The great thing about the internet is that it allows people to disseminate massive amounts of information at amazingly cheap prices.  This is also one of the worst things about the internet…  Because it’s so cheap to send out information, there are a lot of people out there spewing out pure garbage on a colossal scale.

Everyone knows about spam email and how annoying it is. But, really, it’s not that big of a deal. Be careful who you give your address to, change addresses often, and delete the random junk messages that do make their way in.

Spam’s ugly online cousin, spam-bots, can be much more difficult. Of course, not all bots are bad. Without them, we wouldn’t have search engines or aggregated news feeds. But, even those useful bots can do a lot of damage. Looking over my access logs and reporting, I find that bots are consistently around 50% of the traffic to all of my sites. That means that 50% of my server load is spent delivering pages to non-humans.

And then, even worse, there are the evil little bots sent out by the same jerks who think sending out bulk spam emails qualifies as a fun hobby. The thing that was good about them in the past was that they were so dumb you could trick ‘em real easy. Throw anything in a JavaScript tag and suddenly they don’t see it. Or just do the most basic of keyword filtering and knock out virtually all the spam comments on a blog (for some reason, they all seem to talk about viagra, porn, and online degrees a lot). Lately, though, I’ve seen some alarmingly smart little guys trolling out there.

I had an Ajax script being used for cost-per-click displays of phone numbers and got a huge wave of impressions on it from the same IP in a really short time. I figured it was some prankster, but when I investigated, I found that it was GoogleBot. Of course, this isn’t spam, but still it was alarming to see that a spider was out there hitting links that were only available by running a JavaScript function. So, clearly, I’m going to have to do a little re-thinking there and also start worrying about nefarious bots picking up JS capabilities too.

Then, today, I got a notification from WordPress.com that someone had posted a follow-up to one of my comments on another blog. I went back to the post and was very surprised to see my comment reposted again below the original with my name and a link to some spammy site (as my URL). That’s impressive. And scary. Now, it’s going to take more than a casual glance to figure out which comments are real and which are not. And, it’ll probably result in some legitimate comments getting blocked and visa versa.

So, moral of the story is, this isn’t the nineties anymore and you can’t just assume bots are stupid like they used to be. Watch out.

This is a question that I haven’t thought much about in the last ten years or so.  I picked up a copy of Homesite back when it was still published by Allaire and never looked back.  I upgraded versions a couple times out of necessity as I moved to new computers, but never really checked out any other editors.  So, why change now?  Well…

After Vista forced me to install some update or another, my built in FTP client stopped working.  Even so, I stuck with Homesite.  It was like an old, favorite, worn-in baseball glove by this point and I didn’t want to give it up.  But then, my hard drive started making this crazy noise consistently and Vista kept giving me bizarre errors and I realized my laptop was probably on it’s last legs.  Rather than panic after a crash, I decided to be proactive and get a new computer (a desktop) and I loaded it up with Ubuntu Linux distribution rather than continuing to deal with the Microsoft garbage.

Homesite doesn’t work with Linux so I was forced to finally find something new.  Bluefish Editor is what I came up with. It rocks. I easily connected it to all my FTP hosts (including the SFTP ones) and happily started coding away.

Only problem was that I kept forgetting what I had edited from there and then overwriting my own code with local stuff from the laptop. Plus, my wrist was taking some major abuse with all those clicks: save, switch window to FTP, change local directory, change remote directory, upload, change window to browser, refresh, switch back to the editor, etc. Finally, I decided enough was enough and I went out on the hunt for a new editor for my laptop.

The first thing I tried was just getting familiar with the VI Editor and working directly on the servers through a shell. Although this would have been wicked cool, it is a pretty steep learning curve and I just didn’t have the patience. Every time I wanted to do anything (cut, paste, search, replace, undo) I’d have to go back to the tutorial. That got annoying real quick. Plus, I found that the VI Editors on different servers are wildly different. One will be color coded while another is monochromatic, etc.

So, then I asked a colleague for recommendations and he said to try PSPad and Notepad++. But after downloading these, I quickly found that neither supported SFTP so they were no good for me. I was hoping to find something like Bluefish for Windows, but there was just nothing out there.

Finally, I downloaded a copy of WinSCP and figured out how to configure it to work with Homesite as an external editor. I guess I should have just done that to begin with and saved myself all this effort. Bottom line is, 10 years later, I continue to use the same editor I started with. Funny how some things never change.

Yikes! Another long drought between blog posts up here. But, again, I have a good excuse… I’ve been hard at work cleaning up ancient (circa 2003) code, doing a little re-design, and adding some new features to my online running log. In addition to all that, I moved it over to a new domain and renamed it Best Running Log. Why? Well…

First, I’ll admit I’m trying to move up a couple easy spots in the search engine listings. I often wish it were still the 1990’s, those glory days when you could just make cool content and not worry about promoting it, back before all these SEO gurus wrecked the internet. Sorry, I got off on a bit of a tangent there… What I was trying to say is that, I’m coming to the realization that promotion is almost as important as the actual generation of content these days. If I want to generate the type of advertising revenue I’m looking for from my Network, I’m going to have to start doing a better job of getting the word about the sites out.

The second reason was just pure logistics. This was the last site I transferred over to my new server and, because it is so database dependent, I would have had to take it offline for at least a couple hours while waiting for a DNS transfer to propagate. By setting up a new domain on the new box instead, I was able to transfer everything over with less than a half hour of downtime by doing simple .htaccess redirects.

Finally, the new name is intended to refocus the site and return it to its roots. Whereas East Coast Runners was a somewhat ambiguous name, there is no doubt as to what Best Running Log is all about. I’m going to stay more focused on simply being a great running log and not get so carried away with side projects (which have a tendency to half-develop and then stagnate).

That’s about all I have to say about that. Go give the site a whirl and let me know what you think.

I’ve admittedly been bad about posting up here lately. But, I have a pretty good excuse — I’ve been super-duper busy lately. A big part of that was the fact that I moved all my sites to a new host not just once, but twice, in the last couple months. To hopefully save you a similar agony, I’d like to offer a little advice on choosing the right host for you.

Don’t go too cheap. When I first signed up with 1&1 hosting, I was a sophomore in high school and was on a very limited budget. As such 1&1’s shared hosting package was a great solution. But, as I became more and more serious about my web presence and eventually came to have a full blown web development business, the slow servers, constant downtime, and limited database storage space were issues that I could no longer deal with. I had been researching different hosts for a long while and finally bought the bullet, so to speak, and moved almost everything from 1&1 over to Mosso in January. Which brings me to my second point…

Don’t go too expensive either. The $100/month base price for Mosso’s cloud hosting was a big jump from what I was paying before, but I figured that it would be money well spent if it gave me the type of dependability and scalability that I was looking for. But, after I moved, I found that my compute cycles (their way of calculating server usage) was adding up very quickly and that, by the time I achieved the traffic I was looking for, I would be paying well over the $100/month. With a little handy math, I came to realize that I would need roughly 125,000 monthly unique page views to break even (figuring with a $0.80 eCPM, which is typical to the sites I run), but by the time I hit that I would have well exceeded the compute cycle allotment. So, there was really no way of me ever making a profit while running on the cloud computing environment. And so, even though I was in love with the idea of cloud computing, I realized that it was unfeasible for me to remain there.

Like Goldilocks, you have to find the host that is just right. For me, that was Dreamhost. I went with one of their virtual server packages which gives me a ton of flexibility and all the cool goodies that I’m looking for. Plus, they have managed servers there so when I do grow to the type of traffic I want someday, I’ll be able to switch over easily (they actually copy all the files for you). Sure, it’s not as cool of a solution as the instant scalability of the cloud, but it makes a lot mores sense for a small business like my own.

I’m almost done with moving everything now and will hopefully be able to get back to all the projects that have been left on the back burner very soon. Check back soon for news on those.

The name change is now on the books — What was Lantenengo Industries is now officially Ink Plant. The process of filing a DBA was actually relatively simple after I figured out what had to be done. To spare you the same difficulty I had in tracking all that info down, I’ll list it here…

How to register a sole proprietorship in Manhattan (New York County):

• Choose your business name. It has to be composed of real words or your name (You can’t just make up some cool sounding word.)
• Hop on the subway and head down to 60 Centre Street.
• Buy a DBA form from the coffee shop right inside the front door ($2). Don’t fill it out yet.
• Go to the County Clerk’s office in Room 109B in the basement.
• Go up to the counter and check with the clerk to see if the name you want is acceptable. If it is, fill out the form, pay them $120 (cash, money order, or credit card) and they’ll give you two notarized copies of the certificate.
• That’s it. You’re official now. Congratulations.