Monthly Archives: September 2006

WordPress Flickr Pictures Tip 2 – post a single Flickr photo in a WordPress blog post

Posted on by
4

Flickr has a fantastic, easy feature to post your Flickr picture in your WordPress Blog. First, add your blog to Flickr by logging into Flickr, going to your account and selecting add a blog.

Now you only need to visit your photo while logged in and click “blog this”. You’ll be asked to fill out the description and info *within Flickr*. After completing that and selecting “Post Entry”, your picture and the information you added in Flickr automatically become your WordPress blog post. Neat!

Yahoo Rocks again with Web 2.0!

My previous post, a mural picture from Chaimanus B.C., was done in this fashion.

Also see how to do a WordPress Flickr photo embed

WordPress Flickr – embed Flickr photos in WordPress blog

Posted on by
58

Maybe I’m just slow, but it took me a long time to figure out how to do some neat stuff with my Flickr pix and my WordPress hosted blog.

To embed your own Flickr photos in your WordPress blog you’ll need to first add the Flickr Widget by going to the WordPress Dashboard and selecting presentation, then sidebar widgets. Then, you click on the right side of the Flickr Widget, which opens up a dialog window, and you add your Flickr RSS feed. To get the RSS feed DO NOT log into Flickr, rather stay logged OUT and visit your own pix. The RSS feed will be located on that page. Note that your feed does NOT show up on Flickr when you are logged in (at least I could not find it and it, confusing the heck out of me for the first time in the otherwise amazingly intuitive Flickr).

Don’t backup your drive – do something more productive instead and absorb the risk.

Posted on by
1

Guy Kawalski is being WAY too hard on himself after losing his hard drive and failing to back it up. He cites the book “Why Smart People do Dumb Things” which suggests these ridiculous reasons for things like…failing to back up your hard drive:  Hubris, Arrogance, Narcissism, Unconscious need to fail. (!)

Guy! I certainly agree you are a really smart fellow, but you REALLY had to stretch to fit those silly criteria to a hard drive. These authors obviously are spending way too much time on the new age couch and too little down at the local hardware store where you’d learn that the reason you didn’t do it was simply….laziness plus a correct assessment of negative ROI.

Backup time is not *directly* productive, it’s insurance against problems. Thus you must balance your problem against the 2,000 people who did NOT backup and did NOT have a problem. They, collectively, saved a YEAR of time assuming, very modestly, only one hour of “work” needed to backup. Collectively the “no backups” saved an entire YEAR of time. You probably only spent a few days recovering stuff. Over a lifetime of such decisions you can expect a great ROI by maintaining the level of risk you *correctly chose* when you didn’t backup the drive.

Conclusion – do NOT backup due to poor ROI. There are some things that offer good insurance value for the time/money. Backing up in the normal fashion is not one of them for most users (banks excluded).

OF COURSE critical info should be backed up, and it would sure be nice to have better backup systems that were easy and automatic. But as long as it takes over an hour and the MTBF on your hard drive is tens of thousands of hours, I say you are smart to follow the Nike antimatter mantra: “Just don’t do it”.

Digg this 

SEO for Talent, Oregon? Google this shouldn’t be so hard.

Posted on by
4

When I agreed to help Star Properties with their new website I thought it would be easy to make them appear first at Google for “Talent Oregon Real Estate“. Why? They are easily the most relevant site for that search being the (only?), first, and best Real Estate office here in Talent.

Maybe I’m expecting too much from Google, but what seems to be happening is that my blog posts are rising to the top for this term rather than Star Properties’ (more appropriate) Talent Oregon real estate site.

It’s somewhat reasonable for Google to wait until a site is verified as “non spam” before they rise to the top for highly targeted searches, though it is also a search defect as it keeps the best sites from appearing for that waiting period, sometimes called “sandboxing” by SEO peeps.

I think what this indicates is how significant blogs are becoming to the search experience. Google correctly assumes a blog is fresher and more relevant than most sites.

Note that under the local listings there is a “Star Properties” but it links to the wrong site – one that just mentions them but has incorrect email and old website info.   Google does have a procedure to correct this bad listing.

Spam Police – let’s pay a bounty on the heads of mail spammers

Posted on by
Reply

Is it a naive idea?   I waste SO much time now dealing with spam that eludes my ISP and Gmail filters – I’d say as much as an hour a week and that does not factor in the frustration and potential for lost “real” email.

My proposal is to create a fund through voluntary, very small personal contributions of a few dollars and larger ISP contributions to pay people to personally identify spammers, their businesses, and their location.   Spam Bounty Hunters.

This blacklisted database would be available to all with an excellent feedback forum to quickly remedy false positives.    If they protest, the accused would be deemed innocent until proven guilty by 95% agreement in forum feedback.

However, those deemed spammers would be tracked and followed as they changed businesses, emails, etc, and would be hounded by the masses via email, telephone, and real visits.   Collectively the “community” would make the costs of *even trying spamming* greater than any benefits.

Unlike current blacklists used by ISPs, this would bring the collective intelligence, and collective outrage, to bear against spammers.
Those who chose to be “spam bounty hunters” would be compensated from the fund by a formula designed to distribute whatever amount was in the fund devided by an estimate of the number of total email spammers (or some other formula designed to pay out at the rate the problem is fixed).

Over in China, people are getting paid a few bucks a day to play second life and accumulate Linden dollars for affluent US SecondLifers.  Wouldn’t this be a better use of their time?

Digg this story 

Global Warming Guilt

Posted on by
2

Fresh from a great trip in the California Wilderness I feel guilty as usual for challenging Global Warming alarmism from folks I respect and admire and who seem to spend a lot more time than I do on this topic, such as Al Gore and a lot of respected scientists participating in the IPCC.

However it’s really hard for me to view the catastrophe claims without feeling that 1) the major concerns don’t come from the science, rather from emotion and narrow focus and 2) clearly poverty, hunger, and disease are far more pressing human concerns – all being present catastrophic human conditions, solvable with simple technologies and at relatively low cost.

Of course humans are not the only thing to worry about when you’re looking at problems on our earth. However the case for expensive Global Warming “remedies” vs other methods of protecting the environment seems to get much weaker the farther you go from the human consequences. For example Kilauea in Hawaii could care less about GW. In fact Volcanos spew considerable CO2 into the atmosphere naturally (though not as much as humans, contrary to some GW denier claims).

SO…. maybe the best way to figure this out is to take a little more time to carefully examine the main catastrophe claims and compare them to what the actual research suggests. Luckily, the Climate Crisis website, a companion to the film “An Inconvenient Truth” gives us a clear starting point in our quest with these catastrophes they clearly feel are 1) a big deal and 2) looming on the near horizon:
If the warming continues, we can expect catastrophic consequences.

Deaths from global warming will double in just 25 years — to 300,000 people a year.
Global sea levels could rise by more than 20 feet with the loss of shelf ice in Greenland and Antarctica, devastating coastal areas worldwide.
Heat waves will be more frequent and more intense.
Droughts and wildfires will occur more often.
The Arctic Ocean could be ice free in summer by 2050.
More than a million species worldwide could be driven to extinction by 2050.

…. TO BE CONTINUED ….