Why I set up a PayPal account

I have made purchases through PayPal in the past without setting up an account. One thing I remember buying for sure was this book. I bought it using my credit card through PayPal without opening an account.

I have a relatively small paying side job where they like to use PayPal, so I finally opened an account. After all these years of knowing about PayPal and how it can be used to buy things on the internet, it took somebody wanting to send me money to convince me to open an account.

I have read some of the negative things about PayPal. It seems like there is a fairly large, vocal crowd that is annoyed by PayPal. You never know if something complaints like that are legitimate or just a factor of a small percentage of a large user base. The bigger the user base, the more people will have a negative view no matter how good or bad the product.

I do plan on using the account to let people send me money, but also plan on transferring that money regularly into a bank account. Banks still seem more reliable and secure no matter what the internet money handling companies try to tell me.

Future posting with WordPress

My wife made me figure out something that will hopefully become one of my own good habits.

I asked her to write a series of posts on a topic on another one of my blogs. She saved them all as drafts.

I finally took the time to learn how to publish a post so that it does not show up until some time in the future.

For anybody that does not know, you go into the Post Timestamp group over on the right side of the screen when you are writing the post. Simply type the date and time you want the post to show up. Make sure you select the Edit timestamp check box and them publish like normal. The post will not show up until the date and time you selected.

I went ahead and wrote 7 posts for one of my blogs and set them each to publish at 8am daily for the next week. I am also trying to build up a similar queue of posts for each blog that I write. It seems like it would be easier to get in a grove and do a whole bunch of writing at once rather than trying to think up something everyday to write.

We’ll see.

Small businesses will start to increase their online presence

There is a lot of excitement about Web2.0 and everybody becoming content producers. There are also a lot of worries about how much longer that excitement and growth will continue.

We still have quite a long way to go before we run out of content producers.

Just today, I was trying to figure out whether we can afford to have somebody clean the house for us a couple times a month. A few of the big chain companies show up in Google with links to Google Maps.

But, what about all the people that work independently from any franchise? I didn’t find any of them in the search engines.

I can use the phone book to get a better idea, but that still won’t include a lot of the independent people.

My dad just started a home inspection business after retiriing from his previous job. He has started a little website with the help of an old co-worker but has no idea what to do with it besides putting the link on his business card. Once he gets it set up the way he wants, I’ll try to help him get it to show up at the top of the search for home inspections in his area.
If people like my dad are starting to understand that every business needs a web presence, it will not be long before every parent babysitting out of their home and every kid mowing lawns will start wanting to create online content.

We will still be left with the old problem of having small local businesses compete with big national/international businesses but at least we will have a better chance of getting good information from local searches.

Myspace and the unexpected error.

I have a MySpace account that I login to about once a week. I frequently encounter this message when trying to go to just about anywhere.

Sorry! an unexpected error has occurred.

This error has been forwarded to MySpace’s technical group.

Is it really unexpected to the technical group at MySpace? It shouldn’t be. I expect to see it a few times everytime I login.

I’m thinking a more appropriate message might be:

Sorry! the usual error has occurred.

This error has not been forwarded to MySpace’s technical group because if we did that every time we got this error it would crash our email servers.

Cut us some slack. We are huge and cannot possibly have the capacity to handle all the requests that hit our servers.

Hit refresh and everything will probably be fine.

Netscape hires more Netscape Navigators

It looks like Jason Calacanis’ gamble is paying off with his paid Netscape Navigators. At the time, I thought it seemed like a pretty good idea. It is like hiring an entire marketing crew and not needing to pay for their health insurance or 401k. Nice cheap labor for Netscape and some extra spending money for the people doing something they were already doing for free.

Netscape has decided it is time to add some more Netscape Navigators to the payroll with the eventual goal of ramping up quite a bit more over the next couple years.

It is interesting to see the roles the Navigators are expected to play for their $1000/month. In addition to just submitting tons of interesting stories, they are also supposed to help fight spamming and voting rings as well as teach new users how to use the system and provide comments to increase discussions on the various stories.

Sounds like a forum moderator job to me. With all the complaints of spam and gaming the system at Reddit and Digg, it will be interesting to see if having these kinds of moderators helps foster a better environment or just leads to people complaining that the moderators are promoting their own agenda. I’ll bet it will probably be a mix of the two.

Finding new blogs to read

There are a few common ways to find new blogs.

1. Sidebar/blogroll links
2. Technorati or other blog search tool
3. Direct links to specific articles within blogs you read

I almost exclusively find blogs through the last method. With all the link exchanging for SEO that happens in sidebars and with all the noise in the search engines, the last one seems to be the only one where you have a fairly good chance of getting good content on the other side of the click.

Another tool I use to find new blogs is StumbleUpon. It is a toolbar that you add to your browser that lets you tell it what kinds of things you want to search for. Then when you hit the Stumble! button, it will take you to a page that other Stumble Upon users have flagged as belong to the category you are looking for.

In theory it is a pretty clever system and once you get through all the small business/home businesses that seem to dominate a lot of the searches that I do, you can find a lot of new, interesting perspectives. Plus, as you tag stories, you help make the search engine more accurate.

Technorati Tags: blogging, finding new blogs, google, search, StumbleUpon

Customized searches of the near future

Little things keep popping up on the internet that have the possibility of making the internet a much better community experience. I don’t mean things like Myspace and Facebook that have their own potential and drawbacks.

I mean little things like the Google Coop Custom Search Engine. This lets you use the Google search on your website and limit the sites you want Google to search when people enter their search phrase. Very niche. Very cool.

Then just a few minutes ago, a link from Scoble pointed me to this post on the Snipperoo blog. He used Scoble’s OPML to create a Google custom search box for all the feeds that Scoble subscribes to. That is a pretty good concept, but I think the list is static. So when Scoble adds or removes somebody,
the Snipperoo search box will be out of date.

Now if we could just get Google to let us use OPML as more of a dynamic pointer to a dynamic list to build the search engine filter, we would really be onto something.

Technorati Tags: google, search, search engines

Ecto Preview

I have several blogs that I am working on these days. 5 fairly active ones. So, I decided that it was time to download one of the desktop blog editors. At the advice of some fellow bloggers over at b5media, I decided to try Ecto.

All but one of my blogs are using Wordpress software and getting Ecto to recognize them was effortless. I haven’t bothered trying the other yet because I’m not sure how much longer I plan on keeping that blog around without migrating it over to Wordpress.

It recognizes all of the categories that I have created in Wordpress but if you need to create a new category, you will have to log into your blog to add it. It easily lets you add Technorati tags to any post. The editor has a spell checker built in that seems to work as well as any other spell checker. It will save you Amazon Associate ID and let you easily add Amazon items to your blog. I have not written a post using it, but I did mock it up on a draft and it seemed too work exactly like you would expect.

It lets you save drafts.

Now this is a biggie for me. I am really bad about only having one thing that I am writing at a time. Something about using the browser makes working with drafts frustrating for me. I am already using the drafts and have created little stubs for about 20 posts that I plan on writing across my four blogs that I set up in Ecto. I’m planning on dropping notes and links in the drafts as I go and then when I am ready to publish the post, I will clean it up and post it.

Who knows, maybe I’ll even get into the whole future dating posts to have them magically appear while I am sleeping or busy at work.

Baby steps.

You can give Ecto a 21 day trial run for free, but I have a feeling that I’ll be buying a license before the trial runs out. It might be the best $17.95 I’ll spend for a while.

Do you have a favorite blogging software? Let me know and I might try it out before the Ecto trail period expires.

Technorati Tags: blogging, Ecto, Wordpress

Is the more tag evil for your blog?

I have been thinking about the more tag in blogs quite a bit recently since I want to switch to using a base theme for all of my blogs.  I use the more tag from time to time and even have one blog whose template only displays previews of everything on the main page and automatically includes the more tag for each post.

I hate when people use them just hoping to drive up traffic.  I am not really sure why I care, but for some reason it bugs me when I click on the more only to find two more sentences with the punchline.

I like when people use them to keep monster posts off of the front page.  I hate scrolling through some 3000 word special post.

I also like when they are automated and leave the front page with consistantly sized blocks of story previews.  It is a look that I enjoy seeing for whatever reason.  Regular readers will not have to continuously click on posts since they will have been reading all along and will know which ones they have already read.  Visitors from search engines or links from other posts will normally be sent to the full post and will never notice the previews on the main page anyway.  People subscribed to the feeds also get the full post.

So, for now, I am planning on updating the templates of all of my blogs over the next couple weeks.  They will contain the automated previews on the front page.  They will all use the same base template at first and I will eventually customize them all.  I’ll start with unique color schemes for each and then eventually get some unique banners for each.

What do you think about more tags?  Good, bad, or indifferent?

Bonsai - The software I just bought

I’ve been bouncing around project organizers for a couple years trying to decide if I wanted something online, on my Palm, on my desktop at home, or some combination of all of them.

I recently got a laptop and my Palm finally broke. For the near future, I have decided to keep track of everything on the laptop. And to help organize all of that I purchased Natara Bonsai Outliner.

It handles very well a lot of things that I like to do.

• Simple lists. I like to make lists of things. Songs to buy, books to read, people I want to email.
• Organizing Projects. Since it handles multi level hierarchies very well. I’m working on projects in multiple rooms in the house. My parent level for that outline is the various rooms. The next level is the projects in that room. And then sometimes I’ll add a third level for steps that need to be done, equipment I need to get, etc.
• Writing Fiction. I’m working on a few stories. A style that works well for me is to write a quick high level outline and then fill it in on a second pass with more details and then a third pass with fine level details and then start writing. I am doing all of the prep work in outlines and only opening the word processor for when I am actually ready to write.

Bonsai allows you to set due dates, but I can’t find anyway to have that trigger an alarm on the desktop version.

Everything that I have wanted to do I was able to figure out very quickly. Besides the alarm, there really are not any features that I have found to be missing that I want.

I did download a free one month sample of Bonsai about a year ago. At the time, I was still using my Palm so I ran both the desktop and Palm versions. It did a great job staying in sync.

All in all, if you are looking for a basic outliner/task manager, you should give Bonsai a try.