The blog has been around for a wee bit. And will be around for a wee bit more.

I got my first check from google, for running ads on my site. My first blog post, for this particular blog, was on Tuesday, January 22, 2008. That check, is a reflection of from then, until now. I told my girlfriend that I had gotten the check and she said that was cool, and I was like not really, 3 years of work, translated into 73 dollars didn't seem good to me. And asked, well isn't it "free money", from a labor of love?

Hmm… Had to think on this one for a moment. It certainly didn't start out that way. I started writing the blog, thinking I could sell T-shirts and get advertisement revenue, by attracting teenagers with a disposable income. This certainly isn't what happened. If you will waltz down memory lane with me for a paragraph I'd appreciate it.

In the first year, I started it to make money. Which in retrospect was dumb. I got an account on a forum site, hackforums.net. Which turned out to be the right demographic, but people searching for the wrong knowledge base. For the first year that site was 70% of my traffic with the other 20 - 30% coming from google search results. I worked hard to be someone on that site and eventually I was even a moderator for it. I busted my ass that first year, writing the majority of the now 433 posts on this blog, being written in that time. And I tried to sell t-shirts, even had a photo shoot, lol.

I really began exploring other creative mediums as time progressed, the blog gave me a vehicle and confidence to do so. I wrote some, hmmm, would you call it music? Eventually finishing an "EP" which you can still download from last.fm.

I'm doing lot's of other little things. That are various and sundry labors of lover perhaps. In fact I'm microblogging right now at http://ramblings.malvager.net. I do a fiction blog that most certainly is a labor of love. And other side projects that may fall into that category. And another goblin majick album coming up too.

So what is it now, obviously I'm still blogging, and I'm not making money off of it. I've got about 5 posts planned out as of right now, don't know whether they all get released next week or next month. Is it a labor of love? It must certainly isn't. Is it to make money? Of course not. All I can say for sure, is it's a force of habbit.

irc.malvager.net, is my only continuously kept updated labor of love, and for me it's more of a money sync than a labor of love, because two(kye, psycho) of the GREATEST people, and damn good hackers too, help me maintain it, while I just pay a chunk of the server bill. Seriously, love you guys; in the words of Jesse Dangerously, I couldn't make a move without you guys, y'all my legs.

Google TV

http://www.google.com/tv/

Microsoft VS Apple, Google grows

In 1975 Microsoft began selling BASIC interpreters, what we might consider a computer language today. Back then OS's weren't really a part of the computing scene, you wrote your own programs or copied them from a book. But that's not really what I want to talk about, there are thousands of texts on this subject. Microsoft started empire building from then on, trying to dominate the market in all ways. One major move they made was to corner IBM to distribute their OS.They put their Internet browser that was not standards compliant on there OS, not just to obliterate the Netscape browser, but to obliterate the server market that Netscape was a part of. By having a browser that was incompatible with there server, they were taking the bread and butter of Netscape. This is key part of what happened, this is when Microsoft truly started empire-building. A sort of allegory, in which Microsoft began building castles. Companies like Apple tried to compete, but they were competing on the same terms, and in the early days they thought that simply having a better product would win the war. However this didn't work. Apple and Microsoft were the equivalents of warring nations, and though Apple (debatably) provided better products, it was simply out gunned. Even after Steve Jobs came back in coup like glory, they were still fighting the same war. They did take a step forward in making a remarkable phone, with a good profit markup. Even though Microsoft had a mobile platform, it wasn't that good, and it certainly wasn't a complete solution.
Despite this Apple and Microsoft are still fighting the same war. Apple has taken to use some guerrilla tactics, which while that has helped it hasn't really brought them to equal market share.

Enter Google. "Don't be evil"
Google does not sell computers, or phones, or languages. Googles sells ads. It leases various platforms such as AndroidOS for phones, eventually ChromeOS for netbooks(and maybe more). Google offers applications....for free. Most of the code for these products are freely available. The quality of it's mail app, is in my opinion comparable to Outlook, and while I wouldn't say the other google doc apps are perfect, or are as feature rich as Microsoft's apps, I would say that they are a replacement, I wouldn't scoff at, and what's more, they are free. So I wanted to leave with one metaphor, if Apple and Microsoft are nation building empires, filled with castles and war machines, this is not what google is. Google is a form of ivy. And while ivy in general will not do any damage to a well mortared wall, it will however tear down, walls with imperfections, walls of castles that have been fighting each other for years.

ChromeOS thoughts

The ChromeOS demo was today. I'm going to zoom through the negatives first. Oh and here's a simplified video:





Negatives:
Hardware
DIY Computing

ChromeOS will only use specified hardware components and will be primarily for netbooks(the story so far). DIY computers, like building your own device for chrome os, is going to be hard and a hack. I feel that these things suck...but now for the good news.

Paradigm shift:
Everything is a web app. Everything. Editing video is a web app. Someone I work with suggested that they would make javascript that had system calls. But it seems to me, that now you just build your web app to work, and Chrome and ChromeOS do all the hardware stuff for you. The browser will have access to the GPU etc.

Only SSD drives.

Everything is in the cloud...WTF EVERYTHING. It's like the last suit you are ever going to wear. All your stuff will be in the cloud so you can download it when you get a new machine, even saves custom settings like wallpaper. You can use the hardrive to store stuff, and it is natively encrypted. But for the most part everything will live in the cloud.

I think this is a great step forward from the traditional computer paradigm, I'm excited and can't wait until I can buy a chromeOS device.


Bonus: Chrome Browser should come out for linux and mac very soon. I have been using the nightly build script found here:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20090604081030791

The marketting video is the one at the top of the page.

A year of google analytics metrics, what they are and what they mean

***On the 22nd, there will be a new and huge announcement on the blog***

Oh wow, almost a year the blog has been around....just until the 22nd. Well as someone who is a semi-pro at SEO(meaning at one time I got paid for it), I thought I would share my metrics with you. As you can see I have had over 7k unique viewers according to my analytics software(Google Analytics). What does that mean? I don't honestly think that many people have visited my blog, in fact I would say at the very least 50 of those people are me. Is this true? I don't have anything to really base it on, call it, the web version of the spidey sense. I know that I go to my own site on several different computers, at several different locations. Another cool metric that my blog has is that 28.9% of people are returning visitors. IE 3,063 people are returning rather than new. Does this mean I have 3k or even 2k viewers...Ummm, I don't think so. I think this is a fluke caused by people I know IRL, they visit from many different places. If I were to take a guess I would say that in reality I probably only have about 20 dedicated blog readers. I have a colleague that disagrees, and says that I probably have more, closer to the 3k number than 20. Well I don't know about all that. So to prove my colleague wrong, I am asking everyone who is reading this post, and has read my blog more than once, please comment. Comment on this post as to show a true metric. So that's what I have to say about metrics/analytics for blogs.

***On the 22nd, there will be a new and huge announcement on the blog***

Two stupid mistakes one might make with Google's appengine

When appengine asks for your email, suprise, they want your google account you signed up with, not nessicarily your primary email. So if you get an error that says something to the effect of you do not have permission, you may have put the wrong email, or password. So to get your appengine back you will need to delete the cookie in your profile, called .appcfg_cookies.
Another error you might get is CouldNotFindModuleError, typically this is becuase you have appended something to your localhost:8080 address that isn't there or you have defined your app python script incorrectly in the index.yaml.
One last little thing, I find that running my app or even the hello world app in firefox, kind of makes firefox choke. I don't know if this is an extension issue, a firefox issue, a google app engine issue, or my setup. I really haven't looked into it, however it runs great in opera.

I lost my number one spot on google, hacker culture blog

I lost my spot on google, damnit. I was #1 for a while there for hacker culture blog. Of course my SEO strategy changed away from focusing on that search term and instead I was focusing on very non-competitive words, that got decent searches, like unix hacker and underground culture. Well I am going to fight for it back, anything cool I should fight for while I am at it? Maybe something else, hmm? Any ideas you guys? I am currently doing an experiment with terdface. I'll let you guys know how it goes. Oh yeah and I need your help, if you can link me that would be great!

SEO Question for the readership

So I am looking at the google search terms that people have found my site with and the number one is: bsd punk, ok this makes sense to me. However, number two and three are:
dsniff windows and powershell. Someone want to help me out with this. SEO isn't my strong point, but ummm...come on.