Category: noted in passing

Someone somewhere is probably documenting the best way to do this — disentangle yourself from Google’s scuttling of RSS — already…

I turned off Feedburner as the host for my feeds/syndication links. Haven’t seen yet where they appear upon the page so people can pick them up directly. I may have to turn it back on until I can figure that out.

I may as well remove AdSense as that never yields a blessed thing.

Starting experimenting with a few other things I haven’t touched in awhile…stuffing web access logs into MySQL for some kind of reporting (more than a nightly summary) is something I should have looked at ages ago. Not sure if I have logs all the way back to 2002 (!) or what I’ll have to learn about database design to make this work on my underpowered (Shuttle XPC, dual core P4 at 2.mumble gHz, 1 Gb ram — hey, it came from FreeCycle, what can I say?) server.

Reading this back reminds me that of all the lies I learned in school, the one about the key value in long term employability was the ability to learn and grow is the biggest. From what I see in the market, it means “we want people who have already learned the stuff we want on someone else’s time. We’re not interested in your ability to learn if we have to pay for it.” Buzzwords, TLAs, commoditized protocols and standards, not deep understanding or experience, rule the day.

In response to Reader’s projected demise, I wonder if I can mirror my G+ shares here, rather than find out in years to come that they’re shuttering that service as well? I have used Google Takeout to pull a copy but I wonder if anyone has built a parser/extractor to turn those shares into WordPress or whathaveyou posts?

If you are a subscriber to this mess, leave a comment. I’m trying to decide if I should dump it all down the memory hole. I think indexers spend more time here than actual humans. And it’s not like I update it ever…

A post I read this weekend got me thinking about this online writing business, the difference between amateur and professional, the virtues of doing it without concern for payment. When your most-read post yields exactly zero return, even with thinly-veiled pleas for some recompense, you know where you stand.

So I may accept the value assigned by a discerning public.

I got started with this as an extension of my work in publishing and the Internet, but it may be an experiment that has run its course.

So much for the promise of website advertising. I didn’t expect to get rich. The ads presented have no contextual relationship to the content, it’s no surprise the click through rate is abysmal.

This is over several years, since March 2008, not a monthly payout. Since you don’t a check til your total reaches $100, I should see a payment in June 2014.

I wanted to see what posts were being shared through Google+.

#!/usr/local/bin/bash
echo "
"
for i in `grep google-plus /var/log/httpd/httpd-access.log | cut -d" " -f7 | sed 's|?share=google-plus-1||g'`; 
do export URL=http://paulbeard.org$i ; echo -n "
" ; GET $URL | grep \||g' | cut -d"< " -f1 ; echo "
" 
done 
echo "
"

Ugly, I know. Don’t ask how much time I wasted trying to get a regex that would pull the title text from between the title tags. I could use sed to remove text but not match and retain. As the quote runs,

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think
“I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.

*sigh*