TheGarage Tech Blog

I don’t care how many top ten lists are posted and couched as invaluable, insider how-to advice on how to blog and make money, it’ still just SPAM. I don’t care how good your SEO is; I don’t care how visually appealing your theme is; I don’t care about anything except that if your content sucks I’m not gonna come back. And neither is anyone else with any sense. Trust me, I know. I’ve had a lot of people not come back over the last many years.

Of course your theme  and search engine optimization are very important, but the bottom line is that any blog about how to make money blogging = SPAM! If you read those sites you are reading spam. No matter how much you want to believe, it’s still spam.

It’s like a wiener in a bun advertising how much money can be made from selling chili dogs. Put some chili, cheese and onions with mayo and mustard and some dill relish on that wiener would you? If you can’t dish out some relish, you are in trouble. If you get into blogging solely as a means to make money, you are a silly fucker; you have bought into a scam. You probably already have paid someone some money, I bet, to learn how to do it. You think you are getting in on a scam on a bunch of idiots when it is you who are, in fact, the idiot. Now I may be mis-underestimating things, but the pool of available idiots is not big enough to sustain all the other idiots trying to sucker them. See pyramid scheme. See Maddoff. See Social Security.

People who write a blog because they love to write and have always wanted to write, and they somehow wind up with a big audience and are able to make some money, those are the guys who inspire me and I am simply amazed by all the fucking morons who buy in to the idea that they can throw up a web page using this trick or that strategy and that they will somehow rake in huge amounts of money–or even moderate amounts of money. These people are likely the same ones who purchase hair transplants or male enhancement pills. Call ‘em a bunch of Smilin’ Bob’s. Such pie in the sky delusions makes Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds seem pragmatic. Come off your trip already!

Want to know how to make money blogging? I’ll tell ya. This is the best advice you’ll ever get: Consistently provide a bunch of great content that people want to consume and that people will want to come back to consume more of. Consistent means over the course of months and years, not days and weeks. See InstaPundit. If you can throw up decent content week after week after week, a Google blackball can’t stop you. You could serve the dish from a 28K dialup line and people would figure out a way to get it.

A series of never ending top 10 lists on how to create a blog to make money, on the other hand, bores me to tears and tends to make me belligerent.

You know who you are.

This blog now, along with Rumble Strips, lives in the don callaway dot org (dcdo) Wordpress Mu installation configured with top level domains and sub-domains.   To the casual observer these are standalone Wordpress blogs.  For each blog with a top level domain I can also have multiple blogs as sub-domains to that blog.

Sweet.

I revived enormous incongruities into a new blog I am calling Rumble Strips. It was either that or Surface Gradient Anomalies.

I don’t know how much I’ll be writing to the blog since I have been trying to improve my mental outlook by totally ignoring the news about politics and such, but it doesn’t make sense to have almost half a decade of writing sitting in the closet. I had to update the Wordpress version to 2.7 and then export the database and import into wpmu. In the process I somehow lost all my categories and I don’t want to screw around with it.

I finally cut power to the Dell Poweredge 6300 last night at about midnight, right before I went to bed.  It is so quiet in the TheGarage this morning I can’t hear myself think.  I bet I’ll get readjusted in no time.

I have made some changes to the doncallaway dot org domain. The top level domain, doncallaway.org (dcdo)  now points to a Wordpress Mu blog and serves a static splash page that points to all my other stuff.  The splash page is quite simple at the moment but I will be setting up the BDP-RSS Aggregator plugin to replace the simple linkage with fancy aggregated RSS feeds. For a great example of what you can do with BDP-RSS plugin, check out the Edublogs site.

This blog along with several other blogs will be migrated into the dcdo Mu database today using a top level domain configuration, meaning that garagetechblog.com will still point to this blog. However, if you were linking here from doncallaway.org, which has been pointing here since I shut down the Domino web server running on the Poweredge, you need to change your bookmark. Please.

After I finish moving a couple of blogs into the dcdo Mu environment, I am going to move the Gulf Coast Texas Blog into the Gulf Coast Texas Bloggers Mu database. It’s ridiculous not to. Just like how not allowing embed tags in Mu is ridiculous. I am going to make the hack and we will have embeded video in the GCT Mu installation and the dcdo Mu installation since they are both relatively closed systems.  I don’t recommend the hack for wpmu systems open to the public.

If you ever need to access the system wide schema info for a MySQL server, check out this very nice diagram of the MySQL Information_Schema.

What can you do with this information? Well, lots of stuff. For example you can get a list of tables and columns for a particular database, like

SELECT table_name, column_name, data_type [,...]
FROM information_schema.columns
WHERE table_schema = dbname;

Which could be handy for any number of reasons, such as seeing if a table or exists or if a column exists in a table, etc.

In the previous post I mentioned some issues with injecting php into a Wordpress Mu blog post. Some people probably don’t understand why would you want to execute php code from inside a blog post. Well the most obvious answer now that I’ve done some research and what seems to be the primary concern of Jim Groom and the many followers of the issue is the ability to configure and display dynamically aggregated RSS feeds for posts as well as doing some fancy stuff in the widgets. I can imagine the possibilities are endless.

But the obvious reason isn’t what initially got me started on the search to execute php from inside a post or page. I want to be able to add a set of custom fields to certain categories of posts and then execute sql commands against them. For example on an outdoor photography blog, for all posts in the ‘Trip Report’ category I might add some fields called ‘location’,  ‘mileage’, ‘meals’, ‘fuel’, ‘other_expenses’.  Then I could have a page called ‘Trip Expenses’ that would query all the Trip Report posts and display the results in tables, charts, and/or graphs. A Wordpress page with embedded php could create  fancy charts and graphs laid out however you like, like the Quickbooks dashboard, for example.  The page would re-calculate every time it’s opened. How sweet is that?

Another example:  On a blog chronicling a fitness program I could add custom fields to the ‘Daily Workout’ posts like ‘exercise_type’, ‘total_distance’, ‘total_time’, ‘5k_time’, ‘peak_heart_rate’, ‘two_min_recovery_heart_rate’, ‘etc…’. Then I could have a Page called ‘Treadmill Progress Report’ or ‘Bench Press Progress Report’ that spits out graphs based on the fields in all the Daily Workout posts.

Using this technique you could easily build simple database applications within a wordpress blog. You could also build large, complex applications like this but that would be silly, wouldn’t it?

I just found out that Wordpress Mu disallows embed tags within blog posts. No YouTube, no Flikr, no nothing. The reason given is security issues, of course. Details here.

On the one hand I can see how if you are allowing people to sign up and create free blogs on the fly you would want to be very careful with what someone is allowed to inject into your database with an embed tag. On the other hand I don’t see how  you are going to get people to use your fancy blogging service when they aren’t allowed to embed YouTube or Flikr  videos. There is an easy enough workaround that has been made even easier packaged as a Wordpress plugin, but, hey, you know I really don’t want people injecting malicious stuff into my database.

I also found out that WordPress Mu disallows the execution of php and javascripts. Again, for a multi-user installation that has hundreds of users this is the only course. But for a semi-closed setup like the one I am working on now, I want the flexibility to do whatever I want. To get dynamic output in the content area of a page you can use a workaround as described here. Inserting the code for an RSS aggregator is discussed but the technique is good for many things.

To inject code directly into a Wordpress Mu post, forget about it. I have a project on the drawing board where I want to use custom fields and have appended to each post a series of dynamically created MySql queries of the custom fields to create tables, charts, etc. For now, the only choice for that is to have a bunch of php pages pre-defined with the queries and then use an ajax-like method to inject the results into a page elements’s innerHTML. Even if all that can be done it’s hardly the definition of dynamic is it? The alternative is to use a stand-alone Wordpress installation and install the exec-php plugin, which is probably what I’ll do.

For many days now I’ve been doing a lot of hacking to get Wordpress Mu and the Revolution Lifestyle theme set up the way I want and this has caused me to become very unhappy with WinSCP. The problem may not even lie with WinSCP but with 1an1 but either way my session is timing out every minute or so. Grrr!

I downloaded the latest version WinSCP to see if it can maintain a session longer but I am not optimistic. I think the problem is the host. It’s always something, no?

Check out this very nice Wordpress template tag reference guide. I love how the detailed reference expands when a row is clicked. Very nice work!

I’ve been thinking about building a small photography/recording studio here in TheGarage so I can practice up on my portraiture skills and so I can have a set to film lead ins, transitions, and closings to my videos. Actually I’ve been thinking about this in depth for a couple of years now but it involves spending money so it languishes on the back burner. I could probably get a small set built on the cheap, but at a minimum I would need to buy some lighting gear, some additional audio gear, and condition the air.  What I would really like to have is a little spot in a strip center with two studio setups that I could use for my own projects and that I could also rent to others. All the infrastructure to stream to the Internet would be available of course as well as equipment for post-processing and printing.

I have a lot of ideas in this area but I don’t have the extra money laying around. The pundits are saying that for the amount of money in the “stimulus” bill and the resulting jobs, each job would cost about $260,000. Idiots. Give me $200,000 and I would create five jobs by the end of the year just with what I have going now. Notice how during the election both candidates sounded like the savior of small business and now all we hear is government spending and tax refunds to people who pay little or no taxes.

Anyway, I got off track. What I really wanted to mention in relation to the studio is that my Nikon D90 will shoot hi-def video using the new LiveView feature. That means I can shoot hi-def  with any of the lenses I have, which is a nice assortment, including a 10-20mm wide angle, a 70-300mm, and a 105mm macro.   And I suppose I could use the 50mm f1.8 at 3200 ISO in very low light conditions.  I need to record some hi-def at the extreme focal ranges, in low light,  and very close up to get an idea of just what the capabilities of the D90 are. I am not setup to do a lot of hi-def video editing, but I may need to get set up.