Big Dan’s Site

I must be the only webmaster in the world who doesn’t jump for joy, drool and watch my tongue roll out of my mouth at the mere site of a tag cloud. They’re boring, quite frankly stupid when compared to just typing in a search term. OMG is that even possible? or Maybe I should really be saying OMG OMG OMG That’s so 2005! In my best teenage girl impersonation.

On a more serious note, they are a headache to manage for bloggers and webmasters. On forums for instance 10 different people will enter 10 different tags for the same topic, that negates any helpful qualities of having BIGGER words for frequent topics. On blogs, you may slightly alter the same tag from post to post, maybe one time you hyphenate or pluralize it that creates an extra tag and negates the potential SEO value by adding an extra, useless page thereby the could be harmful, page stuffing comes to mind.

It could be that I’m bitter since when Wordpress released built in tagging support I went tag crazy and deleted all my blog categories which lead to all of my permalinks becoming defunct. My fault, I know but all of those posts wound up at Big Dan’s Archive. Wordpress categories are just like tags only more flexible for SEO purposes (think mod_rewrite + category descriptions)? I’m sure a plugin could be written to show a tag like cloud for categories since WP already stores the number of posts in each category.

You see I think tag clouds are the most annoying part of Web 2.0, aside from Web 2.0 being called “Web 2.0″ of course. Hello it’s the internet, technology is constantly evolving. You don’t see Apple calling the 3rd generation iPod “iPod 3.0″ or “iMac 4.0″ nope it’s simple iPod or video iPod, or it’s just a 24″ iMac. Really are webmasters that bored that we need to make up retarded names for almost new or combination (think Ajax) technologies. Of course every one uses these terms even traditional media which makes it all the more annoying.

Another term, I’ve grown to hate is “Social Network” Answer me this is there any of the kind networking other than computers that isn’t social? Business networking is social, school networking is social, hunting buddies are social networking. Do we really need this god awful term? The only thing that makes any sense is a spin off of “social networking”; social bookmarking because it’s new, traditionally we never made our bookmarks public maybe an email link to a friend here and there but not a public list of all your favorite sites, I think that’s pretty cool.

Anyway, back to tags, tagging, and that annoyance:

My question to you tag addicted folks is what’s so great about them, other than the potential to look at a cloud on a website and see the more common topics? For me, I’ll only use tags when a clickable tag cloud is available on the new post page so that I may add existing tags with out adding similar useless tags.

I tried yet again to move my blog to a different domain it worked for about 2 weeks. Now I’m back to my original domain name, BigDan.us. It’s sort of become like my own identity online, I’ve got so much stuff tied to this domain, links posted for other people to reference and the like, and I get a decent amount of traffic here too.  Simple things like switching my email address has becoming a PITA, I’m registered at so many places that I’ll never get all of them. Add to that all the profiles I have online that back link to this domain, it’s pretty stupid of me to throw it away just from the SEO aspect.

BigDan.us fits me anyhow; After all I am Big Dan and a proud American.

Since I completely boinked my category system when WP released tag integration, I’ve moved all my old posts to a separate WP install over at http://archive.bigdan.us all my old posts are there. This blog is offically starting fresh.

Thanks for reading.

Yesterday marked the fifth time in the little over three weeks since I purchased this computer that I have reinstalled Vista. It’s no fault of HP or Vista really it’s just my own indecisiveness. The first format was to install XP but text looked like crap on my screen even with the drivers from HP. So, I formatted and installed Vista again. Next time I tried to triple boot, XP, Vista, and Ubuntu which totally fried my MBR and a full factory restore was the only option. From there I got frustrated with paying for an XP license then not using it, so the decision was made to wipe Vista, install XP and figure out the ugly text problem. The ugly text problem was figured out quite easily by downloading the original drivers from the nVidia website. All was well for a good week, I was more than satisfied with my XP/Ubuntu dual boot setup.

Until I tried to burn a DVD as part of my weekly backup procedures. It appears even though XP recognizes, installs from, and reads discs from my DVD-RW drive it won’t burn to it. XP just plain won’t recognize any blank media in the drive. For me, this is a deal breaker as I need to be able to burn. A quick chat with HP’s live technician tells me what I thought there is no drivers under XP for this drive.

Now, I find that a little out of the ordinary. Ubuntu burns to this drive why cannot a commercial OS? HP even has a whole page dedicated to “downgrading” to XP while it warns that downgrading may limit functionality, HP still felt the need publish an entire document on it. Obviously the “may limit functionally” warning is a CYA maneuver. My issue is there were Light Scribe DVD-RW’s before Vista came out, why cannot they just provide drivers for it to keep their customers happy?

Nonetheless, No DVD burner means no sale for me. Time for a format and reinstall of Vista, everything went smoothly. I downloaded all the Windows Updates, my favorite sidebar gadgets, and programs. In fact I’m posting from Vista right now. Overall, I like Vista sure it’s a bit of a resource hog but it’s eye candy accounts for that. With 3 GB of RAM, I have rarely gone over the 50% mark of RAM utilization even with Open Office and Firefox with 30+ tabs open.

All in all, I’m satisfied with Vista. Sure, I’ve installed Ubuntu and still use it but for now Vista is my primary OS. What are you thoughts on Vista in comparison to XP or any other OS?

Here are a couple of pictures taken from my front porch during our umpteenth snow storm this season.

Click for full size, it looks a little more picturesque if you ignore the power lines. 

This is an update to my last blog entry about how much 1and1 sucks. About 10 minutes after my post I got an email stating my hosting package was canceled. Later on I got 2 seperate emails, 1 was this months bill for the hosting plan ($14.99), the second one was a credit notice that I was refunded $14.99.  My bank hasn’t been charged yet, what do they plan to do charge me then refund me?

1and1 could really use a complete overhaul of their domain control panel, billing system, and customer service department. I am glad this latest 1and1 fiasco ended well. I still plan on writing a How-To on canceling services with 1and1 and will eventually pull all of my domains away from them.

1&1 is the worst online company I have ever had to deal with. The sad part of it is I already knew this and still signed up a for another hosting account with them. It all started with me wanting to conserve some resources on the VPS where I host my DJ Forum. Figuring I’d move my blog (bandwidth eater), parked domains, and a few other sites to an another host so I decided to start a new hosting account with DreamHost for this purpose. I’ve had history with DreamHost too but overall they’re a decent host and work with their customers.

Long story short I had issues with DreamHost it took them over a week to get my domain email working properly, I was getting frustrated so two days ago I opened a new hosting account with 1&1 at an introductory price. This hosting plan was supposed to be an upgrade to my current account where I have about 50 domains registered. Here’s where the first thing went wrong, they added a new contract to my account instead of upgrading my current contract. Okay no problem so I’ll just add the domains as additional hosted domains since they’re already registered at 1and1. The hosting plan came with 100 “add-on” domains, these are domains that are registered elsewhere but hosted at 1and1. I go to add the first domain registered at 1and1 that I want to host on another 1and1 contract under the same customer number (confused yet? Yeah that’s 1&1’s plan all along.) Their control panel won’t let me select host as additional domain it will only let me move it to the new hosting package. Okay that’s fine since I plan on keeping both contracts active. I select move it to this package, now I’m hit with a little check box that I have to check “I understand that my credit card will be charged for this item”. Huh? Wait..What? I already own the domain, why would you charge me to move it? No other registrar does that. Apparently 1&1 wants to charge me a full year’s registration fee to move the domain to another account I own and then not extend the domain’s expiration date by another year. What the fuck? in plain English. So, I cancel that.

Two letters to their “support” department trying to get them to merge the two contracts goes on unanswered. A third letter demanding cancellation of the hosting package gets the standard canned response, directing me to go to cancel.1and1.com. I’ve been through this cancellation process before, it’s convoluted and deliberately confusing. Having been through this before it’s a breeze for the seasoned 1and1 run around professional. I select the hosting contract and hit cancel entire package. Please check your email for a confirmation link, okay I get the confirmation link click it. Easy enough right?

Nope I get your package will be canceled February 19, 2009. Huh? Now I realize to get the promotional price that I had to lock into a time commitment, 1 year. Not a problem but I’m well with their 90 day money back guarantee period it should of been deactivated and canceled on the spot. An email to support explaining the whole situation gets a canned response to contact the billing department. Which I just wrote, I’ll update when I get a response.

As I write this my bank account has been debited $6 on 4 separate occasions from 1&1. $6 dollars is their ghost charge, they charge it and then put the money back to confirm funds availability. Let’s not mention the fact that every other company on the planet only debits a few cents or at most $1 to confirm the card is chargeable. 1&1 has seen fit to confirm my card 4 times, thus tieing up $24 that I could be putting to good use else where like DreamHost.

If it weren’t for my VPS’s host name being tied into a domain registered with 1&1, I would take a hit and loose 50 domains and cancel my entire account with 1&1 they’re just plain bad business people.

Coming soon: A tutorial on canceling 1&1 products.

A little late but better late than never.

Jelsoft released vBulletin 3.7b5 on Valentine’s Day February 14th. This release is primarily a maintenance release for bug fixes but a new feature made the cut. Conversations, profile comments are now threaded like a real life conversation. The best comparison is Gmail’s conversation feature which works much the same way.

As always vBulletinAdmin has upgraded and you may log in and test the new features @ http://www.vbulletinadmin.com/talk/

For the longest time I’ve ignored television news and turned to Google News for almost all of my news. Quite frankly, I’m tired of the fluff; a 5 minute segment on who the next American Idol is going to be is not and never will be news. Other than that my second complaint about media is everything is sensationalized and a majority of the focus is on negative pieces. The few positive stories that air are often squeezed in as the last segment.

My local newspaper’s website has a comments section on every article I frequently read through the comments. Today being Sunday there were a lot of fluff pieces such as local success stories and the like. Along with a cop stabbing and negative piece about a local hospital there were two positive stories one a about a local girl who grew up in a bad neighborhood and made something of herself, another congratulating a local police force for cleaning up gang a gang infested apartment complex.

Here’s the number of comments for each story:

Cop stabbing: 14 comments

Hospital: 9 Comments

Gang Cleanup: 2

Successful Girl: 0

What does that tell you? Is all the negativity being reported truly the media machine’s fault for publishing mostly the worst in people or are negative stories what people demand by reaction and viewer ship?

I tell you what I think; Even though a lot of people complain about the news people still like to know there are people more screwed up then themselves out there. This way people can sit on their little perch, gloat about how great they are, ruminate on how they would never do such a thing, where things went wrong, and judge others. You know the old saying “Sex Sells”? Today it’s “Sex, Violence, and Negativity sell.”

Hi All,

Welcome to my new blog. I decided to put a free domain purchase to good use and finally jump into a .com, while this isn’t the name I really wanted (bigdan.com), bigdanee.com will have to do. My old blog is now redirected here so you should have found me easily, the old posts are archived until I get some time to sort through them and copy/paste them.

Please excuse the mess while I get things setup and write new pages.

Thanks

-Dan