This is part 1 of a series of my lay opinions on proactively maintaining your corner of the web.

I recall when linkrot was the major issue for the web back in the late nineties. While it remains a problem today, I think that the web as a sandbox of emergent technologies has not only promoted linkrot, but something even worse. For now, let’s call it service rot. Today, we take for granted site services such as Google Analytics and Domains, URL shorterners like Bitly and TinyURL, and even social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Has it occured to anyone that these services will one day be gone? Is anyone else worried about how dependent we are on major services to promote ourselves and our brands?

I worry because back when I started blogging, oh, six or seven years ago, I tested the waters with Blogger. I had no comments, no blogroll except for the links I would manually edit into my template. Haloscan gave Blogger comments before it was bought by Google. Blogrolling gave me a link manager before anyone else could. Later on, I discovered B2, found a remarkable web host, and my site’s exposure grew just as the blogosphere did. I was an avid participant in the Conservative area of the blogsophere, and all sorts of little kaboodles came out. I made it to a large mammal in the TTLB ecosystem. I played in Blogshares. There are things I did that I don’t even remember doing.

As the number of participants grew, the fidelity of the services floundered. Haloscan would time out. Blogrolling would time out. TTLB? Time out. Blogshares? Well, people just stopped playing that. I can’t document any and all of the services that have gone through this cycle, but the general drift is that as these services grew, as the freeloading users refused to pay, and as the search for funding became more and more frustrating, some services just threw in the towel.

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After months of bewilderment, I must admit that it was my best friend’s invite that signed me on to Twitter. I’ve been having fun so far; it’s curious, though, how someone can follow six thousand contacts. Take the guy in the following screenshot:

Some guy's stats on Twitter.

Seriously? Don’t you, um, have work?

I don’t have one. There’s a lot of reviews out there (Omnivoracious, Channel Web, and Ars Technica) but there are two things that prevent me from buying one.

First, when I’m done with a book, especially fiction, it goes into the dustheap of history unless I want to read a passage that I particularly relish. Stephen King’s The Stand is one of those books. If I don’t care to keep a book for posterity, I give it away. From what I understand, it’s not easy to give away a Kindle with a bunch of books and have the gift recipient be the owner of those copies. It’s weird, to apply the same ol’ rules of DRM-protected music to books, yah?

Second, I have a library of over a hundred books at home. Many were bought on Amazon, others, not. I don’t want to pay twice to have to own the book again in Kindle format. What I want is to be able to enter a control number for a book bought on Amazon, and I can download the electronic copy of a book I already own. I want a discount on an ISBN that I bought somewhere else by entering a control number for an electronic copy.

Some DVDs allow you to download a copy, albeit protected, for use on a portable device. Until e-book readers solve this little issue, I’m not buying one.

The big news in the dextrosphere (“short” for “right-wing bloggers”) this week was the collapse of the Pajamas Media ad network. The issue was brought into the open by Protein Wisdom’s Jeff Goldstein. I recall when PJM’s ad network was being started up, years ago. People judged the merits of the plan and made their decisions accordingly. Some didn’t join, some did. Some reaped the benefits, others did not. And now everyone is facing the results of their choices.

It’s about choices. Unfortunately, sometimes choices have to be made in the dark, with a less than full disclosure of material information. The infamous explanation by Roger Simon is currently not pulling up on my browser. Bits and pieces are out there, but this quip is what people are discussing:

Actually that part of our business has been losing money from the beginning, so the people getting their quarterly checks from PJM were getting a form of stipend from us in the hopes that advertisers would start to cotton to blogs and we could possibly make a profit. Didn’t happen. No wonder those people are kicking and screaming now that they are off the dole. I might too. [What's their beef? I thought most of them were free marketeer libertarians or something.-ed. Go figure.]

Jeff’s retort was scathing but appropriate. I see no reason whatsoever to keep the people on the ad network in the dark about business being in the red. I really don’t. To take that dig that PJM’s ad network has become a form of “wingnut welfare,” from the very person who founded that damn thing, was out of place. I don’t quite understand how the bloggers paid by the ad network never got the disclosure that not only are they benefitted from a loss-leader program, but that they were in fact contributory to it.

Did the PJM ad network fail because it was a throwback to medieval patronage of the arts? All clues seem to indicate “yes,” and the responsibility to choose was not necessarily that of the bloggers themselves. They thought they were blogging along just fine and making money for PJM while PJM was making money for the bloggers and the VCs.

Leftist bloggers, though, shouldn’t be so liberal with the schadenfreude. Patronage, as I believe, isn’t a good model. In the case of the PJM adnet, I’m glad to see it go. Graceless and charmless as the pink slip may have been, and given that some of the full-time bloggers have but a month to find new work, there is a benefit to its dismantling. For one, maybe we might venture a little past the all-too-familiar territory that PJM has built. Just in the writing of this post I’ve come across Locust Blog, and Atlas Shrugs. The number of blogs has risen, the signal-to-noise ratio has gotten really low, and quality, that ever-elusive metric, is hard to come by. The temptation to coalesce is strong, but the dangers—such as backscratching, banishment of unwelcome opinions—are real.

Burn bright or burn out doesn’t just apply to photography; it applies to everyone.

Assume the following: You are an audiophile. You can’t enjoy music in any situation unless it is at “audiophile-acceptable quality.” You have money to burn, and yes, that’s in “today’s economy.” Now consider the following account, by Mark Jaquith:

Canal phones offer much better sound than their “in ear” cousins, but in order to hear the full range of the sound (especially the bass), they must be inserted properly. This is definitely a subjective thing (ergo the different insertion tips), and something that takes practice and intimate knowledge of they layout of your ears. The phones come with a handy insertion guide, and Etymotic has a video on their site with even more detail.

Here’s what I’ve learned. First, make sure your ears are clean and dry! This is a great excuse to start being an adult about ear cleanliness. For the flanged tips, it helps to slightly moisten the flange prior to insertion. Don’t get it too wet! While a drop of water may help the tip slide into your ear canal, too much will make it easily slip back out. Use as little water as possible. To insert, slightly open your jaw, and pull on your ear, to straighten and open your ear canal. Which way you pull your ear will depend on which way your canal goes or bends. For me, I grab in the back, slightly above the lobe, and pull down and back. [...]

Seriously? Finagle your ear to accommodate canal buds? In order to listen to music at Godly quality while flying or waiting at the doc’s office? It might be worth the trouble, until you get a case of otitis externa. I still go by the old adage, Don’t put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear.

I upgraded my phone to the Samsung SCH-u740. I’ve had it for a few days and I have slowly but surely grown familiar with the standard VZW software.

Coming from my Treo 650, that was a leap all its own. I chose the phone because I am a very heavy texter, and I was slowly getting the knack of using the keys, whose tactile response was definitely different from what I was used to.

I actually started to like texting on this phone. It’s easier on my pocket when I am at work, for one.

Then tonight, when I had 40 messages, I got a warning telling me that my messages memory is 80% full.

Damn you, VZW for providing a phone for heavy texters and not keeping in mind that maybe, just maybe, we like to keep our messages on hand. We have hearts too, and some messages have sentimental value.

I’m switching back to the Treo by Sunday, once I’ve bragged to everyone and their mother that I have this phone.

“So, one day I got the most exquisite piece of fresh rib-eye at the grocer, then I called my best Hindi friend over for a cookout.”

For some reason, after reading Owen Winkler speaking truth to Apple, the above line just came up in my head. Then again, Owen wasn’t really belligerent nor purposefully offensive in writing about how Ipods don’t work the way Windows users expect them to in the Windows environment, as well as a few key interface issues like in-song seek control. However, his post is so like lancing the proverbial sacred cow.

Most PC users already know how to perform a folder drill-down, and a Windows-Explorer–based manipulation of mobile audio player files. Most know how to do this from plenty of experience working with flash drives and digital cameras. When I had to manage an Ipod Shuffle for a while, using iTunes on a computer with a gigabyte and a half of RAM (still slowed the computer down to a crawl), I damn near felt like throwing it at the wall.

Interestingly enough when my friend let me use his Creative Zen Vision:M, I found it remarkable. I’ve always wanted one, even though I don’t have room for all the songs, until I think about how I can put in DivX/XviD avi files that play natively without a snag. Oh, yum. Porn on the go.

I use GMail. That’s the most I’ve let Google intrude on my personal data. Most people might think I’m a quack for being so damned scurred of Google’s privacy peeping when I use GMail with such ubiquity. What’s the first rule of email? Do not email what you won’t have the world see out in the open.

What’s the second rule? If you want to break the first rule, don’t use GMail. Plain and simple, right?

I don’t have Picasa installed. I don’t use the Google Desktop Search. And I have a fast enough connection not to sacrifice my privacy to have webpages load faster than usual. 37 Signals is on the case, which I found from Podz (who by the way has pics of fruit fraternization; creepy).

There are things Google does that are good for everyone: advertisers, Google, end-users. Then there are things Google does that deserve a warning for future generations to come that there are favors that come with too high a price to pay. At least the choice to patronize their services is still there.

I tried MSN Desktop Search a few days ago and it’s pretty good. However, it gets a failing mark on my end because of obscene system resource usage (45 Megs of RAM, and thrice that for the page file, for the indexing service when it’s at rest? You’ve got to be kidding me.). Not that I can’t meet those requirements, but I like my apps lean and mean.

No way am I installing Google Desktop on my computer, though. It’s one thing for me to be using it for email, it’s another to be inviting Google’s prying eyes into my hard drive. So, here I am, left with turning on Windows XP’s indexing service for my search function.

Come to think of it, Google’s dictum should work in reverse for a personal computer. Why search when I can sort?

Know thy enemy, ya? For the first time since I EVER started blogging, I was able to install Movable Type onto a testing subdomain of mine. I won’t be actually posting critiques nor commentary on MT. It ain’t my place, and the whole “know they enemy” phrase isn’t my thing either.

I have no animus left towards Bena after I got over this little fact: in 3.2 Beta (and later), all users can now publish “unlimited weblogs,” although I think that free users are still limited to one author. I got the scoop from Double J and voiced my distate in the comments.

I’ve seen this business behavior before, I just can’t seem to remember whodunit: they’d have premium features for pay that they move towards the “free” version once few enough people were paying. Was it Blogger who ditched their pro thing and did that? I’m not too certain, and even if they were they’re not the only ones who’ve done something like that over the past two years.

I’m trying to figure out business that did that has the highest profile…

I don’t do feed readers, for a couple of reasons.

First and foremost, if I subscribed to every blog that I read, I would have a ton of unread items. Now, if I have an application that glaringly tells me that I have not read 30 out of the 40 articles in the folder, it just feels like the walls are closing in and I don’t like that feeling.

(I have the tendency to be both a packrat and a neat freak, with the latter being the more debilitating. I could probably live with my packrattiness, but if I were to try to neaten that up… )

The second reason I don’t do feed readers is that I use my own blog as a portal. I like to jump from my site to those on my blogroll, and yes, I know a few of you come to me from your stat trackers once I leave a blip on your referrer list. I try to at least play nice and link to y’all from time to time.

A third reason is that having a feed reader makes blog reading seem so… efficient, and I don’t do this thing for like a work thing, ya? I mean, I like to visit the sites I visit especially after that dagger character (no it doesn’t mean they’re dead, it means they’ve been updated) shows up beside one, telling me they’ve updated in the past two hours. Call it irrational or sentimental, but some techonologies that attempt to make experiences efficient take the experience away and turn them into tasks.

I don’t blog, nor blog-read, like that.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to observe the way email attachments behave within our mail applications,be it Outlook, Thunderbird, Outlook Express, or even GMail: each attachment is included in a message as a new copy of the file being attached. If we forward a message with an attachment, another copy of the attached file gets saved with the message. We all know it’s a waste of space, and having the expansive hard drives that we do now or the huge space limits that webmail providers give is no excuse for such waste.

Why can’t a mail application have a virtual drive, complete with folders that would let us upload our files once, send multiple times and have the sent copies link to the files instead of having multiple copies of the same file per message? Then, should we decide to delete the files from this said virtual drive, we could be prompted about messages on record that still link to them. Sure, saving an email on our hard drives outside of the application would be quite different, but, it’s just a thought.

My mom got an iPod Shuffle today. I suppose for her needs it’s fine; I would never recommend an iPod product to anyone who wants the functionality and control that others may want from their mp3 player. The sound from the earbuds is actually pretty cool: it could be the earphones that come with it.

Though I am not disdainful of those who follow the “it simply works” ethos that many Apple products follow, I am already not without gripes over this product. Since she does not have her own computer, I am in charge of maintaining her playlist and charging her Shuffle, which is fine, until I run into the iTunes software. While I like iTunes’ functionality, I wish it didn’t gobble up my system resources the way it does. I wish that having an iPod product doesn’t mean the installation of three—count, three—services: two for iTunes and one for the iPod itself. With iTunes demanding 50 Megs of RAM just to run in focus, it needs more resources than some of my heavier applications. I really don’t know what all that RAM is for, ya?

Other mp3 players have drag and drop functionality using Windows Explorer; I have to fill up this damned thing using iTunes, and its behavior since I tried is very finnicky at best.

I knew long before that I am not interested in getting an iPod product, and my mom’s Shuffle reaffirmed that disinterest. The sound quality doesn’t offset the headache I’ve gone through most of the night getting this thing to work. Count me out of the cult of the iPod.

I don’t even know if what I am about to ask can be done without absolute positioning. I don’t particularly care if the page won’t degrade gracefully in older browsers, but there has been a particular three-column layout that has been bugging me to no end, and it’s got everything to do with document order. I know I have seen a glimpse of either a tutorial or a page source where I saw this.

Basically, you have the header, followed by the content, and then two divs that occupy the left and right sidebars, and then the footer. Vesuvius 1.5 is not an option. The negative margins approach on ALA is not an option.

I know I’ve seen that document structure before, and that the CSS involved floating elements and not absolute or relative positioning. I just know it. And I didn’t have a good way of saving pages I’ve seen before until recently.

Anyone else know of the tutorial or guide that can do this? Anyone with CSS and source code to share?

I’m late to the meme but it’s still fun to do. Thanks, Jason C.

I thought the WP htaccess RegEx was a hoot… until I saw this. Time for a recursive acronym: “REGEX Exceeds Great EXpectations.”

For the record I know no perl, and regular expressions are all RegEx (Greek, in case the allusion to the expression is missed) to me. How does a perl-guy’s mind parse through this? Maybe the same way I can parse through bio jargon.

(Link thanks to PhotoMatt.)