Changing the ID column into Page Order (menu_order) column in Page Management. Note: this is not a wordpress plugin although there are plans to make it so.
Why is this made?
The Wordpress Page Management list each page along with its ID, Title, Owner, Updated details and editing buttons. However more often that not I find there's a need to see the Page Order when sorting pages out and I feel that instead of listing the Page ID, the Page Order will be more useful.
How to change it?
There are three parts to change in two different pages:
I don't think that moving forum topics to the Romper Room is doing the members any justice. Although they are a little hot on fire but they are still serious topics talking about real issues that concerns the welfare of Blogdrive members. They don't deserve to be in the Romper Room because they are not ill-mannered or arguing for the sake of arguing.
Moving these topics away from the main branch (in this case Helpee's on Fire) is like China's media control policy. I think forum moderators should re-evaluate what they move away from the main branch. It feels like censorship to me.
Please reconsider this and move them back to where they really belong.
On the issue of Blogdrive's downtime, that's what I've been saying to myself for the past god knows how long. Maybe it'll get better tomorrow, maybe it'll get better tomorrow, I should just leave this work until tomorrow, it'll get better tomorrow and so on...
And now I wonder how much patience can you give to something that doesn't give you any results at all.
And worst of all having to be insulted by another one of Blogdrive's pacifier, sigh such is the world in US of America.
Everything is officially back to normal, no not normal, I mean up and running. Since normal would mean its down or still under maintenance or unavailable in Blogdrive terms.
This is yet another major disaster. Seeing that more people participate in the forum doing the "complaining" dance. And as usual, the Blogdrive defenders (as in Sinja, JfZ and others) would step in to "defend" Blogdrive.
These people are the saviours of Blogdrive, although they are very much unappreciated both by Blogdrive and people who are angry with the service. The defenders would stand up for Blogdrive no matter what it takes, including snapping pirate's neck, being insulted for masturbating in the server room, or having sexual intercourse with one of the server wire host. (eww...)
I, in my opinion, to be honest, in my honest opinion don't like the attitude of these defenders one bit. Here are the stereotypes: 1) they lie, that the service is running smoothly when it isn't. 2) they make fun of angry Blogdrive users posters, a big NO to customer services and professionalism. Though I must admit, they don't have one single bit of reason to provide professional customer service to these people, they are VOLUNTEERS. 3) they think, it's just blogging, it's just a blog, it's just a blog host, it's just a downtime. They fail to understand the importance and economic value of service downtime. OR they knew but they are just doing what they do best, defending Blogdrive. 4) they think, it's a free service, don't complain. And if you pay, just be patient.
What I really hope for them, at the very least is to be honest with the users, do not insult their problems, and do not ever, EVER say that blogging is just another piece of toilet paper.
I've began migrating my above average post from http://seigey.blogdrive.com/. The process will take a while but it'll be worth it, it's a waste to all the time and effort wasted on permalinks and page rank but this is how it should be in the end.
-- I paid (for three years), I get kicked in the ass too.
Klubbkidd, I've been following your blog every now and then. I also know the volume of visitors you attract, I believe it's in the thousands per day category making it one of the most popular blogs on Blogdrive.
However, seeing that you are doing a serious business you should have left Blogdrive a long time ago. There are better service out there not to mention they are free too.
When BD announced that they are moving data centers, I crossed my fingers and hoped that this'll be the last time we'll be having any problems or discomfort. Till now, one month later it's just as it is before. Pointless.
I guess the only thing you'll lose when you switch, which would also be the most crucial part of it all, is your current blog address. That alone bring many other big disadvantages: Your permalinks and status that you've gathered up until today will all be lost, losing out in search engine rankings. And the complication with what your visitors are familiar with.
My advice to you is this: give BD one more chance, say two weeks. If this big moving of data center doesn't get better in two weeks, by all means, MOVE. Get outta Blogdrive, don't let your potential be hold back by some Californian startup. Flap your wings and fly.
For many times now, Blogdrive have chosen to insert an additional text into all blogs and pages "informing" users they are upgrading servers. Sure, we should actually be grateful that they are in fact "informing" us, which under normal circumstances, they don't.
Blogdrive automatically inserts this line of code into the end of all files stored on Blogdrive. Including CSS and JS files.
<p align=center>Upgrading servers. We'll be back up in a few of minutes. We are currently storing submitted entries for later processing.</p>
Now, let's not let the issue of "informing" users of downtime. The issue I'm facing now, has to do with Blogdrive, automatically inserting additional text into my .js files, making them obsolete and not working. I use lotsa external javascript files which are hosted on Blogdrive. But whenever they insert this tags, all my blogs would fail to execute.
So the solution to this problem, without informing Blogdrive of the problem (as they are always too "busy" to pay any attention to a Magnum (plan 4) subscriber such as myself), I simple insert a double slash at the very end of all my js documents.
It does the trick, wonderfully. By inserting a double slash, I basically "comment-out" the auto-inserted code.
Oh, how genius of me to stop a war, not get angry fix the small problem.
Job title: Archivist Description of position: Using MACs, duties will include: scanning and studying pictures; providing picture sellers with the images they require; meeting press and magazine requirements; and updating the website bank of pictures. The postholder will be working independently and will be working on a two-week probation period for a fixed fee before January 2007.
The position is due to commence in February 2007.
Employer: Homes of Football About the company: Photographer specialising in images of football.
Location: Ambleside, Cumbria. Skills they're looking for: Logical, autonomous and able to cope with computer crashes.
Salary: £17,000 How to apply: Send CV and CL to Stuart Clarke, The Homes of Football, 100 Lake Road, Ambleside, Cumbria LA22 0DB Tel: 01539 434440 E-mail: info@homesoffootball.co.uk
Blogdrive is a great *cough* blogging software, however it isn't the most search engine friendly blog platform around.
New entries or blogs tend to get higher ranking than old post because of Blogdrive's way of handling 404 pages. These new content, either entries or blogs receive a large amount of incoming links from Blogdrive main page and 404 pages. (The number of incoming links is porportional to your page rank.)
As a result, if you regularly updates your blog, your blog will naturally have higher page rank due to these incoming links. (Tip 1)
Other methods, will largely depend on the design and internal HTML coding of your blog.
Tip 2: Insert permalink of important post you made to your sidebar. Since your sidebar appears in every single page of your entire blog, it naturally gives a high number of incoming links. It helps a lot.
Associating keywords to your individual post have a tremendous help of relating to relevant searches. This, however is difficult because Blogdrive system doesn't help in this aspect, at all.
A little hack here and there in the HTML makes a difference.
Such as this blog, each permalink pages have it's Blog Title in the title bar. This is done by forcing individual blog post title into the <title> tag. (Tip 3) This method makes your permalink page rank goes up a significant one PR (PageRank)
Another method, is to link to your individual post with the relevant keyword. Either in your blog, or your friend. Let's consider this as Tip 4.
Tip 5: A newly discovered method by myself, is to insert your blog title into your permalink. Currently, all permalink has the format http://seigey.blogdrive.com/archive/360.html with no specific keyword in the URL. If we make it look like this: http://seigey.blogdrive.com/archive/360.html?Search+Engine+Friendly+BlogDrive
I consider this as another genius idea of mine and I gladly share it with all. Have fun.
Surprice surprice! Blogdrive announced that they will be doing server maintenance from 3/10 till 5/10 (or was it just the 4th and 5th?).
Can you believe it? they actually took the courtesy to let us know! I'm so happy for them. Yay!
This can be found on the left bottom corner the moment you login. http://www.blogdrive.com/manage/ Update to the update: 10/04/06: We will be performing some more maintenance tomorrow, 10/05/06 between the hours of 11:00 AM to 8:00 PM PST.
Update 10/03/06: We will be performing some routine maintenance on 10/04/06 between the hours of 11:00 AM to 8:00 PM PST. Sections of the site may not accessible during this time.
The overly anticipated and over-dued release of Microsoft's new operating system OS Vista hasn't made a good reputation in the public's eye so far.
First of all, there is five version of Vista each for different level of users.
Secondly, it's extremely heavy in processing power and requires very powerful computers to run. I wonder who'd want to spend another few hundred to upgrade an already fully functional computer, not to mention OS.
And now, news just came out that Microsoft will monopolise OS security market (aka free antivirus and firewall for all) built into it's new Vista. No third party antivirus softwares are allowed. period.
This is really cool, Google added tabbing to their personalised homepage project, we can add as many tabs as possible, too. This will help with loading time significantly and it's a good thing, very good and way better than the other module hacks.
Oh by the way, the modules that I wrote are now listed in Google Directorys. Yahoo!
The Sagrada Familia Church by Gaudi is one of the most magnificent church/catedral I've ever visited. It's been under construction since half a century ago, and will not be ready for another half a century.
As everybody already know, Blogdrive has recently moved their data center, promising every blogdriver a better service with less down time. I was very looking forward to this event as this would definitely make Blogdrive a competent blogging platform. (And benefit my fellow readers )
To me, Blogdrive is a wonderful work of art, programming, business and internet technology. Of course by saying that, I did not take into consideration the frequent downtime, the rude customer service, the slow responce time (in terms of everything: customer service, releasing new upgrades, and server fixes), the defensive sensitive forum regulars, and of course the deadly-inconsiderate-evil-money-minded spammers.
There are a few conspiracies regarding what actually happened behind the scenes. AH hah! I knew you love conspiracies.
The move started on June 29th, as indicated in this entry. But by July 21st, it still wasn't completed. It was until Auguest 30th where there were signs of "almost done". Till now, I'm not sure if they are completely finished with the move but the red notice that was in the blog management area were now removed. After two months.
Michael has always been very good at telling stories, I loved the way he put things into an easy to understand, emotionally touching story line. But what really happened isn't always what the story claims, usually. It's true that the real Blogdrive crew consists of Michael, Tim, Jeff and Rick. Each specializing in different areas.
What's untrue is... the number of servers claimed. There's only one server, for all I know. And judging from the quality of server responce time, nothing has changed.
It is kept very cold inside to keep the thousands of servers safe from heat damage. It is also very loud in the data center due to the monster ACs and the thousands of server fans running.
Thousands of servers... right!
Has Blogdrive improved their service so far? I, still see no difference.
I wonder why no one has requested this until now, Gloria proposed we create a wikipedia page for Blogdrive in the forums. With failed attempt.
So, I'm proposing a different approach. We'll have to show wikimods how important Blogdrive is to be included in the best online encyclopedia. In order to do that, we should do what we does best, blogging!
As always, Michael make up good stories on his expriences working on Blogdrive. I'm afraid it might dissappear one day like the other stories so I decided to post it here too. You can head over to the forum and read them all there. This is also a n update of their progress in moving data centers.
(Short version)
I apologize for the down time we've been experiencing. Things are looking quite good now. After performing a system upgrade to power hardware on 8/26/06 we were faced with an unexpected challenge that caught us off guard. It took a while to identify the cause which is why it was difficult if not impossible to give an ETA to Blogdrive members during this time. We did attempt to place info on the home page; however this was not always viewable. Thank you for your patience. We will do our best to make certain this does not happen again.
(Long version)
The day the world went away The events of 8/26/06 explained:
It was morning. Another sunny day here in Southern California, filled with magic and wonder. Nothing out of the norm. Little did we know tragedy was just around the corner for Blogdrive.
We were adding some hardware to the Blogdrive array of servers; line conditioners, rebooters, etc. We had to shut down all of Blogdrive to do this, which is not unusual as we shut down servers often to perform repairs and such. Shutting down and starting up servers is done in a specific sequence. We are schooled in this and did not anticipate any difficulties. However, after reboot something went terribly wrong.
Tim is our main server programmer. Besides being a great programmer he is also an awesome drummer (He insisted that I put the word "awesome" in there.) We have the servers setup to send Tim pages via his cell phone when they are in trouble. They were in trouble. Tim's cell phone sounded like an unstoppable mini Star Wars battle in his pocket.
The "data center" is where all the blogdrive servers are housed (there is also an outside backup location.) The data center occupies an entire floor of a very large building in Los Angeles. The security there is very tight. There are guards with monitors, a security desk, an area to place your entire hand for identification and several cards and keys to open doors and elevators. There are rows of racks and cages. It is kept very cold inside to keep the thousands of servers safe from heat damage. It is also very loud in the data center due to the monster ACs and the thousands of server fans running. Tim is often herd yelling "Speak up!" and "Why is everyjuan friggin' whispering on me?!" Many of the Blogdrive servers are setup in a redundant array, each with multiple drives duplicating data and exchanging load and requests. This way if a drive fails or explodes or moves on to the next life, we can change it out for a new juan, re-sync it to the others and begin replicating data again. This means no data is lost and no down time experienced.
Needless to say when the pages started flooding in we all panicked; in a calm inward maintained programmer-like panic. All of the servers started shutting down and rebooting on there own in a crazy Ghost in the Machine kinda way. Tim with a link via computer tried to intervene and connect a minimum of resources to gain some control of the situation. They would not have it. I along with Jeff and Rick started pulling severs out of the cages and connecting them to other power sources. I held juan of them in my arms as it was convulsing. I looked over at the guys and screamed, "Is this how it ends? Is this how it ends?!" I set the dying server down and placed my hands to my head, slowing stepping back, then started screaming uncontrollably like a little girl. Or so they tell me.
It seemed there was nothing we could do to put an end to this madness. We checked everything; rebooters, switches, routers, etc. There was nothing. We then really started to panic, in a "what do you mean we're out of coffee?!" kinda panic. We pulled all the servers off line. Blogdrive went silent.
We brought many of the servers home with us to repair any damages that occurred to the data base, and or hardware. As I drove down the street I thought about all the servers I was carrying, the Blogdrivers and all their blogs, all their stories. I also thought about my driving skills, the fact that I was almost out of gas and had juan headlight out. Over the period of a few days we repaired damages and were able to put minimum systems online. We continued to work on the servers at my home. We slept when we could; me in my bedroom and Tim on the sofa, no funny business here. We assumed that we had experienced a strange power spike. We posted what we could to Blogdrive members. Although we did not have an eta, after much thought we knew we were close to an answer.
After further inspection of the servers, Tim felt the answer must be in the power source; something fluctuating in power, something undetected by the other equipment. It was juan of the most improbable possibilities. It would mean that the actual power source coming to the Blogdrive cages in the data center was at fault. This is like blaming a wall outlet. Very unlikely.
We brought the servers back to the data center. With new meters we tested the power source to the cages. It was true! There were severe power fluctuations in the line. It apparently caused damage to the equipment used to protect us from such things. Quickly we re-routed the power to a clean source. We mounted the servers and began syncing them. They were very happy. Blogdrive went back online with full functionality in the early hours of 8/30/06. It will take a week or so to get everything completely up to snuff, but this should not show much influence on the system.
I'd like to apologize to anyjuan affected by this challenge. We had never experienced such an outage before. We will do our best to keep such events from ever happening again.
I'd like to thank the following people:
Veronica over at Fry's Electronics - You got it going on baby! The folks at Dunken Doughnuts – Remember, it's all about the Maple Bars. Tracy at the security desk – Thanks for locking me out twice! My girlfriend Erin who said – "Did you know there's a guy sleeping on our sofa"
I'd also like to thank all the Modulators including JFZ, Ang, Anthony and Sinj for their support. You guys rock me!
Btw, During the wee hours of the morning at the data center I saw ghosts roaming through the various server cages and hallways. I tried to track them down, you know, to speak with them, but they kept disappearing. They seemed to be dancing at times, wearing nice clothing and such. I was tired. Sounds like a Made For TV movie to me.
Sad sad news... the famous reptile "tamer" died when he was dealing with something that wasn't a reptile - a Stingray! And quite astonishingly, he was killed by the stingray barb through his heart. How can anyone survive such a horrible death?
Update: We'll be moving data centers on 6/29/06. During this time Blogs will be displayed but will only show posts that were made up until 6/28/06 5 PM PST till after the move is complete.
That was about a month ago when the notice is put up. I wonder when will the work be finished, or if they have already completed the work.
At Facebook, a popular social networking site, the executive found the candidate's Web page with this description of his interests: "smokin' blunts" (cigars hollowed out and stuffed with marijuana), shooting people and obsessive sex, all described in vivid slang. It did not matter that the student was clearly posturing. He was done.
I know of a few friends who was hired by their company because of their blogs or personal social networking online profiles.
Come on, if a company were to hire reliable worker an extensive background study has to be made. Isn't it? Looking through whatever is available online is just (honestly) very brief and basic.
So people, be careful of how you express yourself online.
Maybe Abby may want to add this to her research project.
As many of you know, I'm a computer nomad. I don't make love to the same computer all the time. It's not that I'm cheating or unloyal, I do have feelings for these machines but it's just that ... I'm non-commitment kinda guy. I just want to enjoy myself as much as the computer does. Live for the moment, Carpe Diem. You know what I mean?
Anyway, back to the main topic. I had no problem accessing the admin section or the Blogdrive forum but I can't get to my blog, or any other blog for that matter. The funny thing is, I can access all blogs that are FEATURED as Blogdrive Favorites. Not any others.
This is racism. Just because I'm not on the favorites, shouldn't I get to access my blog?
As I was saying, I travel around, a lot. I've had experience with young, beautiful and energetic new flat-screen desktops with smart, intelligent operating systems (winXP). To old, mature but rock solid late-90s computer who likes long walks around the lake, dogs and cats. One of these days, I'll try to get my pants into the new Vista baby. And no, it's not paedophile.
My point is, from all these different computers there are some times (especially these few days) where I CAN or can NOT reach my blog. And guess what, it has nothing to do with the differences of these computers. It's their location or rather ... their connection source, a.k.a. Internet Service Provider. It became harder to get to my blog if the internet connection I get is rather dodgy, like a wireless network, proxy connection or dynamic IP addresses.
SO,
speculation of the day is:
Blogdrive disables blogs connection to dodgy computers.
why?
my guess, based on what I've been suffering for the pass few days is to fight spam. I've received more than 50 odd contact form spams in two days. Click on the image to have a better view.
Now, how is this fair? I'm a subscriber but I can't get to my blog. What about my visitors? For your information, my visitor stats have been down by 50%. It's a huge traffic blog so stats differences are very notable despite daily fluctuations.
Lets look on the brighter side of things. By cutting connection to dodgy computers, spam attacks can be reduced and this saves the server from crashing again. At least, Blogdrive isn't entirely down. Right?
But what about those that do have an account here, are loyal Blogdrive users and even are subscribers. Why can't they be exempt from being classified as dodgy? Why can't they get access to their own blog? at the very least.
Dear readers, do you have other ideas as to why I can't get access to my own blogs?
UPDATE: ~justme~ » "Posting from this IP is not allowed. You are posting from an IP/proxy server that is known to distribute SPAM and the author of this blog blah blah blah
justme was having trouble commenting, whatever happened to the antispam feature introduced not too long ago?
Good news! Remember the last time I talked about co.mments? I was just talking to Assaf yesterday and they have added support to track comments on Blogdrive. I must thank him for the quick response and how fast he wrote up a parser specifically for Blogdrive. I think it's a great service and I'm hoping that in the near future everyone will start using it.
The great thing about this service is that you can track any comments, whether if it's your blog, other Blogdrive blogs or even other blog services. It works great! All you need to do is just "Bookmark" that blog.
Also, it is possible to generate a Comment RSS for your blog. Look at mine.
This would save me a lot of time going from blogs to blogs trying to see if I get a responce from a comment I left earlier. Or if there are comments by other people on a particular topic.
Go sign up an account now. Signing up for an account allows you to have all your conversations stored.
While we are constantly complaining about how much Blogdrive can improve, let's take a moment to be reminded of all the good stuff we have here on Blogdrive that you shouldn't have known.
If you are reading this article right now you should turn off the lights and make sure there's nobody behind you. If you are discovered to have obtain these information, an assassin will be sent to murder you.
1) Built-in search feature - Search your own blog with the blogdrive's built-in search feature, it's originally only available for subscription blogs but if you use a GET method on your url, you'll get a free (temporary) feature. However, it only search your blog titles.
2) exceed your bandwidth - for free accounts, an allocated amount of 50mb monthly bandwidth can be exceeded even without any upgrades. If you have a subscription blog, your allocated monthly bandwidth will be higher but again your files will not fail to load in the event that you exceeded it. So, what are you complaining about? (please note: you can't store more than what you should)
3) store HTML / CSS / JS documents in your filemanager with .jpg extensions. Okay, this is supposed to be a techy hack but it works.
4) the amazing Seige - this isn't just a goodie thingy but the coolest lad I've ever known on Blogdrive. He's smart, brilliant and above all massively fantastic. Oh, did I mention that he's got a great sense of humour?
Everyone's been lovey dovey over the new WYSIWYG editor (JfZ, future, forum guide, hacks) While I, despite my initial "enthusiasm", still think that it has lots of problem room for improvement.
The WYSIWYG editor is at the very core, the most important feature on Blogdrive. Without it... you would be wondering how a blog host can ever be a blog host. And we really don't expect writers to be able to write properly, right?
1) Insert Link opens a new window? This has to be the most annoying small problem. Everytime I need to insert a link, I'll need to wait till the new window loads before I can do anything else. This is a pain especially on MSIE because it takes a long time for MSIE to open a new window. Blogdrive should really just reduce to using a "prompt" javascript function to do the magic. It's less complicated and faster. Not to mention no new HTTPrequest to the Blogdrive server while editing.
Another problem is that it'll not work if the text you highlighted contains an apostrophy ' or ' . For example if you write: "Seige's dog", and wanting to add a link to these words, it'll not copy the "Seige's dog" to the window. This is a Javascript bug.
2) Different browser syntax rendering - on Firefox it's "XHTML Transitional" while on MSIE it's "plain old HTML" with CAPITALS. You can notice the differences if you use the "HTML View" feature located at the right bottom of the editor. It's odd although
3) Up Down Left Right button doesn't work sometimes - can't move the focus of the text cursor basically but the weird thing about this is... it only happen sometimes. And as for me, I can't identify what is the source of this problem.
4) In HTML View, the text cursor isn't always where it should be - more often than not it appears to be one or two characters away. How and why this happens is a mystery. It usually happens when I have a long entry that I needed to edit. It has something to do with miscalculating the string lengths or something along those lines.
5) Undo/Redo doesn't work sometimes - Again, this is odd and I can't tell why it doesn't work. It happens to both Firefox and MSIE.
6) Outdent/Indent uses different elements sometimes - I would really prefer the editor to implement the <BLOCKQUOTE> elements, it works great on MSIE but on Firefox, it uses <div> with margins set to indent it... how cruel.
7) Save post to clip board works on MSIE only - it doesn't work on Firefox mainly because Firefox is stupid for not supporting the copy-to-clipboard function. Sadly.
8) Firefox browser crash when reloading editor sometimes - Again, this is another one of the "sometimes" problem. It's just weird and I just can't make it out why. Don't take me wrong that it could be other webpages I'm viewing because the window crashed a few times and it's always during reloading of the editor in Firefox.
9) Can't insert Scripts or Objects - That's due to security reasons but for someone like me who do need to use some Javascripts, it's . Though... I shouldn't fret because I still have the beloved PTE.
10) Help Guide is coming soon ever since the big bang - See that "?" up there on the top right hand corner? Ever clicked on it, No? Don't bother.
I somehow realise that all these problems have almost everything to do with browser inconsistencies. Still I don't see why an editor should be flawed just because of certain browser not working perfectly well.
Wondering if Blogdrive will ever be bothered to fix these minor things? Nah, never. Not in a century or two.
Ever since Blogdrive fixed the PTE, it has so far been a million times better than WYSIWYG editor. Although it doesn't mean it's all great (because it doesn't work all well in Firefox/Opera), it's still better than WYSIWYG editor.
A little more than a year ago I made an entry about Studio Traffic, about how such business have no solid base and can't make no money. Today, I just found out that the website itself dissappeared and turned into something called myFileHut.com that offers free image and file hosting. How oddly obvious?
Curiosity and procrastination has brought me into Googling the latest news. Secretly laughing out loud inside repeating "Told you so". So anyway, I digged up some rather interesting news (and somewhat odd).
For those of you who doesn't know what StudioTraffic is, here are some quick links. http://www.studiotraffic.co.uk/ - A Uk website with some pretty good coverage of the aftermaths. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studiotraffic - A pretty messy explanation, loads of grammars mistake as if it was done by some pretty unstable members of Studiotraffic who had their money stolen. http://www.answers.com/topic/studiotraffic - A very good overview of the whole StudioTraffic. You should read this if you have no idea what I'm talking about until now.
Doing a trend-region study on Google return this interesting details. It appears South East Asian countries are the worst hit.
I don't know how to say this, but really. How can anybody be so stupid? I know I've probably asked this more than a million times, but I can only think of these:
1) Making money online is so COOL. - It's easy and you don't even have to leave your house. You can even make money in your underwear.
2) The so-called "John Horan" was very CONVINCING. - Okay, I got to admit to this one because I actually took the effort to study it's business model after reading his writings. He has a way of selling himself that even my mom would buy without second thoughts.
3) They don't know how to do MATHS. - The only reason I didn't believe this "scam" has everything to do with my mathematical ability and has totally nothing to do with my common sense and/or instincts (which I'm terrible at). As mentioned in my blog entry a year ago, I calculated using complex calculations (brag) and advanced numbering series (brag) along with Euler's partial differential equation (brag) the amounts of money involved in this business structure (brag) and it's flow patterns (brag). And then I compared them to what "John Horan" has said, it didn't made any sense at all. See, Maths is for love and not hate.
4) Strong StudioTraffic SUPPORTERS all over the Internet. - this has to be one of the most fascinating thing that I've ever come across (I'm still very impressed). A big supporter / fan / cheerleader club for a SCAM website. Anybody who initially regard it as a scam would believe it's real if so many people are defending it. It goes with the saying: "If everybody believes it, it's bound to be true!" It's like religion.
That's it, its' a religion.
5) The power of WORD of MOUTH. - "John Horan" obviously played the game very well, I'm not entirely sure how but I've received many recommendations from friends and relatives. They came to me only to be dissappointed when I told them it's a scam (having to explain with graphs and diagrams (brag)). I think this says a lot about building a network-based business. See, POWER of Networking! 6) They are Young, Naive and Ambitious. - As opposed to old, lonely and seeking attention. I might be wrong here but I'm pretty sure nobody will easily believe this form of scam again.
Well, I guess the supporter (part 4) can be reasoned by people who have actually "invested" some money and really can't bare to realise that they have been cheated. It becomes a sensitive issue and they form a cult-like army.
I know whatever I say here may potentially offend many especially those who have been faithful to the programme. I can't help but feel sorry for them (and writing this entry). A little community service brought to you by me.
The Cool Blogdrive Guy (one of the two Blogdrive admin) speaks in responce to a member's complain in the forum. Read the complain first.
Blogdrive has tortured me enough. I've been a customer for one year and I'm actively looking for other options. This is the third unannounced outage and unresponded to help tickets in less than 2 weeks. Even when it's "working" it takes over an hour to make one post due to crashes. I've had the patience of a saint, hoping and praying. Yet, Blogdrive appears to be flatlining. I've simply had enough. I'm not going to waste my time even commenting much more. It's time to get serious and find a host that is ready for prime time and living in the real world. I feel foolish for even giving my business to this company. Maybe, instead of Yahoo buying Blogdrive, we should see if Toys R Us would be willing to take over. Or maybe the Salvation Army. Message to Helpee: I get the sense that you're trying to help, that you want to help, but that you just can't help. People need a blog host to have things that work and it's simply not working. It's very sad, but it is just not working. It's not. If I saw a light at the end of the tunnel, that would be lovely. But, all I see are the pleas of my fellow members virtually begging for improvements to the pathetic levels of outages. Is everyone familiar with the oft-quoted definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. That's really what staying on as a Blogdrive customer equals: insanity.
And here is his reply:
Hi Rich, I feel your pain. Any unexpected outages have been just that, unexpected. Earlier today there was a flood attack on the servers. The unusually high utilization caused a database error which propagated to the other servers. It took some time to correct it across all the servers, but all is well now with no data loss. We are now looking at implementing new measures to help protect against this type of scenario. Most of the other "outages" you experienced before are do to spammers or spiders causing DOS attacks. We have been in the process of both a data center move and network overhaul to better supply us with the network capability and bandwidth necessary to handle these situations better. unfortunately do to the scale of both projects it is taking some time to complete.
I can't say it says a lot, but it certainly keeps the member's mouth shut for the moment. Let's see for how long.
I just learned that Blogspot introduced RSS feed, just very recently. It seems odd seeing they already have ATOM feeds, why all of a sudden introducing RSS? Besides, RSS version are older than Atom, its going to be obsolete sooner than Atom. So why are they releasing RSS then?
Also, it appears that RSS list the last 25 updated items, which is different from their Atom feature because unlike their RSS, they only list the selected number of post you on the front page. Weird, why the disimiliarity.
Lucky for us, Blogdrive have long been supporting both RSS and ATOM. And Blogdrive displays a reasonable number of items (10).
However I do hope that Blogdrive will introduce some RSS features such as editing options (HTML) or whether we can publish full or partial feed... I've included this in the forum topic asking for more features.
This is good stuff. I would have said it myself but I'm too gutless to do it. What's worth nothing is this:
Anyone who doesn't mind their site being inaccessible for hours, or even days, with no advance notice. Anyone who has no desire to have more growth potential for image loading. Anyone who doesn't care if the tech support for a paid account is not "priority tech support." It's really non-existent tech support. Basically anyone who doesn't take what their doing seriously. It's great for practice.
Here is the entire post:
Seige, I appreciate your efforts to help. I really do. Funny, no not media power. But, I am motivated to get a solution to this quagmire. I'm sure most of you would agree that the best way to tick someone off even more is to make them feel that their concerns are irrelevent and frivolous. So I appreciate those of you, and us, who assume someone has a bona fide reason for flying off the handle because there really is validity to many of the concerns raised here. The frustrating thing is that I never in a million years thought that I was embarking down a road with BD that was a virtual dead-end with no chance of expanding with growth. You can see what I'm describing at my site: http://www.carrienews.blogdrive.com I suppose I didn't know anything about what growth requirements there would be. Now I do. I'll see what I can come up with as far as alternatives. I may need some suggestions as far as how to migrate blog entries to a host that has growth potential with more reliable software and servers. My suggestion is for anyone reading this who plans on having growth potential, be careful of putting all your eggs in the BD basket. It will be an exercise in futility and a good lesson for anyone in the business world of how not to treat customers. I used to rave to people about how great BD is. But, I can't do that anymore. So sad. Here is who I would recommend BD to: Anyone who doesn't mind their site being inaccessible for hours, or even days, with no advance notice. Anyone who has no desire to have more growth potential for image loading. Anyone who doesn't care if the tech support for a paid account is not "priority tech support." It's really non-existent tech support. Basically anyone who doesn't take what their doing seriously. It's great for practice. What's sad is that many of us have been offering suggestions ad nauseum for months now. Oh, well. Life goes on. Thanks, Seige, for pretty much taking my concerns seriously. After all, unstable hosting, non-expandable bandwidth, and no tech support are pretty serious issues. IMHO. Those aren't great selling points, are they?
Who's fault is it? Why do they do what they do? Is a mystery.
As everyone can tell, the downtime for our favourite blog host has just occured. Cause of downtime is of course unknown, it's top secret (Blogdrive will have to kill you(in secret) if you figure it out the secret, it's bad for publicity)
There has been a HUGE, I mean it HUGE voice of anger in the Blogdrive forum. And not a single response from Blogdrive themselves.
The frequency of downtime is occuring moreandmorefrequent compared to a few years back. Here are some of the most popular reasons given by Blogdrive whenever there's a down time:
1) Hurricane, this is an annual event and it doesn't just occur once a year but several. Whenever lighting strike, when the storms are strong, one of the internet router will *boom* and so there goes the 30,000 other Blogdrive blogs. This is far worst than a woman's PMS.
2) Upgrading server (or software), I'm not sure what its updating really. Whenever it say upgrading server, I hardly ever see any new features that comes with it either. Well, maybe sometimes (like the comment spam protection) although the down time could be of entirely different reason.
3) DoS attacks. Oooh... I absolutely hate it when these hackers have nothing better to do and choose to launch an attack on Blogdrive. Come on, why would anybody want to harm Blogdrive, there's 30 thousand innocent souls at stake. Say no to War on Iraq!
4) Spammer steals bandwidth. Yeah, these dirty bastard who are trying to make a quick buck on pharmaceutical products and pornography "steal" bandwidth. How? Erm... I don't know... I just know that it caused down time here on Blogdrive. (oh, really?)
5) Seige's Fault. It's all my fault. I didn't meant it. I didn't want anybody to get hurt but because the toilet isn't working I had to find an alternative target to satisfy my "nature calls". All this downtime is caused by waiting for the server drying up and for the toilet pump to be fixed. Disaster eh?
(In case you haven't realise, number five is totally made up and I've never actually seen the server before. Accept for a sexy picture of it here.)
Oh, and don't ask me why on earth update.blogdrive.com wasn't updated with any news about the downtime. All I know is that if you found out why Blogdrive was down, you'd better watch out because you might be murdered in a tragic death where all your body parts are broken into pieces and thrown into the river with no trace at all.
Did you know that you can personalised your Google Homepage? Did you know that you can add your favourite blogs or news feed to it? Did you know that you can actually add some gadgets (or widgets) to your homepage?
Well, there are more than just widgets. There are a whole lot of variety to choose from: Clocks with Date and Time, Local Weather, Gmail intergration, Google Calendar, Google Reader. You can even insert Sudoku into your homepage. How cool is that?
So, after founding this new found area of playground. I got to work to create a number of Google Gadget APIs for Blogdrive. Currently only two: One for Blogdrive Templates, and the other for Tagalicious.
Add them to your homepage and try it out (you'll need a google account like Gmail to start with) and let me know your feedbacks on the Gadgets I wrote.
Just discovered a new service called co.mments. It's a service that helps you to track responces to comments you have left on different blogs. It even alerts you if your commented page has been updated with new replies.
This sounded like a really cool idea to track all blog that I have commented on and if there are any replies from other blog readers or from the blog owner. If you are a regular commentor, you'll definitely love this service.
How it works?
Like all cool new web inventions (such as del.icio.us), it doesn't 100% automatically track all your comments. There is one extra step you have to do, just one. ONE STEP. You, of course, need to let it know what to track. And that's as much hassle as it can get. Not bad at all I think.
Basically, once you add a comment, you add the URL of your commented page to your track list on co.mments. And then co.mments will do all the hard work and track it for you.
Easy.
Does it work on Blogdrive?
I'm not sure, I've just signed up for it and currently it works well for blogspot. So, chances are it just might work with a bit of tweaking in the codes. I'll update in a couple of minutes, as soon as I find out more about this service. *UPDATE 2: It's currently working with Blogdrive after speaking with the founders of co.mments. *UPDATE: Currently it doesn't work on Blogdrive yet. I've sent them a couple of emails and they seemed pretty helpful. I hope that they are able to make it work on Blogdrive.
Google Trends plots how popular a search term is over time. Basically, how many times people type into Google to look for such information. So, the previous entry shows you the search volume over the last two years and where those searches comes from.
Google Trends can also show you the comparison between two search terms. Such as: Blogdrive, Blogspot.
Give very interesting results, here it shows clearly the trends in Blogdrive traffic. Where it comes from and what do they mean? Blogdrive is a Californian-based company but apparently most of it's customer ... are based in South East Asia? True or False.
MONROVIA, CA -- Blogdrive's Executive Vice President of Emerging Global Technology Acquistions division announced the launch of the 3.57b entry editor on the video conferencing multiscreen to the cheers of thousands of swag-wearing Blogdrivers at the Malaysian BlogCon2012 conference this evening. BlogCon Malaysia attendance has surpassed the Tokyo Auto Show in recent years.
After the Blogdrive acquistion of the Tawian-based Neural Network start-up, Hudyang, many blog pundits forecast the emergence of neural editors. Blogdrive has shocked financial market pundits with the 3.57b because it is the first low cost and functional product to truly work in the long-awaited I-wear market.
The 3.57b has not only been crowned product zero in the I-wear market by EEEI, but also its software has been rumored to be up for multiple awards for idiot-proofing among social networking and marketing industry groups. Blogdrive's own logo serves as the 3-button comand interface.
When one of the 121.3 million Blogdrivers is using the the 3.57b editor, they can compose in the language of their choice, preview and verify their entry on the heads-up display, and then simply process that entry with one touch on the Blogdrive logo. Tapping the orange control means cancel, blue saves draft, and green publishes the entry.
Blogdrive's Emerging Global Technologies division is currently working on the automatic classification of blog entries using the Neural Emoticon System Generator, but the roll-out of the NESG Blogdrive feature has been hampered by the recent inclusion of the bi-polar algorythm.
Firefox appears to be one of the "better" browser with additional features and allows installation of Plugins. I love using it and it's my prefered browser for many reason, mainly due to it's tabs ability. Allowing me to open several window at the same time.
I don't use Opera much despite it's amazing ability in memory management. It lacks many basic feature a web-browser should have.
MSIE, the most commonly used browser, is still the BEST browser around. It's more stable and have better support for most website on the internet. I don't use it only because it doesn't support tabs.
So, that leaves Firefox. Although it's my most prefered web browser, I HATE It.
There's so many thing wrong with it, it can't find or search within textareas. It takes a long time to start up. It always have problem with memory management (crash easily). And it CRASH anytime it feels like it.
Worst of all, it always crash when I'm trying to load Blogdrive's WYSIWYG Entry Editor. WTF?
it's nothing wrong with Blogdrive's Editor, rather it's firefox not being able to support the complexity of Blogdrive' s editor.
Damn you FIREFOX! Would you for once, not crash at all?
It seems to be occuring more and more often, every time I make a new entry I would receive several email notifications. (Mind you, I'm one of the more narcistic fella who subscribes to his own blog just because I love myself so much)
Anyway, I think it's just a minor glitch and could be something to do with the system restarting the process over and over again when it couldn't send out emails. Or maybe something else.
I hope Blogdrive will fix this soon too, because it might cause my readers to unsubscribe from me because the email notifications clutter their inbox. Like spam.
So, back from the beautiful land. The weather man was really kind over the weekend, plenty of SUN and no rain. It was a bit windy so it's cold.
We stayed in a korean house which served us with korean breakfast. One of a kind experience, they gave me something called "Kim Chi" which is vegetables with loads of chilli. It made me cry of spicyness, haha.
Accomplishment includes climbing up to the top of Salibury Craigs hill and we went to firth of forth. Oh, not to mention Haggis, a so-called Scottish favourite meal.
Apart from all the enjoyment, me and AG was arguing the whole time about non-existing problems. It's just really stupid.
Rejecting invitations be it dinner-ing, clubbing, travelling, movie-ing, whatever-ing. Something I rarely do, and to be honest, I don't really know how to handle it well either.
It's always good to hangout with friends, talk gibberish and more gibberish. Who doesn't enjoy it? Somehow something always tell me that I shouldn't miss out on anything and so I always try my best to attend them meetings/gatherings.
She just invited me over to her place for dinner today. But I declined saying I had eaten and I had to study. HAH!!! What good excuse, ain't it?
Anyway, I kinda feel guilty now. Somebody comfort me please...
There are 3 main situations that lead men to be pathetic for women. That is when a man wants something that he can't get (like sex or love), when a man looses something that he wants back (like a girlfriend) and when a man is in the process of loosing something he doesn't want to loose (like an imminent break up).
A man that says or does pathetic things to fix any of these situations becomes as unattractive as he can possibly became. Nothing is more of a turn off for a woman that a man that begs for pity or for some concession.
Let me give you some examples. A classic one is a man that lusts after a woman, or women, and he is not getting anything in return to his attentions or his attempts; or perhaps he is getting only a small amount of teasing that keeps him trying without real success. This situation is so common that any man on the planet at least once faced it at some point in life. I did too, a few times. The worse possible thing a man can do in this cases is to became pathetic and beg or send cries for attention. This is often done by guys in the forms of complaints on their miserable existence or situation, cries of desperation, pathetic letters and messages, claims of infinite love or other overwhelming feelings, exaggerations going from talking about suicide to cries of pain toward God or nature or other universal and immense concepts. A man that acts this way will never ever get anything other than pity from the object of his desires. Even if a man gets something out of pity, like a forced date, it is going to be only as a way for a woman to stop the torture and to stop the pathetic cry in hope that it won't happen again.
If you can't get what you want, please do not be pathetic. You make people puke, you do not attract anything but pity. It is disgusting and miserable; an insult to humanity and a waste of your energies that you could use in better ways.
Another example is when a relationship is ending and a man doesn't want it to end. A man that wants to maintain a relationship going should never beg or became pathetic with sad love letters, cute and constant messages of eternal love, constantly calling and trying from every angle including harassing or using common friends or family. If he does he will loose all the respect of a woman and any real possibility of a long and happy relationship in the future.
There are some exceptions in which desperation is sincere and is briefly expressed immediately and on the spot of some painful event. This is sad but not necessarily pathetic, and sometimes it needs to happen spontaneously to express some overwhelming feelings.
As an example, if a woman leaves a man after a long relationship and a man cries spontaneously, that is sad but understandable. While I don't think it helps anything and I personally wouldn't do it, I also won't pass judgment on that. After this strong first reaction a man needs to find his calm and stance and face the situation. No whining, no self pity, no crawling on knees or beg for concessions. A man needs to face reality and either try to fix whatever went wrong, if there is a way to do so, or just accept it and move on. Life doesn't end and begging is not going to bring anything back. It just pushes a woman away further and further.
I am not saying that a man shouldn't suffer. Suffering because a woman is normal and it happens. I suffered many times. I am saying that a man shouldn't try to get back what he lost trying to inspire pity or other sad feelings.
You need to be what the woman you care about used to like, not a mess of tears and sad exaggerations. That is very unattractive.
If she leaves you for something you did, you should try to understand your fault talking to her. If you can't see it, do not admit a fault that you don't understand or even have. Accept the fact that she doesn't like you for what you are and move on, knowing that is better that way. You don't want to be with someone that doesn't appreciate your real self. On the oter hand, if you can see a fault in your actions, see if you can and want to fix it and if she is willing to give you a chance. If not, move on. Don't try to fix what can't be fixed or what doesn't exist. Don't change yourself to accommodate a woman. It may seem like a good thing to do on the moment of crisis (like claiming "I'll change..."), but it is not a good thing in the long term. People don't change unless they learn either falling hard or with time and experience. The "I'll change" promise is sincere when is made; as soon as the situation calms down, that promise is forgotten and things go back to be what they were. Men have a short memory.
The bottom line is: if you are a man, please never be pathetic to get a woman. It is not going to work. Period.
)
sigh...
