It has gotten to be such a pain in the ass to write a blog post anymore. I’m not even sure where to put my primary content. I like taking pictures. I like writing about them, but my current “publishing” workflow has got to change. Here’s what I’m doing currently, though it seems to vary a bit post-by-post.

1. Edit my photos in Lightroom or GIMP as needed. Export them to a web-sized image for uploading.
2. I upload the images I’m most proud of to Flickr. If people I know on Facebook are in the images, I’ll upload to Facebook too (or sometimes instead). If its an image like the one above that I’m writing about and has no other merit, I’ll just upload it to my blog.
3. I write about the images or the experience or whatever I’m thinking about. Most always that writing is done on my blog. Sometimes I’ll add content to the description of the Flickr images. Sometimes I’ll add content to the Facebook images.
4. I’ll publish my blog post.
5. Sometimes I update the description of the images on Flickr or Facebook to include a link to the blog post.
6. I link to the blog post on Facebook .
7. I link to the blog post on Google+.

I have a small community of contacts in each of those spaces that I’d like to maintain, but its getting to the point where a) I don’t know why I’m doing what I’m doing and b) it takes a minimum of 30 minutes just to publish an image and a paragraph about it. So I’ve started to procrastinate–took me three weeks to say almost nothing about the shoot with Jessi.

Why use four different venues for my content?

I use Flickr as much out of habit as anything. And I’ve got a few contacts on there whose input on my work I value. And it means my web host doesn’t get hit with traffic for the images (yeah, I know, all 10 views).

I use Facebook because the huge majority of the people I know use Facebook, and its the best way to make sure my content gets seen. But I don’t write extended content on Facebook because their terms of service used to say they can use my content any way they want, even if I deleted it. The TOS doesn’t say that now, but old habit die hard, and I feel like I want control over my content history. Also, (I believe this is still true), comments, status updates and notes on Facebook are not searchable to the world. So if you got an “smoni receive datagram” error, and had I published my experience solving the error on Facebook, you’d never find it. On the other hand, my blog post about it is number two on Google search results. I like to write to help others.

I started to use Google+ because there was a huge influx of photographers there. Seemed like a good place to go to meet and share with other ‘togs. But almost none of my IRL friends and family are there.

I use my own web host because of the degree of control that I have over my content. But not many people read the posts. And control also means I have to deal with spam and hackers.

So this is mostly a rant about the situation I’ve developed for myself. I know, first world problem. Dunno where I’m going to go from here. If you have a thought, please feel free to hit me up on any of the above channels.

1. Plug a USB drive into the back of her PC, and script an xcopy command (or something similar) so that every hour or so, it copies her important files to the drive. This would be cheap (she doesn’t have that much data), and pretty easy. The solution would protect against drive failure, but not against robbery, fire, or flood.
2. Use winscp to securely copy her files over her internet connection to my NSLU2 network storage. This is more complicated, costs nothing but a bit of time to figure it out, and protects against all possible forms of data loss (unless our whole city is consumed with a fire or flood).

Since I’m already sharing my NSLU2 with Skippy, and I’ve got way more space than she’ll ever need, and I like a bit of a challenge, I’ll go with winscp.
Some pre-requisites that I’ve already got set up:

• NSLU2 running Unslung.
• Use OpenSSH for remote access.
• Forward a port on my router to the OpenSSH port on my NSLU2.
• Establish an account with a Dynamic DNS host, such as DynDNS.com, and set up my router to check in with DynDNS to update my IP address periodically.

Now, on to using winscp for this application.

1. Download the “portable” version of winscp and  save it to a new directory. I renamed it from winscp416.exe to just winscp.exe.
2. Create a new user on my NSLU2 for my mom, and give the account ssh access.
3. Establish the first winscp session to my NSLU2 to save the security keys: winscp sftp://user:password@host:port
4. Save that session in winscp by choosing Save Session… from the Session menu. The default name was user@host, and I chose to keep the password.
5. Create a list of winscp commands, and store them in winscp-commands.txt. The following commands will copy everything from the current directory structure to the home directory on the NSLU2.
   

   option batch on
   option confirm off
   option transfer binary
   synchronize remote -delete
   close
   exit

6. Create a batch file, named backup-files.cmd with the following command
   winscp user@host /console /script=winscp-commands.txt
7. Set backup-files.cmd to run as a scheduled task.

The “synchronize remote -delete” command will put all files from the local directory into the remote directory, deleting any files on the remote that have been removed from the local.

It is also possible to add multiple synchronize commands to this file, but be careful, because the remote directory must exist for the sync to work. For example:

synchronize remote -delete “c:\documents and settings\me” /user/my_stuff

will only work if the directory /user/my_stuff already exists.

http://theplug.net/28/strangerphotos.htm

It would be a fun project at Chautauqua, especially if the sign had a URL where people could go see their and others’ photos. Chautauqua is such a trusting place, I could almost do it with a digital camera.

1. Sign up for Twitter, if you haven’t already. If you don’t have an e-mail you want to share with them, use a dodgeit.com account.
2. Add a link to your blog (or a particular post) in a tweet.
3. Go to step 1, using a different username and dodgeit.com account.

Do this 5-10 times to get your link onto the front page of http://www.s2n.com/pulse/twitter.com. See how many hits you get.

I learned about Google Apps from Skippy a couple of months ago, and decided to give it a try.

Its an interesting concept that lets me manage various aspects of my domain through Google. Their instructions are complete and easy to follow for anyone who has heard of DNS. You don’t have to know the difference between a CNAME and an MX record. So I set up my Google account to manage e-mail and a “start” page. I expected they would be just like Gmail and iGoogle, respectively.

Unfortunately, the Google Apps versions of e-mail and iGoogle appear to be older versions. For example:

• The UI for GA e-mail is about 2 years old, compared with the current GMail version
• The GA e-mail client still has a bug that prevents users from editing imported contacts.
• The GA start page doesn’t allow multiple tabs, whereas the current iGoogle does.
• The GA start page doesn’t allow users (or admins) to customize the number of columns, but iGoogle does.

The other problem I currently have with my Google Apps is that it doesn’t have a version of Google Reader. So, to continue using Google reader, I have to maintain the Gmail account.

Oh well. So far, the Google Apps have been fun to experiment with, and functional enough. If Google Calendar had an off-line client, I might be able to convince my wife to use it.

What I’m seeing in my site stats is a handful of sites that claim to link to me, but are really porn sites that seem to be hoping I’ll click through. Have porm spammers figured out that bloggers tend to be a self-satisfied lot that want to know just how popular we are? Well then, what better way to fool us than let us believe we’ve been linked by some new web page.

Incidentally, I’m not going to mention the URLs in full because I don’t want them to see their site mentioned anywhere. If you are interested, the base of the URL looks like this, without the @ signs.

http://i@s@m@y@m@o@v@i@e@s@.@c@o@m

There was more to the URL at the end, but I assumed that the last bits were just for tracking who gets clicks through, kind of like embedding a special code in a graphic so that they know you viewed their spam e-mail. If someone clicks through, their site will suddenly be on the list of “suckers” who will click through anything.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s much I can do about it. I do look at my incoming links, but now I’ll have to be more skeptical if the name doesn’t seem to make much sense or have any relevance to my site.

Update: it turns out that every fake referrer that I’ve received has come from the same IP address: 87.118.120.23. I think my next PHP script will be a WordPress plugin to always give that IP address a 50 MB file of garbage….

My web host allows me to enable AWStats on my sub-domains. I have it enabled on journal.nearbennett.com, and I check all the stats periodically. For example, it was really fascinating to see a bunch of hits come from Stumble Upon for my hard drive clock post. AWStats has a lot of good information that I’m not sure I want to share with the whole world, so I have the whole directory structure protected. But I want people to be able to see what search terms are leading people to my site. So I created a very small PHP script to by-pass the protection, and allow someone to view My Influence on the World.

Here is that PHP code for you to enjoy.
#!/usr/local/bin/php4.cli
< ?php
include_once("../../awstats/journal/awstats.journal.nearbennett.com.keyphrases.html");

?>

Yeah, I know its not much to be proud of, but hey, it works. And its like the third thing I’ve ever done with PHP (the first was of course ‘hello world‘).

I’m pleased to report that if you search Google for hard drive clock, my post is the third on the list behind Make. Yes, I did that a while ago, but please allow me to bask in my glory a little while longer.

Oh, and now people are selling hard drive clocks on eBay. I particularly like this quote:

There are very few of these in existence, probably less than 20.

Yeah, right. I’ve made three my self. And considering this place sold out, I’m pretty sure there are more than 20 of these things out there.

I love it. Unfortunately all my drives are ripped apart now, and I never had quite that quantity. Hm, maybe there is something else I could dream up…

• One of my computers was downloading some large files to the NSLU2′s drives taking up my full DSL bandwidth.
• Simultaneously, on another computer I was watching a video that had been previously stored on the NSLU2. It was a 42 minute video, at roughly 350MB. There were no hiccups or interruptions.

What is the total bandwidth of these two activities? Who cares!?! The point is that it did what I needed it to do.