Media, Technology & Science

Useful Blogging Tools

12.17.07 | Permalink | Comments Off on Useful Blogging Tools

From time to time someone will ask me “what tools and techniques do you use for your blog?” and I rattle of a long, incomplete list of stuff which is a little different each time. So I thought I’d put pen to paper and start a comprehensive list that I’ll update periodically. Aside from this entry, which is accurate today, you can always find the latest list in the sidebar link Great Blog Tools. Hope this is useful to you, these tools are certainly valuable to me!

Hosting

Servlet Inc. – The good folks at Servlet have been around a long time. The thing that distinguishes them from any other provider is the service. They’ll take care of you and make sure you’re a satisfied customer. Yes, you can get cheaper packages, but you’ll never find the degree of personal attention and service that this team provides. Highly recommended. Disclosure: I’ve known the founders of Servlet for over 20 years, but I maintain no commercial relationship with the company other than as a customer.

Software

Fedora – Works for me and for millions of others. I also considered OpenSolaris (due to my long relationship with Sun Microsystems.)

Apache – Works well, very flexible, tons of packages and add-ons available. Best web server available in my opinion.

PHP – A fine scripting language that allows you to extend the functionality of native packages.

MySQL – Best open source database bar none.

WordPress – If you’re going to host your own blog, WordPress the choice. If you want them to host it, check out WordPress.com.

Minim Theme – One of the best things about WP is the sheer number and variety of themes. We like the Minim Theme from the UpStart Blogger. I’ve modified the theme heavily, but the core influence is still apparent.

404 Notifier – This plugin keeps you informed of errors on your blog through email messages and/or an rss feed. Written by prolific plugin author Alex King.

Akismet – I love Akismet. I wouldn’t blog without Akismet. 66,000 spam comments have been caught and handled by this wonder plugin authored by Matt Mullenweg. Highly Recommended.

All-in-one-SEO – A convenient and effective meta tag, short description, and title manager. With WP 2.3, you get these things for free now, but I still like the way the plugin manages the activities a bit better.

Get Recent Comments – A plugin that finds and displays the most recent comments and trackbacks on your blog at the place of your choosing.

Google XML Sitemaps – This handy plugin creates sitemap.xml files, compresses them, and alerts major players like Google and Yahoo that you’ve got new content.

Popularity Contest – Another plugin by the prolific Alex King. This one outfits your blog with a weighting system to determine the most popular content on your blog and then display it wherever you’d like.

Recent Posts – This plugin makes a handy list of your x latest posts for inclusion in sidebars etc.

Related Posts – This plugin enables full text indexing on your blog database and will suggest entries that are somehow related to the present entry being viewed.

WP Short Stats – This plugin queries your database to let you know who’s visiting what on your blog when. Nice little package that does a great job in concert with web log analyzers.

AWStats – A comprehensive and detailed web log analyzer. I wouldn’t put up a web site without it. Highly Recommended.

Mac OSX – It’s not like Apple needs any more press, but I can say this. When you can shift your focus from making the computer work to simply doing work on the computer, your life transforms for the better. I was staunchly anti-Mac for years, OSX has changed that. I don’t know how to work without Expose for instance.

Transmit – A full-featured and robust file transfer utility. Yes, I have scripts using rsync that keep two machines synchronized, but when I’m in user land, Transmit fits the bill. No fuss, no muss.

Navicat – The best GUI tool for MySQL bar none. If you work with MySQL frequently, run, don’t walk to pick up this indispensable utility.

Taco Edit – A fast and efficient html, css, and php editor.

Graphic Converter – If you muck with images, then you’ll need a utility like this. Great for resizing, conversion, and basic editing/touch-up.

FeedBurner – A great, now free, way to outsource and aggregate your RSS feeds. Recently acquired by Google.

PayPal – If you’re going to business on the net, you may as well use PayPal. It’s a great way to get paid and pay people.

Google Analytics – Place a little snippet of code in your blog and away you go. A full-featured and free way to understand who’s doing what on your site and to track changes that improve/degrade the experience. My only gripe is that it consistently under counts visitors relative to local web log analysis and blog stat plugin analysis (and even relative to AdSense – where you’re getting paid for traffic!)

Pingomatic – A reliable ping/announcement service for your content with limited coverage.

Pingoat – A comprehensive ping/announcement service for your content.

Monetization

Local Advertising – I will work with you to create the best exposure for the best price possible. Read the details if you’re interested.

Kontera – Inline, contextual text link advertising. This is new for me, I don’t know how well it will work as yet.

Google AdSense – The mature leader in the marketplace. It works, but the conversion rates and pay rates leave alot to be desired. I’m working to increase the effectiveness of this tool set on this blog.

Review Me! – If you’d like, I will write a review of your product/service/site subject to the rules available here: terms and conditions.

Hardware

Mac G5 Tower – Great desktop machine, plenty of horse power to host a staging and testing system at home for the blog, webserver, and databases.

Mac Powerbook – Great laptop machine, also hosts copies of everything and allows me to make updates while on the move.

HP Xeon Rackmount Server – Rugged and reliable server thus far, provided by Servlet as part of our hosting package.

Do you use a tool I haven’t mentioned and find it to be indispensable? Leave a comment, always happy to learn more!

Energy, Technology & Science

New H3 Exploration Technique

12.17.07 | Permalink | Comments Off on New H3 Exploration Technique

Berkeley Lab geochemist Mack Kennedy
Berkeley Lab geochemist Mack Kennedy used this mass spectrometer (foreground) to determine helium isotope ratios in samples of surface fluids from the northern Basin and Range.
Photo Credit: Roy Kaltschmidt

Via Renewable Energy Access:

In a survey of the northern Basin and Range province of the western United States, geochemists Mack Kennedy of the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Matthijs van Soest of Arizona State University have discovered a new tool for identifying potential geothermal energy resources with no drilling required.

…

Kennedy and van Soest made their discovery by comparing the ratios of helium isotopes in samples gathered from wells, surface springs, and vents across the northern Basin and Range. Helium-three, whose nucleus has just one neutron, is made only in stars, and Earth’s mantle retains a high proportion of primordial helium-three (compared to the minuscule amount found in air) left over from the formation of the solar system. Earth’s crust, on the other hand, is rich in radioactive elements like uranium and thorium that decay by emitting alpha particles, which are helium-four nuclei. Thus a high ratio of helium-three to helium-four in a fluid sample indicates that much of the fluid came from the mantle.

High helium ratios are common in active volcanic regions, where mantle fluids intrude through the ductile boundary of the lower crust. But when Kennedy and van Soest found high ratios in places far from volcanism, they knew that mantle fluids must be penetrating the ductile boundary by other means.

…

“We have never seen such a clear correlation of surface geochemical signals with tectonic activity, nor have we ever been able to quantify deep permeability from surface measurements of any kind,” says Kennedy. The samples they collected on the surface gave the researchers a window into the structure of the rocks far below, with no need to drill.

Read more…

As a company with a vested interest in the Basin and Range province and in alternate methods of geothermal resource assessment, this is a welcome breakthrough. The research paper describing the technique and results published by van Soest and Kennedy appears in Science is available to subscribers for review. If this method proves reliable, it could open a whole new round of geothermal exploration (and certainly will be used as another tool to assess current geothermal prospects.)

Humor

Funky Santa

12.16.07 | Permalink | Comments Off on Funky Santa



We got this toy to share with family members and before it went, we took a little video. It made our household laugh, and laugh, and laugh. So, Are You Ready For This? Watch the 30 second video above and see Santa shake his groove thang! Merry Christmas from Musings from the Coast!

Sports

Congrats Champs!

12.16.07 | Permalink | Comments Off on Congrats Champs!

The lower divisions of college football decided their champions on the field this weekend, and it was a good weekend of games.

Congratulations to Appalachian State, Football Championship Division (or I-AA to those of us who despise that designation) Champions. App State started the season with a bang beating then #5 Michigan at home and finished strong with a three-peat, taking home their third consecutive I-AA championship. Final score: Appalachian State 49, Delaware 21.

Congratulations to Valdosta State, Division II Champions. Valdosta scored with 22 seconds left to pull out a thriller over NW Missouri State, who lost in the DII Championship game for the third consecutive year. Final score: Valdosta State 25, NW Missouri State 20.

Congratulations to University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, Division III Champions. UW sprinted out to a 17-0 lead over defending champs Mount Union and held on to win with a tough defense effort. This was UW’s first win in three consecutive tries against the Purple Raiders and snapped a 37 game win streak. Final score: UW-Whitewater 31, Mount Union 21.

Division I bowl season gets rolling along this week and will carry on until the championship is decided between LSU and Ohio State on January 7th, 2008. Should be fun.

Humor, Technology & Science

Nasty Keyboard Solution

12.15.07 | Permalink | 1 Comment
Does your keyboard look like this?

Picture of dirty, nasty keyboard

If so, you might want to unplug it and throw it in…

Picture of garden variety dishwasher

If all goes well, you’ll end up with…

Clean keyboard, fresh from the dishwasher

I’m not nuts, a colleague forwarded this story to me recently – and unlike a number of these situations, I actually have first-hand experience with it. In 1989 a Coca-Cola was inadvertently spilled into my AT-style keyboard. Since it was ruined anyway, I thought, “what the heck, I’ll toss it in the dishwasher to see what happens.” In my experience, if you split the keyboard open, insert into dishwasher (away from heating elements – if your model has them) with no soap, a quick 10 minute cycle was sufficient to get the gunk out and a couple of days of drying allowed the keyboard to be reassembled and then used. Good as new.

During my PC days, I would do this frequently. Now in my Mac days, I haven’t yet tried it. My desktop keyboard is NASTY so perhaps it’s time for an experiment…I’ll take pictures (and will get a replacement just in case…)


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