts built up. I would rather not use them, but it would just be nice to know they’re around if I need them.  The problem lies in the fact that I’m trying to do it for more than just this blog.

All told, I have four mandatory posts a day to do, and one big post that I work on at night.  So I am already generating five posts a day, every day.  Two of the four daily ones, I can build up a surplus, the other two are to timely.  And the big night time one, I need to talk to my editor to see how he wants to handle it.

But, with my day job, and already writing so much content each day, I’m just burned out by the time I get to the “extra writing” portion of the day.  That’s part of why I’m doing these real late night posts on this blog so that I can possibly free up some time elsewhere.

No, this post had no real point, but I’m frustrated and I want some surplus posts darn it!

I’m not sure why, but Yahoo! Mail just tends to annoy me more than anything else any more.

Correction: Yahoo! in general annoys me, but I’ll be specific to the mail.

After a post I did in August, where Roy and Luis taught me, via comments, about the aspects of GMail I was missing out on, I have totally fallen in love with GMail.  It really shows the flaws of Yahoo! Mail though.

I had been using Yahoo’s email for awhile for business emails so I could access them from anywhere, especially solicitations from vendors.  What I’m finding now is that older emails tend not to load.  It’ll say they’re loading… and then nothing.  I’ll reload everything, try again, still not loading.  Sometimes it takes 3 – 4 tries to get them to finally work.

A lot of people signal the fact Yahoo! Mail offers you “unlimited” storage, but what good does that do you if you can never read them?  The interface is showing it’s archaic age, as is all of Yahoo!, and you have to wonder what happened to this once king of the Internet?

Google could very easily sit on their laurels at this point, but instead they are constantly innovating.  I do wonder sometimes if they are going to reaching a breaking point by expanding too fast, in too many directions, but for now, they seem to have a handle on things.  In the email department, once I learned how to do labels, I can’t believe how smooth the whole system runs.  I have never been unable to reach a piece of email (*knocks on wood*), and the only flaw I’ve ever run in to is my contacts list sometimes fails to load, but it usually shows up in a minute or two.

So, can Yahoo save itself?  It could, possibly, but every day they let slip by is another nail in their coffin.  GMail is becoming one of the most common used applications on the web , and Yahoo is going to have to copy some aspects of it if they hope to survive.  The first thing they need is a completely new interface, and hopefully one built on AJAX.

For those who don’t know what AJAX is, it’s a web language that allows a portion of a page to refresh without the whole page having to do it.  Take for instance when you archive something from your inbox in GMail, you notice it disappears, the inbox shifts, but the whole page doesn’t disappear to accomplish that, that’s AJAX at work.  It’s faster, less annoying to the user, and much faster since only a portion of the page reloads.

It probably comes down to a design aesthetic,  but Yahoo needs to get their head out of their behinds and get cracking.  I for one have left, and and don’t see myself going back unless there are major changes.