Month: October 2007

I’ve made a few changes to the site, specifically applying the latest upgrade to WordPress 2.3 and a few new plugins. Here’s what’s behind the engine now:

The All-In-One SEO Pack: Modifies titles and meta tags for better search engine optimization. The site was doing fairly well before, but it’d be nice to make sure all content here is accessible.

Google XML Sitemaps: Generates a sitemap XML file (that you can use with Google Webmaster Tools) from your existing WordPress structure.

Share This: Adds a fairly inobtrusive link to the bottom of posts allowing submission to social networking and news aggregation sites.

WP-Cache: Caches page contents so that your database server doesn’t get reamed as badly. I’d already been running a previous version, and the only annoying thing is that if you’re editing a theme, you have to turn it off (or delete the cached pages every time) and remember to turn it back on when done.

The theme being used here is a slightly tweaked version of Mandigo Blue, with some sidebar code modifications and added support for Google Adsense/Analytics code.

Over the past few days this site has had a ridiculous number of hits outside its ordinary audience. This seems to be due to two particular referrals at the same time, both referencing my post on Leopard showing networked PC’s with blue screens of death:

Unfortunately, the StumbleUpon community seems to be somewhere around the Digg level of maturity when it comes to reviews:

We have a Warren-esque remark about how the site content is “OLD” (let alone the fact that it was written in June, and was a spur-of-the-moment type thing based on a preview copy of Leopard). Strike one.

We also have a superior-than-thou comment about how the poster has never seen a BSOD on XP, and is now going to play some “award-winning games” on his machine. I can hear the Comic Book Guy’s snickering now.

I’ve had kernel panics on OS X. I’ve had random “bus error” messages appear while using Disk Utility on the Mac – hence the title of this freaking weblog. (I’ve never had that horrible of an error message occur personally on any other operating system.) And I’ve had blue screens on 2000, XP, 2003 Server, and Microsoft’s latest pride and joy, Vista – and in Vista, they’ve been incredibly perplexing to troubleshoot.

Operating systems of all kinds can and will die unexpectedly. I don’t play the game of platform superiority anymore. I find Windows does better for certain tasks, such as a seamless 1.8TB storage pool for all my media and personal files. (I’ll have a post on Windows Home Server and its ass-kickery soon enough.)

I find the Mac does better for other tasks, such as managing my 60GB+ music library with iTunes. I don’t have the time or patience to determine why a Core 2 Duo E6750 can’t organize folders locally in half the time my MacBook can over the LAN. After years of tweaking Windows settings, I’m content to let the Mac manage things and find out solutions to idiotic problems when it’s convenient, not when I want to listen to Mims.

In any event, users probably wouldn’t notice XP bluescreening anyways, as its default settings are to dump memory contents to disk and reboot immediately. I’ve fixed many a system with dodgy motherboards that needed this option disabled, to confirm that the chipset drivers were acting up. A split second is not enough time to ascertain the driver file name or the STOP message.

So, commenters of StumbleUpon, I salute you for your wonderful sense of timing and self-satisfied gaming. Any other takers?

I’ve made a few statements in the past – both in real life and online – about how certain Web sites seem to attract certain types of users and commenters. There’s a very clear relationship between the audience a site attracts and the comments contributed by users. One can clearly go from quality, interesting comments to spambots and txt-speak in a few clicks.

I may update this list as necessary, as new sites appear every day, but here’s my definitive Hierarchy of Internet Commenting. Rankings go from quality at the top to “I am dumber for having tried to read this” at the bottom.

1. Popular Web standards or technical discussion sites, such as A List Apart or flagship sites in the 9rules network. Sometimes the comments can definitely stray into pretentious quibbling, but for the most part they’re insightful and offer decent advice to Web designers and developers:
2. Something Awful Forums: The content of discussion at SA may be highly ridiculous, but it’ll be written well and intelligently. There’s a reason that several industry insiders post there. A $10 registration fee acts as an initial gatekeeper, and a few ban-hammer wielding administrators take care of anyone foolish enough to use ‘lulz’ in a post or reply.
3. Newsgroups: general discussion. Most newsgroups take a bad reputation because of the inherent community of trolls, but even the troll posts are generally well-written. People may be fairly snippy, as per below, but you’ll generally get the correct answer if you’re thick skinned.
4. Slashdot. Posts without merit are taken care of by the moderation system, and the standard of written English is very high even though there’s no specific enforcement of it. There are some Internet memes present in most discussions, but these posts are likely lead to genuinely funny responses. Posters on Slashdot also have a significantly higher degree of technical knowledge than the average bear (or Internet user), so responses to questions are likely to receive a correct response in a shorter timespan.Comical or humorous posts – even the first one in a discussion – have likely already analyzed the situation and provided commentary on it:

   

5. General-interest blogs. Sites like Gizmodo, Engadget, Kotaku, Joystiq and all others owned by Gawker Media and Weblogs, Inc. have dedicated staff policing their comment fields. Unfortunately, there’s not much enforcement of post quality – simply that there’s no trolling and people tend to stay on topic. Additionally, it’s clear that certain topics attract people without the technical knowledge to respond properly. These people respond anyways, forking the discussion and causing needless debate, when a snappy “You’re an idiot and here’s why, with proof” response would curtail the issue. A certain amount of sarcasm is necessary, in my opinion, to separate the idiots from people who actually do know something.
6. Facebook popular applications walls: This is where we start devolving into really horrible discussions of who is popular and who is clearly not. The picture alone should be sufficient to tell you that the quality of discussion definitely has gone down a bar:
7. Digg: I thought the site’s newly introduced ranking system would keep discussions a bit more technically involved.I thought wrong – apparently that damn “cheezburger” meme is still worth displaying:

   

8. YouTube comments are filled with the most ignorant, racist invective I’ve ever seen online. I found these attached to a “most popular” video on the front page of the site:
9. And last but not least, any MySpace comments – simply because they’re 90% ads for “free” ringtones or profile tracking scripts. I’ll leave the image off this site here, but you know where to look for examples.

Have any other sites with good or horrible comments? Disagree with my ordering? Feel free to comment here, but please keep it at a Kotaku-or-above level.