brainscat.com

Looks like I don’t have to shave my beard.

Not exactly breaking news, but Wordpress 1.5 is out. Michigan State’s spring break is next week, so I’ll have some extra free time. If this site isn’t upgraded by 12:00 AM EST on March 14th, I’ll shave my beard.

Recently, I’ve considered adding cigar, whiskey, beer, and wine reviews to this site. So many times I’m tempted to write any and every interesting thing here on brainscat and more often than not my first reaction is, “No.” I’m realizing more and more where that instinct is coming from…

Most of my favorite bloggers, (Robert Scoble, Joel Spolsky, Mark Cuban, Gabe and Tycho, Tim Bray, Iggy, and Tracy and Trev) besides being authoritative, all share a focus and consistency of content that makes their respective sites worthwhile. Their adherance to a topic is one of the key qualities that makes their respective sites valuable.

I’m sure Scoble is a well rounded individual and is interested in many things besides Microsoft and related technology, but I don’t care. I don’t read Ongoing because I think Tim Bray is a good person and I don’t read his site expecting to hear about his newest hobby. I read their blogs because they give me focused info on topics I’m interested in and I don’t have to wade through crap.

So many bloggers would do well to remember their audience when they are searching for what to make of their webspace. I’ll do my best to keep this from turning into this.

Update: Forget this. I may not read “shotgun” blogs that jump around from topic to topic, but I realize that shouldn’t have anything to do with how and why I blog. I write for my own sanity, to keep a record of interesting bits, and to hopefully help someone else out.

Update 2: Don’t forget this, just forgive me for being to rash in both previous revisions. I just don’t think strict adherance is what’s going to make my blog good. More accurately, I have a need to stray every now and then from regular technological writings to keep my own sanity. To be a useful resource though, I have to stay on target. The best place for myself and brainscat is somewhere in the middle. End of navel-gazing. I promise…. for now.

Get gmail invites at isnoop.net. I was sick at looking at all my available invites so I donated them over there. isnoop harvests the invites for other random people, and gives them to you upon request. Basically, I’m done with invite contests since demand is low.

I’ve temporarily turned on comment moderation. Either SpamKarma is broken, turned off, or suddenly inffective. A bunch of bestiality and incest spam has gotten through the filters in the past few days, so I’m locking things down.

Update: Oops, it looks like I deleted a bunch of comments by accident. Doh.

I got this from Alex who got this from Scott, who blames it all on Simon. Clearly, this post is not my fault.

1. At bloglines, find your own blog.
2. If it’s not there, register and add your blog.
3. After searching by your blog url, click related feeds.
4. Select “include” feeds that you’re subscribed to, if that’s your fancy.
5. Post the top 5 (or more) on your blog.

Results for brainscat.com follow…

1. Joe Beda’s EightyPercent.net — never heard of him, but I’m subscribed now.
2. Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger — everybody reads him, no suprise here.
3. Alain Leroy’s view on our world — another wildcard, but I’ll give him a shot.
4. Nate Furtwangler — coworker’s blog. Brandon’s leetle brother.
5. brandon.furtwangler blog — Brandon’s blog, not a suprise at all, since we both started blogging at the same time.

Regular readers of brainscat know I’ve toyed around with the idea of building a better aggregator. Instead of writing the whole damn thing from scratch, I’ve decided that it would be best to add-in some of these peer-to-peer features to iPodder.

So, in an open request to the illustrious Dave Winer and Adam Curry, I’m throwing my voice on the web, praying that these guys hear it. I’ve sent emails through their respective weblogs to them, but if you see this and you have their ear, kindly pass it along and ask them to listen to my iPodder peer-to-peer proposal.

I guess this blog just recently became cool enough to receive comment-spam. Comment moderation’s been turned on for now, but I’ll be installing a slew of spam-fighting plugins later this afternoon.

Within an hour of my post, Mark Fletcher, CEO of Bloglines, left a comment saying all will be well with regards to the speed of the Bloglines service. I’d like to clarify that the fairy-tale post is somewhat embellished as all fairy-tales are.

I’m a huge fan of Bloglines, they’re the only aggregator I use currently. They’re without peer when it comes to having a web-client that deals in traditional syndication. I can see their technology as possibly supplementary to the new aggregator I’m going to take a poke at writing, as the new client will have a penchant for distribution of large media files, a task that seems incompatible with the Bloglines model.

Let these events stand as proof that pingbacks are useful, and allowed a Mark to know about (some small) buzz regarding his business and react quickly. While it’s refreshing to see companies that are accessable and have a more personal public face, it’s amazing to see a CEO respond so quickly in a blog. It’s really cool to see technology at work in a practical way.

As an aside, it’s interesting to see Mark’s blog about some of the recent hurdles Bloglines has had to jump.

Please let me know if you have any criticisms or praise for the new design. The look is by no means finalized, and I hope to make it as useful to readers as possible. Lay it on me.

“Keeping it simply styled” is my new mantra for this site. I’ve been working on this layout for quite some time, which is ironic, considering how little there is now. I’m confident this is a large improvement on this site as I am of the opinion that the default WordPress style is far too cluttered, and many of the “features” are not used 98% of the time, according to my request logs. To be more specific, I feel that the majority of the default features in the sidebar belong out of sight, stored in a drawer for the rare occasions people use them. Seafood forks, spatulas, and whisks are all very useful when I need them, but I don’t keep them mixed in with my every day silverware.

Small tweaks will probably happen in the coming weeks, and I’ll be adding a few pages that I’ve been meaning to put up for a while like advanced searching, an about page, contact form, linklog, and music log. I’ll even be changing this style a bit to comfortably fit on top of my PictorialisII photo gallery.

On another note, I’m indirectly thankful that Microsoft Windows’ fixed-width fonts look so butt ugly. You see, I originally hoped to use Courier New as the font for the site, because as a programmer I figured it really adds a flavor to the site that fits me. On OS X, Courier New and Monospace look pretty slick, and so I thought I would differentiate myself from other blogs with a fixed width font. Alas, there’s a reason websites don’t use fixed width fonts; they’re very hard to read. Such was almost the fate of this site, that is, until I checked it out in Internet Explorer… *shudder*.

This past weekend I was lucky enough to get together with my buddies Nate and Freiman for camping. We jumped into a Jeep and drove 560 miles up to Eagle Harbor, Michigan to relax on Lake Medora and see the surrounding marvels of Lake Superior. Instead of giving you boring details that can’t come close to how the weekend was, I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

Hosting went down again. Need to find new providers…

This month seems to be the month of drafts for brainscat that never get finished. C’est la vie.

Sorry for the downtime everybody. It seems my hosting company needed to take a while to replace the RAID array, leaving the site down for a while. It looks like all systems are go for the time being.

You already know what “blog” really means, right? Along those lines a flog is a blog for a group a friends, a publicly viewable forum for a select set of buddies to press their thoughts upon the Internet.

So, those of you might be wondering what happened to Lorin and Justin…

The fact of the matter is that I got fed up with Simplog and also wanted to set up a more personal space where I could comfortably write about things other than entertainment media. Enter the new WordPress version of Brainscat. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve kept the old site at dev.brainscat.com the address of where I used to toy around with new ideas. After a conversation with Lorin though, I found out people asked him, “Why dev.brainscat.com?”

I was lazy when moving the site. Atmittedly, “dev” makes no sense, and has nothing to do with the content of the site. Not having the heart to delete their space on the web, I figure it’s a better alternative to give them more of a permanent place to stay at http://friends.brainscat.com. “Permanent” of course meaning as long as hosting costs remain reasonable. As you might have guessed, friends.brainscat.com is now the preferred way of getting to their site. Learn it, love it. The address dev.brainscat.com will continue to point to that site indefinately so as not to break anybody’s links or bookmarks.