Geeze. As I am sitting here reading some blogs, I noticed the CNN breaking news Twitter account post a message about O.J. Simpson being found guilty. Two minutes later, Twitter blows up.
If it weren’t for Twitter, I would have no idea what is going on in the world.
I hope I don’t get sued by The Steve Miller band for using that lyric for my post title. Anywho, it’s been awhile since I’ve published anything here at my home away from home and with good reasons. Of course, you have the obligatory statement about how there has not been much time for me to publish anything and in this instance, that is true. I’ve been really busy between getting WordPress Weekly back on track, maintaining Perfcast, contributing on a daily basis to Performancing.com and then there is that crappy night job I have which always seems to ruin everything. In a nutshell, that explains why there hasn’t been a post published on this blog in awhile.
Back when I redesigned this site, I did so because I wanted to dive into experimenting with monetization techniques while also narrowing the site down to just a few categories. I’m still not interested in monetization right now so that idea has been tossed aside. As for slimming down the blog, I have to admit that I feel stupid by transferring all of my personal posts away from this site onto its own domain with its own blog. I thought I was doing a good thing by doing this but now, all I have accomplished is providing yet another site for me to update. I should of just kept everything under one roof and told people that if they don’t want to read my personal mumbo jumbo, to just subscribe to the categories they were interested in as I see each category being its own blog. I’m not sure yet if I will re-import my personal musings back into this site so the verdict is still out as to what I am going to do.
Asides from all of that, I am inching closer to finally being able to cut myself down from 32 hours a week at the grocery store to perhaps weekends only. There are some changes afoot over at Performancing. There are also some other opportunities opening up within the SplashPress network which may help me accomplish my year end goal of only working at the store on the weekends while blogging full time. With all of this going on, I am throwing away most of my living space and will be purchasing some equipment to transform it into an office. I’ve seen some nice looking furniture at Officemax which would look even better in my room. I feel I’ll be much more productive with an office environment compared with what I have now which is more of a mashup of a work space.
The leaves are starting to change color here in northern Ohio while Fall is definitely in the air. I have yet to have my annual fall picnic with my girlfriend but that should be coming within the next week or so as the leaves reach their peak color. Soon enough, it will be Winter time. The time of the year where there is not much to do besides blog. How are the leaves in your neck of the woods? Looking forward to Winter?
Before I let you go, I have decided to bring WordPress Weekly back online. Starting this Friday at 8P.M. EST, I’ll be broadcasting live with my Canadian co-host all things WordPress. The anticipation has been building and I am looking forward to interacting with members of the WordPress community yet again.
Last but not least, I have removed the URL field from the comments here on this blog. This means I have also disabled the CommentLuv plugin. This is only an experiment for the month of October as I want to see for myself what happens to not only the volume of spam, but which types of spam I receive. To read more into why I am performing this experiment, read this post on Performancing.com.
Those of you who remember me from hosting and producing the WordPress Weekly podcast will know that I spoke of a new project in which I would be producing another podcast that dealt with everything blogging. That podcast is called Perfcast. This show covers some of the blogging news which happened within the past week, contains a blogging job of the week, initiates a blogging challenge of the week and most of all, is interactive allowing listeners and bloggers alike to chime in with their thoughts and opinions.
The show is hosted by Jeff Chandler (That’s me) and co-hosted by David Peralty of Xfep.com. The show airs live on Talkshoe every Thursday evening at 7 P.M. EST. Please read this post (How To Participate In Perfcast Live) on Performancing.com to find out how to participate live during the show.
By the way, we already have an episode produced. You can check out the show notes here or listen to the show via the embeddable Talkshoe player. Hoping you’ll stop by this Thursday for Episode 2 where David and I will be discussing WordPress 2.7, Blogging Through A disaster and a service called BackType.
I woke up today and discovered that Mr. Registry Scan had contacted me over Skype. Apparently, Windows requires immediate attention and security center has detected malware on my computer. A funny joke considering that I bet it wouldn’t be discovered unless I clicked on the link provided within the message.
If Mr. Registry scan ends up contacting you through Skype, immediately block him and DO NOT click on the link provided within the message.
I hope I don’t have to look forward to being bombarded with messages from Skype accounts with spam. That would become seriously annoying. This is one of the reasons why I never use the SkypeMe! availability option.
Glogster, the service that gives people a chance to create posters of themselves which I reviewed here (Glogster – You In A Poster) has announced that they have reached version two.
The new version now gives you a chance to embed YouTube videos, pictures and sounds from websites by URL. Also, not sure if this will be a buzzword that will catch on but you can now live glog. Those of you who have a webcam will be able to turn it on and stream live from your glog. Thus, live glogging. Doesn’t sound as good as live blogging but this is web 2.0, anything is possible.
Glogster has improved the galleries by means of introducing romantic elements. Now you can spice up your Glog if you’re into that sort of thing. Last but not least, Glogster has added a multitude of languages from which to choose from when adding text to your poster. This ends up giving Glogster a shot at an international audience.
To see the new YouTube feature in action, take a look at my latest glog.
Tonight marks the third Tweet-UP hosted by Billy Fairchild aka. Tw3nty3ight. So far, these tweet up events have been a blast to attend, each lasting on average 2-3 hours. The tweet up is a place for all of those on twitter who don’t have the luxury of attending a local event to come online and gather in one place. I’ve met quite a few cool people due to these tweet ups. Not to mention, these guys and gals have one hell of a sense of humor making for a great evening.
If you are a Twitter user looking to meet new people, gain new followers and have a good time, be sure to meet me and the rest of the gang on Talkshoe tonight at 9PM EST. I go by the handle of Jeffro on Talkshoe.
In my effort to re work this site from the ground up, I have moved all of the content that was within the Jokes and Personal categories to my personal blog, Jeffc.Me/blog. I have also gone through all of my content categories and have rearranged them, consolidated them and then deleted the ones which had 0 posts. This will help me regain focus instead of having a thousand different categories with less than 10 posts each.
I’m not sure how many links I have broken due to these moves so if you come across one, please let me know. I am now ready to begin working on the redesign of this site that I hope I’ll be able to publish before the end of this week.
Stefan Vervoort was kind enough to make me feel special by conducting an interview with me. The interview discusses my job at Performancing.com, managing time while blogging, Jeffro2pt0.com, jeffc.me, my goals with each site I am operating and more. I may have gone overboard with the time management question but I’ve been waiting for an excuse to tell someone what it’s like in my shoes for a day. I seriously need to find a way to manage my time better.
Please check out the interview and then come back here so we can talk about it. Thanks again Stefan for the interview opportunity.
If you haven’t opened up your copy of Woopra yet, do so soon as they have released version 1.2 of their analytics client. This new version has finally fixed a long standing problem I’ve had with Woopra since the release of 1.1 and that is the referral com null redirection error. I’m happy to say, that feature works properly now.
After installing and running Woopra 1.2 for the first time, there are two things that you should notice right off the bat. The first, Woopra now has a new desktop shortcut icon.
Although the icon is not a drastic change, it has a slicker appearance than the other one.
The second thing you’ll notice is that Woopra now has a dashboard area or a homepage. I call it a dashboard because its purpose reminds of me of the WordPress dashboard. This is where news from the Woopra site is displayed along with advertisements on the right hand side. The advertisements are not that distracting and I feel this is one of the ways Woopra will be able to provide a tiered (paid for / free) service.
Click on the image to see the full size
The dashboard also provides at a glance information for each site you have configured to use Woopra. The dashboard contains information such as the live visitors, pageviews, and visits along with a mini bar graph for visual stats.
Other things that are new with Woopra:
So far, I’ve been pretty happy with this new release. If you have upgraded to Woopra 1.2, let me know what you like most about the new version. If you would like to read more about the features in Woopra 1.2, be sure to read the official blog post which goes into more detail.
As I checked my email inbox this afternoon, I discovered an email which was supposedly sent from CNN. The subject line was CNN Alerts: My Custom Alert. The problem is, I’ve never configured custom alerts on the CNN webpage. However, The email looks very legitimate and I almost clicked on the links until I noticed that the FULL STORY link points to a site other than CNN. Check out this screenshot.
I’ve never received a phishing email which has appeared to originate from CNN. I’ve received similar looking emails from Paypal, Ebay, Chase bank, Bank Of America, etc. They almost fooled me on this attempt.
The funny thing is, when I typed in the URL of the full story link into Google, I checked out the search result for the McAfee Site Advisor and according to them, the site is just fine, no significant problems found.
Here is what I find disturbing. How many people do you think may have been as careful as I was with this link and checked out the site advisor page only to see that there was not any problems associated with the site thus, they went ahead and clicked on the link? Thankfully, the comments section of the McAfee post filled me in on the details:
“…didn’t find any significant problems.” Better look harder!!!
CNN.com Daily Top 10 spam has disguised links to <http://www.blackhawkk9.com/cnntop.html> concerning which:
DANGEROUS: LinkScanner Online has found [Trojan Fake Codec]
Yeah, as well as clicking the fake link of your choice they want you to download a trojan loader, submit your machine to a botnet and further their aims to rule the observable universe (nice work if you can get it).Name: blackhawkk9.com
Address: 68.178.211.52
(Owned by GoDaddy.com Inc)
Nameservers:
ns17.domaincontrol.com 64.202.165
ns18.domaincontrol.com 208.109.255.9Registrar: GoDaddy.com Inc
Also, I sent word about this email on Twitter and many other people have reported receiving the same thing.
Word of warning, do not click on the links within this email. Immediately send it to the trash bin or your spam folder or simply delete it. Although this email smelled phishy, this phish almost took the bait.
Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff 