Don't Back Down

As the year winds down, it's time to look at what has gone by and what we might expect in the year ahead. I'm pretty bad at looking at things monthly, but maybe I can keep up with it once a year. We'll see how it goes. At least I won't have to worry about it for another year.

Business is Booming

I've been absolutely slammed at my job, where I mostly do Movable Type Consulting (though I also do other things as well), and so I haven't had as much time to post this year as I have in years past. I also spent a few months seeing what would happen if I didn't post at all. The answer is that it didn't seem to matter a whole lot. A hair under 180 posts this year (nearly half of what I had been averaging previously).

Read "Don't Back Down Year in Review: 2007" »

I was having a conversation with my wife after we managed to get out of bed, some hours after the new year began, and we were trying to decide what to do with the day, it being a holiday and all. She offered to take the kids out and do something so that I could have some peace and quiet. Now I'm not normally one to ignore such an opportunity, but I also didn't think that there would be much that she could do with them.

To my surprise, it seems like just about everything was open. Malls, stores, even Chick-fil-A - and they are always closed on holidays that are family oriented (not to mention Sundays). Imagine my surprise. So we decided that we'd do our Christmas returns. It was unbelievably easy. I think we'll do it that way every year.

Read "Easy Christmas Returns and the Death of the Department Store" »

Now of course I am most curious to know what makes you want to read this blog, but I really am curious what makes you want to read any blog. I mentioned the most popular posts the other day, and it's easy to tell that for whatever reason recently, I haven't been resonating with people.

In a brief discussion over on Raanan's blog, we talked about search engine traffic. I've mentioned before that I get a ton of it - more than 90% of the traffic here comes from search engines. His is less, around 60%, meaning that he has more regular readers. I don't know that either is better than the other, it's just different. What I want to know is what makes you read something regularly.

Read "What Makes You Want to Read a Blog" »

I've been writing for a long time, and I've been creating blog posts for a while now. Almost 1500 entries, and closing in on five years! But the majority of those are written through the regular Movable Type editor. I've tried WYSIWYG editors, and I just don't like them. But with the increase in offline editors, I figured that it was time to give them another try.

Perhaps the most advanced editor actually comes from Microsoft. The Windows Live Writer is really a decent piece of software, and competes well against established veterans such as BlogJet, Ecto, Qumana, w.bloggar and the ScribeFire plugin for Firefox. There are a lot of options!

Read "Using an Offline Editor to Post to Your Blog" »

Not long ago, I asked how the Lynx Blue Line was doing. According to the Charlotte Observer, they had 12,000 riders. It turns out that the figure is, in fact, closer to 12,000 riders per day, which is an important distinction to make. After all, if you handle the same number in a day as in a month, you have a whole lot less work to do, right?

Unfortunately, it seems that the plans to actually handle those riders went somewhat awry. As I have mentioned previously, putting the bill collector way down on the bottom of the front means that a lot of people just can't find it. I'm sure that they will get used to it eventually, but come on - they shouldn't have to. It should be right there where they can see it, not where they have to hunt for it so long that they give up in frustration and just don't pay. The issue that you already have with light rail is that there are no turnstiles preventing people from getting on. Allowing them to use the Ticket Vending Machines as an excuse just means that many more people will skip paying.

Read "Don't Forget to Plan for the Future" »

It isn't often that I have to rename a ton of files. Usually I find that it is just faster to rename the three or four (or ten) files that need renaming than it is to figure out how I can do it by writing a batch file - it just isn't worth taking the time to dig up all the arcane commands that I've managed to forget over the years and make it happen. But then there are the times when I have dozens upon dozens of files. Or hundreds. In fact, just the other day I needed to rename upwards of 450 files. Doing those one at a time was daunting, to say the least, and maybe it was going to be worth figuring out the batch file after all. Then it happens that Windows doesn't do regular expressions very well, and it looked like I would be renaming them all by hand.

Then I found Bulk Rename Utility. This relatively small (less than 1MB) download comes feature-packed with just about everything you might need to rename a whole bunch of files. In fact, it will probably come with more than you need. It certainly could do everything that I needed and then some.

Read "Using Bulk Rename Utility to Rename Files" »

With the announcement that TigerDirect parent Systemax is acquiring the CompUSA brand, trademarks, e-commerce business and as many as 16 stores from my least-favorite retailer. The sixteen stores are located in the Florida and Texas in the United States and in Puerto Rico, apparently a hotbed of CompUSA action. TigerDirect currently operates 11 retail stores in Florida, Illinois, North Carolina and Ontario (Canada) and of course their website, tigerdirect.com. The cost of the deal is about $30 million, depending on the precise locations that are acquired (I guess that hasn't quite been decided yet).

What amazes me is that the remaining locations are worth anything at all. We have made a couple of stops by the CompUSA location on Independence Boulevard here in Charlotte, because I can almost always find something that I can use at a good price, and I am simply amazed at the lack of good pricing, even several weeks into the store closing sale. Usually when someone goes out of business, they try and actually make money from the process. It is of course possible that they are not paying rent, and are planning to stiff the leaseholder when they ask for payment, but I'd think that the cost of the cavernous building would outweigh whatever miniscule amount they might be scraping from withholding the good deals from the merchandise.

Read "CompUSA Can't Even Go Out of Business Correctly" »

I mentioned last week that some of the most successful posts (at least in terms of popularity) were written when I simply wrote, rather than ones that I felt I had to write. Just yesterday, Darren Rowse talked about thinking like a blogger - in other words, not struggling to come up with posts, but actually changing your mindset so that you begin to get into that process of creating content.

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I have to say that there are definitely times when I wonder who I'm writing to when I create entries. Way back when I wrote The Angler Fish (the eleventh entry ever, ID#20), I had no idea that it would end up well-ranked at Google. I just wrote, because I had a question that I needed answered, and I wanted to be able to find the answer later. There are other times, when I will put something together that is more of a tutorial. This may be for my own memory, but it is also for others to learn too. Finally, I will sometimes find myself writing for Google. Invariably, the last sort of post ends up being something that no one wants to read and Google will never index well.

Read "Do You Write for You, Your Readers or Google?" »

You may have heard about Movember on Problogger back in November when Darren grew a mustache for charity. He eventually raised more than $1800, a pretty impressive tally for growing a mustache (of course, at least $1200 came from the premium sponsors, who ended up with their buttons on the site - but still).

I didn't participate in Movember, mostly because I didn't read about it until it was already under way, but I did manage to catch wind of a charity with a similarly-odd name, Mustaches for Kids. No, it doesn't actually provide mustaches for kids who don't have them (though that might go over well), it raises money while growing mustaches, and the proceeds go to help kids. Simple enough, right? Well, yours truly will be growing a mustache for the next four weeks to help out the cause.

Read "2008 Mustaches for Kids: Let's Grow!" »

The other day as I was in the grocery store, I was struck by the absurdity of just how far one woman was going in her pursuit to get a discount on a package of hot dogs. Now don't get me wrong - I'm all for scoring a discount and all, especially when it involves little to no effort, and even more so when we're talking about lots and lots of money. The greater the reward for the least amount of effort, the more exciting the prospect.

But in this case, there apparently was an ad in the weekly circular that said something to the effect of Beef Franks on Sale. Now if you ask anyone - especially my wife - if I am a stickler for language, I am. When it comes down to what someone says or what someone meant, I will almost always side with what someone says, because after all, that is what they said. I have no way of knowing what they meant. We even have our own little joke about it, saying that I have a condition - which may or may not be true.

Read "Do You Value Your Time or Your Money?" »

I understand that the NFL playoffs are in full swing, and this weekend was pretty good, as far as that goes. The Colts lost, as did the Cowboys, and though the Packers and the Patriots won, Brett Favre looked like a kid in the snow. It was a reasonably enjoyable weekend for watching football, all in all. Much better than the mess that was the college football season that finally came to an end. Maybe they will enact a playoff system when the current BCS deals expire.

Nontheless, major league sports are, well, tired. It's a bunch of overpriced athletes who get out there and play a game that, for the most part, they don't seem to be interested in playing. To make matters worse, most of us are so busy sitting on our couches that we can't even pretend to live our lives through them. Where are the dreams of growing up to be Johnny Unitas or some other big-league ball-player? I'm sure there are a few, and I'm sure that more than one kid wants to make it big, but it's to land a rich contract or endorsement deal, not to be the hero on Sunday afternoons (or whenever). Where are the real sports?

Read "Where Have All the Good Sports Gone?" »

Because of my recent communication issues with a cable telecommunications provider who just can't seem to get things right, I've had to log into my router a number of times to reset the line. And in case you're wondering, it's because I use a Cisco router at home, rather than the standard Linksys fare. It provides a better connection - provided the line itself is working. Unfortunately, if the line goes down, it doesn't do quite as good as job as recovering, which is odd, since it's a lot more expensive.

So it means that I need to log into the router and shutdown the line and reset it anytime the line goes down - which over the last week and a half has been several times a day. This isn't a difficult process, but it is a pain. Either I have to load up a serial session or a telnet one, and then type four commands. Like I said, it's not hard, but it is tedious. In fact, it's really tedious. So I decided to come up with a solution.

Read "Automated PuTTY Session to a Cisco Router via VBScript" »