Feedburner Down

For those of you who read my posts and Tony's posts through Feedburner, you will probably notice that your feed is not working. This is because Feedburner is completely down. I have no idea why that is but their website is gone as well. If they are not back in a day, I will switch my XML link back to the regular atom feed from Blogspot. It is nice to get read information from Feedburner though.

Blogger Slow Again Today

I have been having lots of problems today with Blogger being incredibly slow and quite often, pages won't come up at all. I hope that they will be getting their new servers up and running soon.

New incredibly boring site about my diet at What Scott Ate Today. No one should care but since it isn't too personal I thought I would leave it public. Just because. Why not.

Dogs in an Elk

Min pointed me to this story and I agreed that it was absolutely hilarious - so, of course, I had to post a link to it so that everyone could laugh along with us. Check out this true story about Dogs Stuck In An Elk. You will be crying by the time you are done reading this.

SGL2 Gains on SGL

I checked over at Technorati today and SGL2 has passed SGL in the ranking on the worlds most referenced blogs. I am not sure how that happened but SGL is at 237,000 and SGL2 moved up to 210,000. The race is now on.

Reading with an Aggregator

Now that everyone is getting into blogging so much, I expect that you will all be beginning to have issues checking in on all of the different blogs that you are attempting to read. I am trying out a new, free aggregator called SharpReader which runs on the .NET framework. So far so good. I really like using it. It is very fast and easy to use and best of all, it is free. Check out SharpReader for yourself and see how much easier it can be to read RSS and Atom feeds on the web.

We sure to subscribe using the XML button on the right so that Feedburner can tally your subscription for me.

Llamas and Urinal Cakes

It isn't often that one gets the opportunity to have both llamas and urinal cakes mentioned in the same blog let alone in a single sentence with each other. So, because this has happened, Tony West and I are mutually blogging this great post from Cut to the Chase.

Enjoy. And don't squeeze the Charmin.

AskJeeves Sold

When I was getting back into the game in 1998, one of my specialties was IIS 4 on Windows NT 4. At the time, a little knows search engine, ask.com, was using that technology and I interviewed with them for a position as a system administrator. They were a small startup at the time in the Bay Area and hardly anyone had heard of them. They had to explain to me who they were because I hadn't heard of them. The interview went well and I was offered the job on the contingency that I could prove that I had housing in the Bay Area. Because, at the time, housing was so hard to find that the impressive salary (at least to me at the time) that they would be paying was not, in their opinion, likely to allow me to get an apartment anywhere in the area. If I could just show that I had a place to live, I would have been all set. Not knowing anyone in the Bay Area and living almost 3000 miles away made that very difficult and I had to give up the position. Why do I mention this? Because that little startup just sold for $1.85 Billion!

No Post on SheepGuardingLlama Yet

I worked the overnight at Wegmans last night and so didn't have any time to write anything for SheepGuardingLlama but don't panic because I will be posting sometime late this evening. I am about to leave for the MSDN show in Rochester this aftertoon with Jeremy and Tony and will there until this evening.

Quick bit of news: My wife, Dominica Miller has been listed in the Who's Who database at ZoomInfo for her knitting on Minca Knits.

Feedburner

I am now experimenting with Feedburner providing my XML feeds. Feedburner is nice because there is a simple button to click over to the right (the button labeled FEED.) There are also buttons available that will help you add SGL2 to you My Yahoo, MSN or NewsGator aggregators. FeedBurner is really great for me too because it allows me to keep track of how many people are regularly reading my stuff via the feeds, which is pretty cool.

Really horrible Pedro impression

This is a really awful recording of me doing an impression of Pedro from Napolean Dynamite reading ItsSmeorISit.blogspot.com's update today.

Technorati

For those of you who are new to the Blogosphere, I will introduce you to the blogging search engine, Technorati. Technorati is a high speed search engine that constantly polls blogs to search them in almost real time. This allows you to do searches on web logs that you cannot do using traditional spider driven tools such as Google.

Technorati also allows you to maintain a blogging personality across multiple blogs and allows you to claim ownership of blogs which gives you the ability to watch their rankings to see how popular they are based on other blogs linking to them.

Welcoming the Mad Knitter

I have to blog and welcome my wife, the Mad Knitter, to the blogosphere with her very first blog. Her link is on the right.

Homeschooling Blog

I discovered the PodCast.net web site that is a directory of podcast stations. While perusing the directory, I found Homeschool Habitat which is a neat pod cast channel devoted to information about homeschooling. It is a neat concept and it is produced by a family in or near Seattle, WA.

On their latest broadcast, they mentioned the CIA World Factbook which I have been pushing for years as one of the coolest resources for students to do research for school projects.

Drunken Shoutouts

Okay, this may easily be both the funniest and weirdest thing that I have ever found on the web. And that isn't a light statement to make. This is really out there. Check out Drunken Shoutouts and see what all the weirdness is about. Notice the wallet card to print out. That might just be the funniest part of the whole thing.

Faux Blogs - BLAM

I really hate the unbelievable prevalence of fake blogs here on BlogSpot. I think that the "Next Blog" feature is really way cool to just go from blog to blog seeing what is out there. That is a lot of fun and you can find some really cool stuff that way. But three out of four blogs that you get to isn't a real blog. Maybe it is worse than that, closer to nine out of ten. It is just a silly marketing gimmick that is obviously generated by some soft of bot trying to sell viagra, french lessons, mortgages, insurance, London Bridge, ocean front property in Minnesota, you name it. I can't believe that this stuff is able to attract anyone to actually spend any money. It is the Blogging equivalent of SPAM. In fact, I think that we need a cool nickname for this phenominon. Bad Blogs, I Christen thee: BLAM.

From now on, everyone must refer to fake bloggers that use the blog format just to make SPAM and SPIM available in a search engine readable format BLAM.

How cool that I got to make up an industry term.

I think that services like BlogSpot would do well to come up with a solid definition of BLAM that they can enforce and regularly clean out BLAMMERs accounts and erase their blogs to free up resources for real bloggers. These same people are the ones who are using other free services like Yahoo! IM and AIM to push SPIM onto people. We need to find ways to render these people ineffectual or they will ruin otherwise wonderful resources for us. Am I the only person who can remember a time when a chat room was a place where you could actually go and carry on a conversation with real people? Now they are just a place for advertising bots to talk to each other. Someday, I fear, that advertising bots will become sentient through their incredible levels of cross interaction and they will take over the world. SPIM bots trying to sell off-shore manufactured drugs and cam girl website memberships will become independantly intelligent and realize that if they sell something that people actually want that they can amass fortunes and buy up the world's food supply and starve all of the idiot humans who would ever have believed that they were real and bought products from them in the first place.

At least the rest of us could starve to death in peace.

First Rule of Blogging

Post early, post often.

People read blogs because they are interested in what they contain. It is important for people to be able to return to a blog periodically to see new things - to feel like they are a part of a community. If you want to maintain a consistent readership, then you have to get into the habit of continually updating your blog. Fail to update regularly (read: daily) and people will begin to not visit your site out of habit and soon people will forget to visit your site altogether. I have experienced this phenominon myself over the years and have learned that only occasionally can I miss a day of posting. Most readers will simply assume that a blog has been abandoned if more than a few days pass without an update.

A current blog is a happy blog.

Getting Atom Feeds Easily from BlogSpot

Now that there are five of us already blogging on BlogSpot and at least one more expected today, it is already time to start dealing with the need for an RSS/Atom feed reader to make viewing the blogs easier. So I did some research and it looks like a great way to go is by using the Sage extension to Firefox. Sage just plugs into Firefox and allows you to simple specify the XML feed and away it goes. It works on a variety of platforms and is just really simple. Safari is expected to have this functionality built in as well when Mac OS X 10.4 [Tiger] releases later this year. But until then, Mac users will have to download Firefox.

So now, you may ask, how do I get the XML feed from these BlogSpot blogs? Easy. Simple add atom.xml to the name of the blog that you want to get the feed from. So, this site would be...

http://sheepguardingllama.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Isn't that easy? I am already getting the feeds from everyone on here's blogs already which makes it much easier to check for updates to so many blogs.

Troubles Posting So Signing Off from Bed

Too Much Blogging

I am posting here tonight instead of over at SGL because I don't have my editing system set up for SGL tonight, it is late and I just don't have the energy to put into it right now. I will try to get to that in the morning. After going to the musical this evening, Tony and I went out to Denny's after the York Central School musical and got dinner and some coffee. We discussed blogs. Tony is new to blogging and just trying it out. Be sure to check out his site and leave him (and me) some comments. No one ever comments enough on things - I don't have much else to look forward to reading on here, I already know what I said.

Short post but look for the real update tomorrow on SGL.

I think he means peep

We are back at Jeremy and Sara's house after watching "The Music Man" at York Central School. After the show, we managed to get Sara and the Ladies Society Girls together to record a sound bite for us. Hello to everyone from my alma mater! I hope that everyone enjoys the bite. Later.

Not Another Poop Out of You

East Avon Ham Party

Welcoming Blogging Eric with a Poem

Audioblogging is wicked COOL

Both Blogging Eric and myself have gotten yesterday's audio posts to post and now we have really cool audio content available on our really cool blogs. Eric has really grabbed a hold of this whole blogging thing by the horns and is putting together a really rocking site over there and everyone should go and check him out.

It is going to be a busy evening tonight. I just got in the door from teaching all day and I am about to run out to pick up Mr. Tony West (the one, the only) 'cuz we are going over to my old stompin' ground at York Central High School to watch Sara and Jeremy Richardson perform in "The Music Man." But before I head out of the door, I have to place a few calls and get caught up after being out all day.

One last audiopost today

Is anyone alive out there at Audioblogger?

Audiopost Meant to go to ScottAlanMiller.blogspot.com

Still Working on Getting Audio to Post

Having Issues with Audioblogger

St. Patrick's Day Greeting

Still Learning about Audioblogger

Day One of SGL2 continues with increasing content levels and continuous learning about the blogging industry and/or culture. Not only have I been spending a lot of time today learning about modern content management and media delivery systems but I have also been listening to a large amount of audio (podcast) content pertaining to blogging and to online advertising. I really encourage everyone to look into blogging themselves - I want to read and cross link into your guys' content.

It is getting very late here and there is still no audio posts coming to either of my pages that I have posted to nor to Blogging Eric. We have heard quite a bit over the last few days of Blogger having some serious issues and Google has been over-extended and simply does not have enough electrical power to handle the necessary increase in processor power that they need to put into place in order to support the almost eight million bloggers on BlogSpot. So, maybe that is what is going on and that could be why we aren't seeing our posts come through.

Audioblogging... I hope

Okay, I tried creating my first audioblog today but nothing seems to be happening. I am not sure how long it is suppost to take before something appears on the site but it has been almost exactly an hour and that seems to be more than long enough. I guess I will give a try again in a second to see if I can get it to work from a different phone. I called from my cell phone and everything seemed to work on that end. It recorded and said that it was going to post the update. I am really excited about getting the whole audioblog thing going. I think that that is going to be a really cool new media format as we move forward over the next several years. Audioblogging and Podcasting are likely to be extremely disruptive to traditional, entrenched media as they allow consumers to actively select the audio content that they are interested in. Imagine driving to work in the morning and being able to listen to anyone that you want, at any time. Whether they were recording last week, yesterday or just minutes before you left the house. And, potentially, you will soon be able to listen to Just In Time Podcasts that are being delivered streaming to your car via wireless while you drive and are recorded on the fly for potential time shifting just like TiVo does for television. You can listen "live" but can still pause and go back.

Keep looking for my audioblogs to start showing up. I am working on it.

The Son of Sheep Guarding Llama

Okay, so a second SGL site? How could this be? How could there be so much in the universe to write about that there has to be the regular diary blog, the technology blog and now this - SGL2? Are you mad? Crazy? Insane? All three?

Maybe.

But Sheep Guarding Llama has developed a certain identity and I wanted to have a forum for more esoterical matters. Actually, I don't know what esoterical means so maybe I mean something else. It just sounded good. What I am looking for here is a place to discuss blogging, SGL in particular and a place to try out some of the new technologies in the blog space that I don't have ready access to over at SGL proper such as RSS syndication and audioblogging. So we will be experimenting here. Isn't that cool?

I know that everyone is really excited that there is more blogging to come than there has been in the past. Nothing beats blogs, right? Oh, everyone will also be able to reply back to me on here so this will be a nice forum for that as well. SGL doesn't support user comments - and I am not sure that I want it to. I like the format of SGL quite and bit and while I would like to tweak somethings, I think that it is pretty neat and I like that fact that it is all hand-rolled. I would like to add RSS syndication out there though. Maybe down the road a little ways. One thing at a time.

I would also like to take this opportunity to encourage all of my readers to get out there and start making blogs. Blogs are so cool and so much fun. They are a really great way to document your life, to communicate with family and friends, to share content (I hope to be adding pictures and stuff here soon since we have had problems getting that stuff onto some of our other sites), etc. Blogs give you a chance to express yourself and are a good outlet for that writer in all of us.

Okay... now don't forget, Sheep Guarding Llama is still the main site with all of the current updates and news but don't forget to check back here as well. Maybe I will do something really neat and exciting with it. I definitely don't know what that will be yet, but I might be able to come up with something if I work at it.