Jumping the shark

Some of you may be like me and be a little confused every time you read a blog and see a reference to "jumping the shark" or "jumped the shark". It turns out that there is a nice Wikipedia article that explains what it means to "jump the shark". It simply means that you've passed your peak and are on a decline. One does not deliberately engage in "shark jumping", but it unfortunately is something that just happens.

-- Jack Krupansky

Status of my blogging cloud

As of today, my blog "cloud" is 4,620 hits in Google, but that's 162 displayed hits, and 15,500 total hits, compared to 5,020, 158, and 16,800 a week ago.  My blog cloud is defined as the results of a Google search of my name in quotes and the word "blog".

 

I suspect that the numbers declined since blogs sometimes have lists of recent comments, and a number of my older comments simply fell off those lists.  That's life, but there is also the lesson that you need to stay current and can't thrive for very long on old contributions.

 

My strategy for raising these numbers is to continue to make quality comments on the blogs of others, as well as to post my own blog posts when I feel that I have something to say.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Proper terminology: blog vs. weblog vs. web log vs. bloc note

I'm a stickler for seeking out proper terminology, so I probably should be referring to this as a "web log", but I recognize that the shortened form of "blog" is popular enough and not inaccurate, so I'll continue using it. Some people still use the intermediate form of "weblog", but I'm not a fan of jamming words together.

I'm actually a fan of the French propensity to come up with there own terms. I note that they seem to be reasonably logical in their choice of terms. They refer to a blog or web log as a "bloc note" or "blocs." Sounds good to me. Jeff Clavier pointed out this usage on his "bloc note."

I also thank Jeff for supplying me with the French rendition of "rant" - "coup de gueule", which Babel Fish translates into English as "blow of mouth." Excellent.

I am resisting the use of the term "RSS" when the more proper term "web feed" feels more appropriate since the feed can in fact be in formats other than RSS (e.g., Atom), and the feed need not originate from a bloc note.

Fin de coup de gueule.

-- Jack Krupansky

Blogger doing better, again

No problems with Blogger today, including email posting.

 

Actually, there was a slight problem that I've been running into.  I made a mistake in a hyperlink in my email post and logged into Blogger to edit it with the Blogger post editor.  I made the change and viewed the updated blog, but although the change was successful, Blogger changed the line spacing between the two adjacent paragraphs.  I had to go in and delete the two new extra lines.  It then updated correctly, but having to "fix" Blogger's confusing mistake was somewhat annoying.  The good news is that I didn't have to resort to any raw HTML editing.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Stock Market Commentary for Thursday, May 26, 2005

Finally on Wednesday we got a little of the long-awaited "profit-taking", with Nasdaq falling a moderate 11.50 points.  It's always very difficult to tell whether a decline is simply profit-taking before a continuation of an advance or an indication that the advance is over.  Wednesday did look like simple profit-taking.  A market top is usually preceded by some number of trading sessions where the market opens sharply higher and then closes well below the opening level, and there is no sign of any of that, yet.

Nasdaq closed at the level it had fallen to by 10:20 a.m.  This is not the trading pattern of a true sell-off.

The economic data was quite decent.

Nasdaq trading volume was very light (1.55 billion shares), and breadth was almost strongly negative, with 1.90 losers for each gainer.  The momentum froth speculators certainly jumped ship, but this was not a heavy sell-off.

Click here to read the entire column.

-- Jack Krupansky

Blogger not so bad, for now

My errant email posts to this blog just posted, but I'm still annoyed with Blogger.

 

While I was waiting for Blogger to recycle or reboot itself (or whatever it does when it's not doing what I want it to do) I read a blog that talked about how people upgrade to Typepad as they get more sophisticated.  Hmmm...  But, I'd rather stick with my current blog URLs rather than start over.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

More on Bad Blogger

My errant post finally posted to my finance blog.  I had been trying to manually post it as well and got a strange error and then it posted twice, once without a title, and then the original post finally came through.  I had to then manually delete the two extra posts.  What a pain, but it's okay now.

 

Unfortunately, this blog itself is refusing to update in a timely manner as well.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Bad Blogger, again

Just when I was almost getting used to Blogger doing better lately, my latest email post failed to post promptly and still hasn't posted after ten minutes, and I didn't get a bounce-back either.  Oh well.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Stock Market Commentary for Wednesday, May 25, 2005

The market continued its "sideways" march on Tuesday as people continue to struggle over the question of whether the run-up is finally over or simply taking a breather before resuming.  Nasdaq gained a modest 4.97 points.

Economic data continues to be mixed, but reasonably positive.

Nasdaq trading volume was not quite moderate (1.74 billion shares), and breadth was modestly negative, with 1.13 losers for each gainer.  A gain on negative breadth usually suggest that large-cap stocks did incrementally better than smaller-cap stocks.

Click here to read the entire column.

-- Jack Krupansky

Blogger speedy today

My last email post to this blog was posted by Blogger almost instantaneously. As fast as I could click to check incoming Gmail, the Blogger confirmation message was received. Nice work.  I knew they could do it, eventually. Now we look for some consistency.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Bloglines versus NewsGator: better feed title sorting in Bloglines

I continue to use both Bloglines and NewsGator, in parallel, for my web feed aggregation.  One nice feature I've noticed in Bloglines that is not present in NewsGator is that Bloglines ignores any leading "The" of feed titles when sorting them.  How could NewsGator be so stupid as not to do the same as this useful Bloglines feature?  Sure, maybe it should be an optional feature, as long as the option is there and is the default.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

del.icio.us is not very palatable

I've heard lots of chatter about the del.icio.us social bookmarking or "tagging" site, so I finally got around to giving it a try.  I was able to register easily enough, but the user-interface is so bad that I was unable to figure out how to do anything, including the theoretically simple task of placing a bookmark.  I'll have to do deeper research to find the cheat sheet the gives enough clues as to how this service works.  I was able to figure out Blogger and how to create and edit wiki pages and even use Technorati's tagging service, so it seems strange that this social bookmarking service should be so much more intensely cryptic.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Hardware and system support

Microsoft's "Geek Blogger", Robert Scoble, writes in his blog that "My comments are down. I have to switch to a new server, but don't have time this weekend since..."  Here in the 21st Century, why should any of us have to be concerned with or even inconvenienced by hardware and system management issues?  Have we learned nothing about building computer systems and applications over the past 50 years?  Apparently, we've learned very little.

 

Hardware is supposed to be so cheap that it's effectively free, but we fail to exploit those economics for system designs.

 

If even Microsoft's premiere blogger can't get decent system support, what do the rest of us get?  I've written about problems I've had with Blogger, but Blogger's service has been fairly decent for the past couple of days.  That's the point:  we should be able to characterize system support as absolutely not an issue rather than counting our blessings when we can go a few days without problems.

 

Deep sigh.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Monetizing my blogging efforts

I'm been blogging now for a couple of months now, and am starting to think about how to think about the value that I am getting from my blogging efforts.  Put more simply:  How can I be assured that I am effectively monetizing my efforts, both in terms of present value and future value?

 

I do have ads on my blogs, but they pay me very little, not even enough to survive in a slum in Bangladesh.  The reading of my blogs via aggregators may be interfering with potential revenue from ad clicks, so I will be using Google "feed" ads as soon as they open up the program to us small guys.

 

I do a fair amount of commenting on the blogs of others, because it interests me, because it helps to promote me, and hopefully because it drives at least a tiny bit of traffic to my own blogs.  That consumes a lot of my time and gives me no direct revenue, but may help to build my reputation over time.

 

My hope is that maybe my blogging and commenting will lead to some consulting work or a venture opportunity, but right now, that's all it is: hope.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Status of my blogging cloud

As of today, my blog "cloud" is 5,020 hits in Google, but that's 158 displayed hits, and 16,800 total hits, compared to 188, 100, and 990 a month ago.  My blog cloud is defined as the results of a Google search of my name in quotes and the word "blog".

 

My strategy for raising these numbers is to continue to make quality comments on the blogs of others, as well as to post my own blog posts when I feel that I have something to say.

 

I've enjoyed posting on the various BusinessWeek blogs, and the GM FastLane blog as well.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Yahoo's Publisher's Guide to RSS

Yahoo now has a Publisher's Guide to RSS that shows you how to easily distribute your content on Yahoo.

 

Note: Yahoo does in fact support the Atom web feed format even though they label everything as "RSS".

 

Final note:  Every place that I write "Yahoo", should be read as if I had written "Yahoo!".

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Google ads coming to web feeds

Google just formally announced the beta program for supporting AdSense ads in web feeds.  You can read the details of the AdSense For Feeds (AFF) program.  This means that I will be able to earn a little revenue even if you view my feeds solely through a web feed aggregator (like Bloglines or NewsGator) rather than directly visiting my blogs on Blogger.  You'll still have to click on the ads as displayed in the aggregator.

 

I'm anxious to use it, but unfortunately you need to have 100 subscribers to your feed to get into the program.  I'm well short of that requirement.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Blogger doing better

I don't have any complaints about email posting to Blogger these past two days.  My daily stock market column gets posted and looks fine.  I don't get any of those annoying bounce-back messages either.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Yet another test of Blogger handling of HTML email posts

I was able to submit an HTML email post to my Finaxyz.com stock market commentary blog last night, and although it took more than a couple of minutes to get through, it posted cleanly.

 

I have reported the bug to Blogger and they requested more information, which I gave them, including the actual email post itself (an .EML file) and the link to the resulting post that was (is) messed up.  No word back yet, but since this is an intermittent problem, either it could take some time or maybe it's already fixed.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Test for email post handling of HTML #2

My last post was to see how Blogger would handle an email post since I've been having trouble consistently getting HTML email messages posted.  This message is in HTML.  We'll see how this one does.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Test to see if Blogger properly handling HTML email posts

Does Blogger properly handle the HTML formatting of this email post?

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Test for email post handling of HTML

<DIV>My last post was to see how Blogger would handle an email post since I've been having trouble consistently getting HTML email messages posted.&nbsp; I just realized that the last post was in <EM><STRONG>text</STRONG></EM> format, not HTML.&nbsp; This message is in HTML.&nbsp; We'll see how this one does.</DIV> <DIV>&nbsp;</DIV> <DIV>-- <A href="mailto:Jack.Krupansky@gmail.com">Jack Krupansky</A></DIV>

Fw: [#212408] email post HTML text not handled properly

----- Original Message -----
From: "Blogger Support" <support@blogger.com>
To: "Jack Krupansky {U 7091770 B 11676251}" <Jack@BaseTechnology.com>
Cc: "Jack Krupansky" <jack@basetechnology.com>
Sent: Friday, May 13, 2005 1:37 PM
Subject: Re: [#212408] email post HTML text not handled properly

> Hi there,
>
> Thanks for writing in. Please see our Blogger Help article for information
> on how HTML tags are handled in Mail-to-Blogger:
> http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=1149
>
> Sincerely,
> Blogger Support
>
> Original Message Follows:
> ------------------------
> From: "Jack Krupansky" <jack@basetechnology.com>
> Subject: Re: [#212408] email post HTML text not handled properly
> Date: Mon, 9 May 2005 19:09:24 -0400
>
> I've checked your online problem documentation and have *NOT* found a
> solution to the problem that I reported. Emailed posts (since Friday
> evening) continue to display actual HTML source text rather than the
> formatted text.
>
> Jack Krupansky
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Blogger Support" <support@blogger.com>
> To: "Jack Krupansky {U 7091770 B 11676251}" <Jack@BaseTechnology.com>
> Sent: Monday, May 09, 2005 7:02 PM
> Subject: Re: [#212408] email post HTML text not handled properly
>
>
> > Hi there,
> >
> >
> >
> > Thanks for contacting Blogger Support. Since we cannot always respond
> > personally to every message we get, we encourage you to check Blogger
> > Help, where you can find answers to many common questions. Here are some
> > of the top articles which could help you out:
> >
> >
> >
> > CHANGES ARE NOT APPEARING ON THE BLOG
> >
> > http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=639
> >
> >
> >
> > A BLOG IS MISSING FROM YOUR DASHBOARD
> >
> > http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=656
> >
> >
> >
> > HOW TO WORK WITH BLOGGER'S COMMENTS
> >
> > http://help.blogger.com/bin/topic.py?topic=23
> >
> >
> >
> > HOW TO HANDLE PROBLEMS WITH INVITATIONS
> >
> > http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=642
> >
> >
> >
> > HELP WITH HTML OR CSS CODE
> >
> > http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=1116
> >
> >
> >
> > If you don't see what you need in these articles, you can use the search
> > form in the upper right corner of any Blogger Help page. Be sure also to
> > check our Status page and our Known Issues page. These cover many known
> > bugs and current operational problems.
> >
> >
> >
> > BLOGGER STATUS
> >
> > http://status.blogger.com/
> >
> >
> >
> > KNOWN ISSUES
> >
> > http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=791
> >
> >
> >
> > If your question or problem is not addressed anywhere in our
> > documentation, please simply reply to this message and let us know. We
> > will help you out as soon as we can. Thanks for your patience.
> >
> >
> >
> > Sincerely,
> >
> > Blogger Support
> >
>

Blogger outage

Just when I was ready to post that Blogger was working fine, I get a message notifying me that Blogger is down due to "planned maintenance" from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. (Pacific Time).  Thanks for the advance notice.  Why force an outage during "prime time"?  Duh!

 

It's now 6:00 p.m. (Pacific Time) and still no Blogger... OOPS!  My blog just came up, but my email post to my Finaxyz.com blog also bounced with the following error text:

Blogger could not process your message at this time.

Error code: 6.9340A4

It's truly appalling that a company like Google is unable to build a fault-tolerant, industrial-grade distributed computing network so that components of the network can be incrementally updated without forcing a total outage like this.

 

Who knows if this email post will be properly processed or bounced or lost.  Oh well, you get what you pay for.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Test for email post after Blogger outage

Just a test to see if email posting is working yet after the latest Blogger "outage".

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Another test to see if the Blogger email post bug is fixed

I just emailed a post to my Finaxyz.com blog and it went through fine, so maybe Blogger has fixed the bug that caused the post to be displayed as HTML source text rather than formatted text.  You'll see the results right here.

 

Oh, I forgot to mention that I did file a bug report with Blogger almost immediately after my last post to this blog, so if the bug is fixed, that indicates prompt turnaround by Blogger.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Testing to see if Blogger has fixed the HTML email post bug

<DIV>I still haven't gotten around to filing a bug report myself, but maybe Blogger itself has found out about the bug that causes HTML email posts to be posted as the HTML text itself.&nbsp; If they still haven't fixed it, then I'll let them know tomorrow.&nbsp; I'm busy struggling to catch up after a lot of traveling over the past two weeks.</DIV> <DIV>&nbsp;</DIV> <DIV>-- <A href="mailto:Jack.Krupansky@gmail.com">Jack Krupansky</A></DIV>

Blogger not processing HTML email posts properly

<DIV>Sometime Friday evening, Blogger started messing up emailed posts that are in HTML format.&nbsp; Instead of posting the formatted message properly, Blogger is posting an approximation of the HTML text itself, as you can see in this post.</DIV> <DIV>&nbsp;</DIV> <DIV>-- Jack Krupansky</DIV>

Need for a wiki computing glossary and wiki product/service directory

There is a wikipedia encyclopedia and even a wiktionary dictionary, but we desperately need a wiki computing glossary since not all computing terms belong in a normal dictionary, and not all of them deserve the kind of detailed articles found in an encyclopedia.

 

There are existing online computing glossaries (e.g., the Free Online Dictionary of Computing and the Webopedia), but none in wiki format so that "the community" can maintain the glossary without the difficulties of overloaded (or disinterested) gatekeepers.

 

We also need a wiki product and service directory since the existing "directories" (e.g., Yahoo, the Open Directory Project, and the Google directory) are also overly constrained by overloaded or disinterested (or greedy) gatekeepers.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Boring act of terrorism in New York City

Overheard on the street near the scene of the explosions in front of the British Consulate here in New York City: "What a boring act of terrorism."  A lot of traffic mishaps have caused more damage.

 

The consulate is a block and a half from my stock broker, a block from a place I was working last Summer, and less than a block from the nearest police and fire stations, but most importantly, a half-block from Essa Bagel where I usually go to pick up lunch.  For a while I was worried that I wouldn't be able to get my bagel sandwich, but they quickly opened half the street for traffic.

 

-- Jack Krupansky