Mark Metson's First Blog

Cool Limits on S-C H-A O-S W-E today...

2008-10-02T09:48:00.002-03:00

Just saw a very nice issue of "Outer Limits" earlier, inspiring me to log in at Blogger/Blogspot to write... :etcetcetc: ...And eventually here I am back at that tab of that browser-window, wow, is Firefox getting better at ro-busting or are today's roes less determined to shoot down every browser that comes their way?

Hmm, maybe its that they're more canny about which browsers look at them sideways, which Internet Protocol (I.P.; IP) addresses they're not quite so wary of, and stuff like that?

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanyway, the short of the long of it has it that "Outer Limits" is on again already, on another channel (Thanks TROP! Hmm, tropism, taxis, praxis, what next?)

Another organics versus inorganics episode! Have the robots in management been infiltrated? Which reminds me...

...Remember when the Borg were equals? Like, before some sick f*** vented "Queens"? Which reminds me...

...Remember when no Changeling had ever harmed another?

Speaking of navels, loose lips, and ships, I may as well throw in a couple of horror stories about loose lips:

Once upon a time I mentioned to someone of an XY persuasion that on the Enterprise, no-one ever has to be alone. His response? "We're not on the Enterprise."

That might not sound surprising, plenty of organic peripherals could well be expected to have still had programming back in those days (it wasn't this millennia) that could lead to such a response. But the specific organic peripheral wasn't one I'd've expected to be that sad a case. Sad. Sad. Sad. :sadsadsad:

Then there was the time I mentioned to someone, possibly of the XX persuasion, that no Changeling ever harms another. The response? I was behind the times. That too wasn't this millenia, most likely. (Does anyone bother remembering what happened in which millenia instead of merely what precededed what? Numerology? Did numerology really work back then? It didn't seem to me to be such a danger then as in this millenia, in which possibly becoming so totally predicted as to have no need for anyone to actually experience it could maybe even happen in some futures... What, that's merely Obsessive Compulsive Disorder? Uh, no, its Obsessive Compulsive Order...

BB
MM

Trying to upgrade email processing...

2008-09-21T16:04:00.003-03:00

Again it has been a long time since I last posted to my blog. Too many things to do, blogger/blogspot had to go on a 'back burner' for a while.

Today I have started trying to process an email account on Yahoo that had hundreds of emails in the inbox dating back quite a while (due to using yahoo for email was on yet another 'back burner').

In the process I came up with a new strategy to attempt. I sorted the inbox by sender, and noticed the sender t the top of the list had only sent me one message. That led me to think hey, someone who waits for a reply before sneding another email might hypothetically not be a spammer. (Understand that the specific yahoo email account I was processing was one I tended to use in contexts in which I figured I might well be setting myself up to get spammed if I gave an email address, and sure enough if there is anything other than spam in that inbox, other than whatever I expected to arrive there today and thus went these to look for, it sure is hard to find amongst the hundreds of items that have many of the hallmarks of the kind of spam I figured I might have been letting myself in for.)

Thus I started to compose a first draught of a "form letter" to be used in future to reply to emails from people from whom I only seem to have received one email but that I cannot find in my files any indication of how exactly they came across my email address, what thread or conversation or whatever we had been engaged in that had led to them sending me that email, maybe even what computer I had been at when I requested that email or why, if I had subscribed to some kind of mailing list, that list had only managed to send me one email instead of whatever regular postings I had subscribed to that list in order to obtain.

Here is what I came up with:

--------------------------------------------------------------

Greetings! Unless Yahoo has deleted or spam-foldered any other emails you have sent me, the email to which I am replying seems to be the only email you have sent to this email account.

I am in the process of reviewing my email processing methodology and hopefully upgrading it in various ways, for example I do not seem to have any record of how exactly it is that we came in email contact initially nor why we settled upon this specific email account as our preferred method of keeping in touch with each other. Do you happen to have such records on file? As I cannot recall precisely when and where I told you to use this specific email address as send-to address when sending this specific category of information/email.

Since I see only the one email from you in my files, I am guessing the email to which I am replying is not a mailing-list message, because if I am on a mailing list I'd expect to see regular posts coming in from the list to which I subscribed. Thus I infer that that either I accidentally got unsubscribed or we were communicating by some means other than email, or by means of some other email account than this one, then for some reason I requested this specific item of information to be sent to this specific email address instead of to whatever address we had hitherto been using in our correspondence.

I am sorry it has taken so long to get back to you on this, unfortunately I got so swamped with spam that it has taken this long for me to come up with the strategy of looking for senders who only sent one message and who therefore are presumably waiting for my response to that message before continuing our conversation/correspondence.

Let us try to pick up the thread and get back to whatever it was exactly that we were trying to achieve.

-MarkM-

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Politics' version of progressive revelations?

2008-06-10T18:48:00.002-03:00

Surfing BlogSoldiers I came across this interesting snippet: "It would be strange to see the Libertarian Party advertise themselves as "true democrats" in so-called "Democratic" districts and as "true republicans" in so-called "Republican" districts, but they literally have the right to do so." (See Our Independent Libertarian Spirit.)

~mgm~

The crafting of an imposter

2008-06-03T14:39:00.006-03:00

I suspect there might be a "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" episode that I haven't seen yet.

I am thinking of a story-arc involving Odo and Kira, which I recall coming to a focus in a cave where Odo could distinguish an imposter from the purportedly-real Kira by the fact that the purportedly-real Kira would never admit to such a thing as loving Odo.

I do not recall any clues in that episode indicating that the audience, or even the author(s), were to be taken as being aware of a mechanism by means of which whatsoever is believed to be true is perceived as true, thus the impression I took from the episode was that the creature Odo was observing was in fact an imposter, rather than its having actually been the purportedly-real Kira up until the moment when his belief that it was not crystalised into the material plane he was experiencing, resulting in the purportedly-real Kira being replaced (possibly by a switch of timeline or something, who knows, there could be many potential mechanisms for such things for all we know, maybe?) by an imposter.

So there you have it, that was the highest point of that arc I recall having seen. The reason I suspect the existence of an episode that I have not seen is that I have since seen more than one episode in which, presumably, Kira has been permanently replaced by some such imposter, as witnessed by the fact that, lo and behold, the creature purported to be Kira expresses expressions that presumably correspond to the kind of expressions Odo had believed, in the cave, the 'real' Kira would not express.

Hmm. I kind of wonder how it came to pass that Odo's timeline changed from one in which the real Kira would not express such things to one in which she would. :)

~mgm~

Then there was the whatsit that used the widjit to do the whajamacallit...

2008-05-19T18:48:00.002-03:00

You heard the one about the awards committee that used the slushpiles to sort the candydates, yes?

No! Omagoshin, y'don'tsay?! 'Nuf said then, maybe?

Option: s/candy/candi/ ;)

~mgm~

--
What, me watch Renee and Street trash a health spa whilst writing my blog? Sure. Any reason why not?

Writing, Magick, Enlightenment, Yoga and Wyvern Street

2006-11-30T01:08:00.000-04:00

I have added pages on enlightenment and yoga to the magick section of the Graphic Omniscient Device today as well as continuing to work on my Halifax based occult novel "The Wyvern Street Irregulars".

-MarkM-

The Wyvern Street Irregulars continues...

2006-11-29T00:38:00.000-04:00

I have gotten some more work done on my Halifax based Occult Novel "The Wyvern Street Irregulars". Chapter Five is not finished and I am currently working on Chapter Six, in which the idea of Murder by Magick is introduced. Yeah, I know, a pretty standard plot-device. This is not meant to be a fantasy-genre novel though so this is based on actual events, albeit events from long ago and far away. A central question faced by the characters is whether there is any actual causal relation between spells intended to kill people and the deaths of those people. Do such spells actually work? How do they work? Surely there must be many cases where they do not work? If they do work what makes the difference in the cases where they did seem to work? As I said, this is not intended as fantasy. Despite the characters' apparent predisposition to believe that magick can work they are not without skepticism and empirical/scientific backgrounds. Obviously we could also be seeing the development of a murder mystery of sorts, but whether or not that is the case you'll have to wait and see. ;)

-MarkM-

More of The Wyvern Street Irregulars

2006-11-23T16:47:00.000-04:00

I have gotten back to work on my Halifax based Occult Novel "The Wyvern Street Irregulars". Basically I have completed Chapter Four and gotten quite a way into Chapter Five. The chapters have been growing longer, I am no longer worried that making a full novel out of it is going to be hard; it turns out that the characters have a lot to talk about...

-MarkM-

BritBlog directory (thanks Nancy!)

2006-11-15T14:58:00.000-04:00

I just noticed that Nancyrowina is an editor at BritBlog so I have registered there, being as how I am still a Brit despite having lived in Halifax lo these many years. :)

-MarkM-

I've started a novel set in Halifax: The Wyvern Street Irregulars

2006-10-30T14:05:00.000-04:00

Woo Hoo! I have started a novel set in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

I didn't think I get started on one so soon, but it is coming together okay so far.

So far I have gone with a description-sparse style. The less descriptive detail the less there is for Hollywood to get wrong, right? ;) Thats as good an excuse as any, maybe? ;)

The genre is pretty standard "good witches and/or occultists versus nasty something(s)". As I read over the first chapter it sure seems pretty standard for the genre to me anyway, and I tell myself I have read quite a few examples of that genre. Possibly the biggest difference is that none of the characters have showed off any British Royalty titles yet, or even Knighthoods. ;) :)

Aaaaanyway, enough said. Go read the at least the first chapter at least. The working title is The Wyvern Street Irregulars.

-MarkM-

Looking for work...

2006-10-29T12:48:00.001-04:00

I attended some Halloween festivities of course: Samhain with the Unitarian/Universalist Sixth Source folk, Friendship Circle's Masquerade, and the Witches Ball.

I did manage a brief chat about a local publisher that specialises in novels set in Halifax. First step with them, apparently, would be to put together some sample chapters and an outline. I do not have already figured out in my mind any particular theme, let alone specific story, to base here. So while I think long and hard about what the heck kind of a novel I would base here, and whether it might be better to just go ahead and write some novel or other that does not happen to be based here, I have started yet another job search.

I have now spent literally years researching the concept of Making Money, with the result that I now have a much deeper and wider understanding of the whole concept of jobs. I can really see why so many people prefer simply working for others to trying to run a business themselves. When I say though that I am looking for work I am not closed to the idea of working in a "self employed" capacity. I am, after all, still Digitalis Data Services (25+ years in business! ;)) That is why the title of this post says looking for work instead of saying looking for a job. But being self-employed is a long way from "running a business". There is a limit to how much one person can do. For example trying to single-handedly run what would amount to a web-publishing business seems a little much for me to do alone. Any kind of business I tried to set up would be more than what i could handle alone. So I am back to looking for work I can do in a "self employed" capacity or even an actual "job". Whatever. I want to get back out to my country house, and to do that properly I really ought to get a vehicle. Vehicles are expensive. I simply have not been making enough money lately to afford one. If you check out my Make Money Knotwork site you will see that I have put a lot of research into the whole concept of Making Money. As I already mentioned, I have put years into that research. In particular I know a huge amount about making money on the web. I paid for my country house, cash down in full, no mortgage, all with money I made on the web. But that was years ago. Things happened, maybe you might have heard of "the dot-com bust". Since then I have been researching to find out what, if anything, I would apply capital toward next time I make capital investments. But meanwhile I have run out of capital, unless I sell the country-house, which I very much do NOT want to do. So I now have much knowledge but I do not have the capital myself to apply much of what I have learned. Thus the search for work. While still thinking of writing projects too, of course. :)

-MarkM- Proprietor, Digitalis Data Services (More than 25 years in business!)

Interfacing with the dream world

2006-10-28T14:57:00.000-03:00

I forgot to mention in my previous post that I seem to have been interfacing with my dreams a lot the last several months, maybe even the last year or few. I have been noticing it more the last few months as I keep seeming to wake up with memories of thoughts that seem to relate to some overarching theme that has apparently been concerning me, at least in the dreamworld, for quite some time.

A lot of it seems to have to do with language. Of course a lot of it seems clear as I awake then fades rapidly as I focus on the waking world, so I am not sure how clear it really is or was, but there seems to be quite a bit of consistency over time. That is what gives the impression that my sleeping mind is working on something. It seems to be coming back to much the same kind of stuff day after day, week after week, month after month. I have the impression that it is getting somewhere with it, not merely going round in circles.

I think it is partly because writing has been on my mind a lot. I want to write something that is worth writing, and much of the kinds of stuff I would like to write about is difficult to formulate clearly (if at all). I have been studying and practicing magick and mysticism most of my life and maybe it is getting toward time for all of that study to come together into something.

-MarkM-

Taking up Writing

2006-10-27T16:11:00.000-03:00

Wow, it has been a long time since I have written to this blog. Sorry about that. I have had a lot of thinking and re-thinking to do. My career on the web started from a system administration and programming angle, but over the years the web has become more and more clearly a publishing medium and it has become more and more clear to me that trying to be a one-person publishing-company is sure to be a case of biting off more than I can chew.

Accordingly I have been thinking more and more about the writing - the authoring - part of it. For years now I have followed with interest various groups who have been taking a web-business approach, which has more and more become a matter of promoting and advertising. I have watched that with interest but truly my heart has never really been in the promoting/advertising side of things. So lately I have been thinking long and hard about sheer writing.

For a long time now i have ad the opportunity to write articles about almost anything I wished to, purely to make some money. I have not gone into that though because to me it has seemed to much like a kind of web-spam. Simply churning out "copy" does nto appeal to me. Sure there might be a bit of money in it but is it really so different from having a script churn out "copy" to attract search engines?

I recently discovered that some people whom I know here in Halifax are into writing and publishing. Real books, even poetry. Later today I hope to be seeing them and will inquire a little into that world. I am actually excited about the idea of getting back into writing, I have written before but not really for publication yet. One of the things I plan to do is review some of my earlier works and map out some options of what exactly to write about. i actually have an entire roleplaying world, D'ydii, with years and years of week by week calendars of the activities of various players' characters, and a whole world of maps. Most of that material is out at my country house in Sheet Harbour, but that jut gives me yet another incentive to get back in touch with that too-long neglected residence.
I hope to start putting together some web-pages about D'ydii soon, if only to get some of what I remember about its various nations and famous people written down. Although the material out at the country house would help a lot with that as I have a lot of written material about it out there.

I have been back into the Kingdoms mult-user text-mode roleplaying game ("Multi User Dungeon") quite a lot lately too, developing a few different characters exploring some of the "professions" they offer. In fact I have been spending too much time at that.

I have also recently read Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" and "Quicksilver", which my father sent me. They are huge books but have been a good read. "Quicksilver" is just the first book of a trilogy, wow, huge. I shudder to think how much sheer writing goes into a project like that, let alone the research involved! I do not aspire to writing anything on the scale of those! The publishing folk that I hope to talk to like books based right here in Halifax so I have actually been toying with the idea of writing about a kind of local school of magic. Yes, I know, it is kind of an obvious attempt to capitalise on the popularity of the Harry Potter books. Another option of course is to finally get around to completing my most popular unfinished work, "The Faery Queen's Knickers"...

-MarkM-

Nanotechnology, Nanomedicine, Robotics...

2006-07-28T00:17:00.000-03:00

I've been putting in a lot of background material circling around the central topic of determinism and free will. Stuff like Evan Harris Walker and G. I. Gurdjieff and automatic people and quantum mechanics and classical mechanics.

To think I started to do this stuff about ten years ago and kept getting driven off course by rabid money-addicts! Ouch! Fact is the idea was sound, as Wikipedia has proven. Its just that the money-addicts around didn't want me to build a Wikipedia for some reason. Oh well, their loss. If they'd helped me out or at least not been such a hindrance we could've been where Wikipedia is. Oh well.

-MarkM- Proprietor, Digitalis Data Services (over 25 years in business!)

Sheet Harbour Nova Scotia

2006-07-22T20:38:00.000-03:00

I finally got around to starting a section about Sheet Harbour Nova Scotia, which is where my country-house is.

Yeah yeah, this should have been done years ago, like when I first bought the house, but the pressures brought to bear upon me over the years each time I tried to actually develop web-content were mindblowing. Starting way back when I first started building an Internet Service Provider.

Hopefully I will be weaving it together with the home, kitchen and garden sections as well as the cooking and gardening sections as soon as I manage to get out to the house to putter about out there. Or maybe sooner if I just go ahead and wail about all the activities that I am missing out on due to not managing to get out to the country-house the last few years. (I hear it has been broken into and is being used as a hangout by local drunks, or somesuch...)

-MarkM- Proprietor, Digitalis Data Services (25+ years in business!)

Home, Kitchen and Garden

2006-07-18T17:26:00.000-03:00

Today I have been doing more background work for the CookingWeb and GardenWeb teams; mostly setting up a section about home and within that sections for kitchen and garden.

In the course of doing that I also did some touching-up in the activities section, mostly in the cooking and gardening sections.

-MarkM- Proprietor, Digitalis Data Services (More than 25 years in business!)

Recreation, Travel and Vacation Activities

2006-07-17T13:50:00.000-03:00

Looks like today is the day to get some work done on the recreation, travel and vacation subsections of the activity directory.

This is of course partly to provide some content areas relating to the TravelWeb team but also of course we will be using it in the process of looking for Leading Guides in these subject-areas (also known as niches, especially within the internet marketing community).

-MarkM- Proprietor, Digitalis Data Services.

Leading Guides Project Blog Updated

2006-07-15T23:21:00.001-03:00

It has been another busy day for me. A lot of what I've been up to is logged on the Leading Guides blog, being as how much of it was related to the Leading Guides project.

I have also started a revamp of the Make Money project. When if began it was basically about automating the process of making money. But two things happened that caused the scope to be expanded. One was the urgency that many people have when they search for material about making money. A huge number of our visitors were not really interested in the automation project, they just wanted to make some money as soon as possible and as fast as possible and of course to make as much money as possible.

Thus the whole universe of get rich quick schemes came into view. Wow! Amazing what is out there. Making money is a very popular topic. Because of our homeschool site we also have a lot of contacts and visitors who are interested specifically in making money at home; running a home business of some kind or another.

Thus as soon as we seriously looked into (and document on the web) the whole concept of moneymaking we found it necessary to provide help for people who wanted to go ahead and make money manually instead of helping to work on the automation project or just sitting around waiting for the automatic making of money to be perfected for them.

It also seems possible that in a somewhat fundamental way - maybe the bottom line - the concept of money involves the concept of human effort or human energy or some kind of human involvement, and that human aspect might somewhat 'put a spanner in the works', so to speak, of the idea of ever totally automating the making of money.

-MarkM- Proprietor, Digitalis Data Services (25+ Years In Business! ;))

Recent Changes

2006-07-14T19:10:00.000-03:00

A nice feature built into the Wiki system is the tracking of recent changes. Kind of convenient eh?

Today someone brought SunRoot Farm and Eco-Solidarity Association to my attention. Check it out, there are a lot of topics mentioned that need expanding... if you are into cooking or gardening, get in there and do some WikiWeaving. In case you had not noticed, Wikipedia has lots and lots of high rankings in the major search-engines. The Internet Marketing folk have certainly noticed, so get involved; you surely must know they are going to building their own Wiki into a massive backbone. Right now is your early-bird chance to get in there and make sure those folk know about your special topics and niches and keywords and so on.

Here's the list of recent changes again, look it over, it might trigger some ideas for you.

-MarkM-

Actual, Imaginary and Virtual Things

2006-07-13T18:53:00.000-03:00

Digitalis Data Services has finally gotten around to having me divvy up the things section of the Graphic Omniscient Device into actual things, imaginary things and virtual things.

Heh well although I said "finally", really the delay was mostly a matter of watching how the places section had worked out, being as how it had already, since the start, been divided into actual places, imaginary places and virtual places.

Oops, almost forgot to mention that I also received an email out of the blue from Turkey and took that as a fine excuse to whip up a Turkey section, in which I have pasted the email that triggered me to create that section.

Now of course I will be on the lookout for more resources about Turkey. ;)

-MarkM-

Issues

2006-07-07T10:31:00.000-03:00

Issues: the plural of Issue. Nuff said?

-MarkM-

Hey, no open in new window?!?!

2006-07-06T14:39:00.000-03:00

Hey, cool, I did not know this before. I tried to make the links to All Hallows Blood Bank and Magickal Mystery Tour in the previous post open in a new window; blogger seems to suppress that. Cool! No wonder blogger is considered a Classy Place! ;) :)

-MarkM-

Did a lot of cleanup all over the place...

2006-07-06T14:01:00.000-03:00

...Including Websites Knotwork's little Niche of Niches experiment.

Yes, it is a "scraper site". It is just a small one, and it gives me a timeslice of what was going on in various keywords at the time of the scraping. I prefer that because I can take as long as I like to thoroughly appreciate the timeslice.

The links were scraped from Yahoo Search, and so far I am surprised at the quality of them really. Yes I see some repeats that might be caused by the use of heavy-handed "SEO" practices but really not too bad. Not like the bad old days, when they were spewing off-topic stuff everywhere. This 'targetted spam' kind of stuff at least looks from the anchor-text and descriptions as if it might be OK stuff. Maybe it is just the SEO-spammed stuff that clawed its way to the top though. It is going to be interesting to see as I delve further into it to find out what is out there. While re-writing the blurbs too I expect, although supposedly part of why scraping was so popular was that it actually concentrates the keywords or something. When I checked out Traffic Hurricane I was amazed at how MSN and Yahoo used to love that stuff. I guess Google must've loved it for a while too as fortunes were made with it.

I have also defined a NON_CONTENT_PAGE macro and have been putting it into my "menu" or "stub" pages as I go along. All it does it turn off AdSense, but as a result the default Pagan banners are now on all the NON_CONTENT_PAGE pages. Oops, I think maybe some Internet Marketing folk might prefer seeing AdSense ads to seeing weirdo Potteresque stuff. ;) :)

Been up for days, ought to try to sleep I suppose... but wait, what the heck is sleep? :)

-MarkM-

Internet Marketing Wiki

2006-07-02T08:26:00.000-03:00

Internet Marketing is moving into the Wikisphere!

-Knotwork aka MarkM-

Beware the Sharks of the Net!

2006-05-31T11:37:00.000-03:00

Someone posted stuff on Net Marketing Forum that put me into a great 'ranting' mood...

[quote]Actually, you'll have more time and money to buy traffic, upgrade in exchanges and gain more JV partners if you have your own product/service.[/quote]

I find that very unconvincing. We get told all kinds of garbage on and on and on. Buy a suit. Cut your hair. Wear XYZ cologne. Have a phone. Have an email address. Have a website. On and on and on. In reality the reason 'they' want to know what your product or service is is so they can provide it themselves so as to cut you out of the picture. The legends of there being money on the net seem to be untrue, in reality the people on the web are simply preying upon people who have jobs in the brick and mortar world. There is no money online, just a few 'payment processors' that are interfaces to offline money.

I had a product and service: internet connectivity. I knew at the time that it was only a limited time opportunity because I knew the phone and cable companies would try to take it over, followed by the wireless and satellite companies. I proposed that by the time that limited time opportunity was over the place to be would be content. That is, instead of selling the on-ramp to the information highway be the reason people wanted to get on that highway in the first place. Because the next move would probably be for the people who had the content to bypass the people who offer the connectivity. Afterall, most people don't buy a phone or cable or wireless for its own sake, they buy it because they imagine it will provide them with content that they want or need.

I gave up having a phone because phone became a gross waste of time. Most people do not seem to want to pay by the minute or hour or whatever for telephone consulting/support/conversation. If someone wants to be able to reach me (rather than an answering machine or voicemail or neighbor or third party retailer/dealer/intermediary) by phone I'd want them to pay me a whole lot more than just what a phone costs.

I am getting toward the same thing with internet connection. The quality of people on the net has gone down so much over the last ten years or so that it is getting to the point where it might be time to abandon the internet as just another waste of time and money. Why? Because the content has been steadily degrading and being destroyed. Much of the good content that was available ten years ago has been hidden, concealed, destroyed, or driven off of the net.

If you do in fact have a product or service you might be much better off NOT telling anyone on the net what it is, because they will not buy it, they will clone it. They do not need or want you, all they need or want is your concept of what constitutes a product or service and, of course, any 'money' you might happen to have access to. Their objective is to eliminate you while appropriating anything of value that you cause them to become aware of the existence of.

That might be why so many do not appear to have a product or service. They are defending themselves by not publishing the nature of their livelihood.

If you look closely at the so-called products or services most who do have 'their own' are offering, you will, at least if you are not as ignorant as most newbies to the net seem to be these days, likely notice those products and services are inferior imitations of better, maybe even 'classic', products and services the existence of which they attempt to conceal from you in order to try to convince you to buy their inferior imitation.

They are deliberately and systematically destroying people's minds and conditioning people to want to be ignorant. There is less and less point in writing any truly informative material because there is less and less chance that there will be anyone left in the world who is capable of understanding it due to the deliberate process of depriving people of the background necessary to understand anything. The objective seems to be to develop a population of consumers who are incapable of understanding anything other than "insert another coin for another two minutes". People who know less and less about more and more until they know nothing about anything. It actually even seems as if part of the objective might be to make reading and writing obsolete. The slave castes will be illiterate again ('like they were always meant to be in the first place' maybe?) and might only have very small vocabularies, if any, even in sound. Possibly only heard sound not spoken sound, as in maybe muting them might also be planned, "afterall we do not need them to be making noises, we only need them to be hearing the noises that we make".

Now that others among my peoples are on the net there is less and less need for me to be on the net. Basically it comes back to the classic observation 'there is one in every crowd'. Nowadays some crowds have more than one, but one is usually enough. Crowds that try to insist that more than one of us join them seem usually to be crowds that are not in fact truly interested in the information that we are capable of providing or offering. They want to know about more of us so that they can attempt to destroy us or exploit us, not because they actually have any valid need to have any more than one of us be their contact-person through whom to obtain what we can provide.

To put more of us onto the net than are actually necessary for whatever purpose we deployed people onto the net to accomplish would be a waste of good troops who might well be far better deployed elsewhere; or it might simply waste more money than need be wasted, since afterall each person that we deploy onto the net costs us connectivity/bandwidth fees or the time and effort required to provide and maintain our own wires or wirelesses.

I think I might actually be starting to look foward to admitting that I have in fact been relieved of the onerous duty of operating a net access terminal so that I can finally leave that to someone else and get back to something more important. Like maybe helping the food banks to increase their farm holdings so they can produce more food thus feed more people thus freeing more people from the tyranny of the money-mongers? Hmm, interesting idea...

-MarkM-

Another lead toward Haligonians?

2006-05-11T07:47:00.000-03:00

Ooooooooooooo, looks like maybe someone at TranQuilEye might have some Haligonian connections! Seems to have heard a thing or two about a street or few of Halifax at least... :)

-MarkM

Synergetic Propensities?

2006-04-28T10:41:00.000-03:00

"Our goal is not to find reasons to reject your article but to speed the processing for members that submit quality product :-)" - Michael Russell of MGRcentral.

Everyone's an author nowadays. ;)

You might've noticed that one of the current fads in various Internet Marketing niches is "article marketing".

Huge numbers of articles are being churned out, hopefully resulting in at least some people out there someplace learning a little about the art, craft, science and activity of
writing.

As a member of Michael Russell's Massive Passive Advertising Machine (MPAM) I don't have to wade through any more of those interminable sales-letters promoting yet another article-pushing site.

Actually that is not quite true if I choose to help the Due Diligence Department vet such offers. But the point is that I have the choice. If I ever get tired of trying to find another MrFire, Joyner or Midas
Marketer I can let go of the obsessive-compulsive reading reflex conditioned into me by their hypnotic neuro-linguistic programming (honest I can, no problem, its just that the Predilection of a Warrior happens to be make a million dollars) and go do something else. Like, uh, hmm, well OK, how about making a post to my blog? :)

-MarkM-
--
Pro Pen Cities? ;) Pro Pen Sitties? :D

Info: Art: Writing

2006-04-26T22:11:00.000-03:00

I have been quite busy since last I posted.

Oops, writing is an activity, it is what is written that is art. Or is it? Hmm... ;)

-MarkM-

A problog runs the gauntlet

2006-01-17T22:28:00.000-04:00

This is a followup to my earlier post titled What, you don't have a problog yet?!?.

What is a problog? Apparently it is a blog with "professional-quality content".

Well guess what... the same chap that I heard about problogs from has put
one of his own problogs "under the gauntlet".

What does that mean? It means he has asked for some "tough love" from his fellow online-marketing professionals. This is your chance to critique a problog and to see vicious professional marketers critique it too. This could be quite educational for anyone who is interested in the world of "professional" blogging.

-MarkM-

The Leading Guides project now has a blog

2006-01-17T17:41:00.000-04:00

The Leading Guides project now has a blog: the Leading Guides Blog.

Wow it has been a while. I have mostly been hanging out at Net Marketing Forum.

-MarkM-

The Illuminati!

2005-12-07T15:27:00.000-04:00

Hey, nice conspiracy/illuminati blog! It even has a cool link to something that claism to be a precise exegisis! Plus an explanation of the term Neo-Conservative.

Yeah I am finally back at blogger. Sorry, been very busy lately with the awesome folks at Net Marketing Forum... no doubt some of the up and coming leaders of the new "secret government"! Hahahahahah! ;) ome on over and help blow their puny little minds into new dimensions and inner riches!

-MarkM-

What, you don't have a problog yet?!?

2005-11-15T17:28:00.000-04:00

A what? Oh yeah thats right, you might not even have heard of a problog yet so sheesh how could you hope to have already gotten hold of one yet?

Aha! Well, today's Instant Messenger Interviewee happens to be
Tim Linden of CLiX Network / TCN Traffic Exchange fame, and I have just learned from him that, amazing as it may seem at first blush, there just might happen to be some among you who just might already happen to have a problog even if they had not yet realised that they had one.

Heh, ok, I know, that probably seems like an easy one to you - if you're one of those lucky people. But some among the rest of you might, if we have managed to attract anyone who hasn't had their second cup of coffee yet, still be going like "what the...?"

So here ya go: a problog is a professional blog, as in a blog of professional quality content. And no, Tim didn't coin the term but he knows who did. Heck it was a friend of his that did it. Oops, Tim has to go now, sorry, end of interview. So lets just leave it at that for now but chances are you will be encountering the term again. In the meantime happy blogging and may you encounter many problogs in your travels.

-MarkM-

Article: Automatic Money

2005-11-03T03:13:00.000-04:00

I have added an article to Makemoney Knotwork. The article's title
(and topic) is Automatic Money.

-MarkM-

Leading Guides Network Revamped and Expanded

2005-10-31T00:05:00.000-04:00

I have finally gotten around to setting up a nameserver on my main server, and am running another at home. While I was doing all this I not only moved all my .info domains over to my own nameservers but also got the .com, .net and .org versions of the Leading Guide(s) domains moved to my nameservers from where they had been parked.

So now finally the whole panoply of Leading Guide Network sites should be up and running and reachable from anywhere on the internet.

-MarkM-

High Art Splash-Pages!

2005-10-16T02:35:00.000-03:00

I am using some images of some of my dad's paintings to make high art splash-pages! Just two so far: Magick and Mystery, Karma and Destiny featuring the painting "Buddha" and All Hallows Hallows All featuring the painting "Dancers 2".

Oh in case you're wondering what a "splash page" is, it is a fast-loading simple page for use in traffic-exchanges to try to elicit a click in 30 seconds or less. I am only using these in "manual" traffic-exchanges, as so far my experience has been that with auto-exchanges there is too much risk of using up more bandwidth than the results are able to pay for.

-MarkM-

Goddess Knotwork now has a blog...

2005-10-14T04:53:00.000-03:00

Yes, I have finally gotten around to installing Simple PHP Blog at Goddess Knotwork. As I write it really has no content yet, but at least it does now exist. Oh a link? Sure, here ya go: Goddess Knotwork's Blog.

-MarkM-

Hey hey, Nick Martin is heading back into action...

2005-10-13T03:23:00.000-03:00

Well well, long time off doing education stuff but looks like he is heading back into action. What, you don't remember Nick Martin? But he's the chap who got Mage Software (oops no link sorry, they seem to have been knocked clean off of the web) to upgrade their "MLM Manager version 1.2" to make Nick's "Special Edition"!

What, you don't remember that "special edition"?!?! My goodness. Well the idea was that instead of making some huge monolithic downline-builder using huge amounts of bandwidth and gaining privy access to everyone's contacts Nick planned on having his team-members "hive off" (yes I know, reminiscent of covens "hiving off" in Wicca) to run the same thing he was running but on their own server, their own bandwidth.

Good to see you're starting to move toward active again Nick!

-MarkM-

So... Which autosurfs actually move traffic?

2005-10-04T17:21:00.000-03:00

Heh well actually the question posed by the title of this article is a bit beyond where I am actually at as I start writing this. I have not gone through the rigamarole of deploying trackers yet, so far I am merely noticing that some of the autosurf sites that I am testing are not using up the traffic-credits that I earn.

So today I am going to try to make notes here as I fire up each autosurf. Oops I already missed StudioTraffic, I never pay attention to that one for some reason. It has the annoying "feature" of firing up its surfbar in a new window, so I used my middle mousebutton to force its surfbar to fire up in a different tab of the same window rather than in a whole new window and then used the tab its member-area was in to fire up blogger to write this log-entry.

So onward. 4Daily: hey, my credits got used! Cool.

5Daily: Hmm, they haven't checked the URL that I added yet, maybe they're on vacation or something.

HitzPay: Heh they are using up credits alright, lots of credits as they let me surf with no limit in sight so I earn lots.

GrandHits: Hmm, this one allows up to 50 URLs, maybe I am gonna have to fill in all fifty, I have five filled in so far (mostly just the same URL over and over again) and it is no way keeping up with the amount of credits I earn. I like to put a bunch of credits when I add a URL though so I will add another and assign it the points I've accumulated since last I added one and maybe some day we'll see what happens.

ProfoundHits: Hmm, today I have somehow managed to accumulate a bit of backlog, but I had the impression it was one of the good ones. I see that I have already plugged in my SurfDownline URL twice so far (it allows up to 50 URLs). Maybe it just wasn't one of the worst ones. I'd better add my URL a third time maybe that might help.

123etraffic: this one seems to be moving along smoothly.

12DailyPro: Heh they only let you surf a few sites so it'd be hard to build up a backlog at this one. Did you notice their latest plan? Kind of a currency of their own in a way: their lines of products will not be buyable with ordinary currencies from other currency-providers, only one's 12DailyPro earnings will be able to buy their stuff! Interesting idea! Meanwhile they have zeroed my balances and claim that I have a withdrawal queued up. If that withdrawl ever arrives at my e-gold account I will probably buy another unit at this one so that I can continue watching it.

2Dollars4U: Hmm, this one allows 5 URLs, I have them all filled in, and I am still racking up unspent credits. Not good.

911Hitz: another that is not managing to eat up my credits. They allow 5 URLs, I have added one URL five times. Looks like I am racking up an ever-incresing backlog of credits.

AWD-Network: Hmm, hard to tell with this one. I have plugged my URL in twice os evidently had not thought it was movinmg well back when I only had my URL in once. It allows 5 URLs. I think I will rack up points for another day before deciding whether to plug in the URL a third time or spread my points among the two URLs already plugged in.

AussieAutosurf: allows tree URLs, I have my URL plugged in three times, and it looks like I am still starting to backlog. But the owner fell ill and it has only just been taken over by temporary new management (planning, it seems, to switch it to a 2% daily rate) maybe the new management can get traffic moving, we'll see I guess.

AussieEarners: credits here seem to be moving.

AutoSurf4Euros: wow, a large backlog of credits here. Not good. Heh they are another (like StudioTraffic) that want to pop up a whole new window for their surfbar. Bleh.

Auto-Surf Biz: credits here are moving.

DadNDaves: Sheesh, how can I even guess, being as how they only allow one URL, I entered one URL way back when I signed up, and it is still waiting for them to approve or reject it - it will not get into rotation until they do. Maybe they too are on vacation.

DaiPaySurf: only one URL allowed and backlog of credits is growing and growing here.

EarnCash4Surfing: Hmm, evidently I assigned my points last time I was on this one, so not sure if it is using them up or not. But hey, it allows 2 URLs and I only put in one so far so it looks like it has not yet commended itself to my attention as one that is backlogging.

eProfitSurf: this one allows ten URLs but just one has been enough so far, my credits are being used.

GWPtraffic: only allows one URL but that is enough to eat up the credits no problem.

RapidSurfDaily: I am up to three URLs used in this one now (it allows five). Not sure if three is enough or not, lets leave it at three for now and see.

SurfCityAutoSurf: only allows two URLs, I have my URL in there twice, and I am building up quite a large backlog of credits.

SurfMunkee: ouch, my URL has 8555 credits assigned still that it has not used. Looks like this one is backlogging. Only 89 credits have been used since the get-go! Ouch! I do not see any indication of how many URLs one can enter. Nor how to take back some of those 8555 points to put them toward another URL if I did enter another URL.

Wow that took a long time. This autosurfing stuff is actually quite time-consuming. Did I mention that several of them keep suddenly logging me out? Don't go believing that you can set them up then go to bed.

Finally, I am done firing up autosurfs for the day. Good night.

-MarkM-

Oh nice, a must-have art link!

2005-10-01T22:28:00.000-03:00

"In 1991, when 2400 baud modems were the norm, ArtQuest released an exclusive art bulletin board service known as a BBS. The BBS provided galleries, consultants and dealers a quick way to locate art throughout the art community. As technology has progressed, so has ArtQuest. Today, ArtQuest offers its members the latest up-to-date service available to the art industry."

Yummy link, and guess where I found it? Surfing a homebrewed new traffic-exchange: TrafficSurfer!

Contrary to the expectations of some folk - though I cannot quite recall which folk they were - joining new traffic-exchanges doesn't seem to be a complete waste of time! :)

(I filed it, of course, under art. :))

-MarkM-

My Fourth Blog!

2005-10-01T10:53:00.000-03:00

Just a quickie: I have whipped up another blog - my fourth, if haven't lost count already.

Tah-dah: Space Cadet Academy!

-MarkM-

Traffic Exchanges and Mini-Hubs

2005-09-27T07:59:00.000-03:00

Manual Traffic-Exchanges

I have been testing "Traffic-Exchange" programs for years now. Over at Net Marketing Forum they love the things, but with a proviso: it is the "manual" ones that they like; they have tended to denigrate "autosurf" ones.

So anyway, I tried them and sure enough they work. They seem to work best for obtaining free signups. Trying to directly promote things that folks have to pay for seems to be a rather wasteful expenditure of "precious" page-exposures. Get folks signed up free first, then worry about "converting" them once you have them.

Thus what I have been running on the exchanges is what I refer to as "minihubs". Others refer to them as "downline builders" but my experimental ones are mini compared to such comprehensive hubs as Michael Russell's M.P.A.M. (MPAM: Massive Passive Advertising Machine). My experimental "minihubs" are simple hacks of Mage Software's MLM Manager version 1.2, as modified by Mage Software for Nick Martin's "Special Edition", which I had been in the process of prototyping for a client who seems to have moved on to something else (I am not sure what).

The prototype is still mostly full of the traffic-exchanges that it came pre-stocked with, or at least those that have survived the test of time. (I have not so much as looked at it in many months, maybe well over a year, though maybe less than two years; the things are kind of "set and forget"). For my mini-hub experiments I chopped it down considerably to make a hopefully much less daunting one: Makemoney Knotwork's Free Viral Money Generator.

As I write, the VMG is the central minihub of a growing family of minihubs, as I branched out with Goddess Knotwork's Free Viral Karma Generator followed over time by various other niche-targetted minihubs. (All of them so far, except Adult Knotwork's Free Viral Traffic Generator, can be found inside the VMG.)

These work rather nicely, a kind of "glorified email-capture page", glorified in that they do not merely capture an email address but actually provide a "member's area" and a forward-looking set of activities for members to progress into. Initially the novelty of them was probably a big factor because back then everyone and their gameboy had seen MPAM countless times and various other hubs containing a daunting number of programs came (and, in some cases, went) but I call these minihubs for a reason: they are mini! They don't present a huge number of programs for folks to sign up to. So they might be particularly appealling to folks who are new to it all and not already used to signing up for umpteen separate programs. Also they are traffic-building downline-builders, which gives them a tendency toward snowballing. They generate traffic which is fed back into them to sign up more people who go on to generate more traffic producing more signups and so on.

Auto Traffic-Exchanges

Then I moved on to testing "autosurf" exchanges. I almost made a minihub for them but ouch, thank about the bandwidth usage compared to the signup ratio! I decided not to risk using more bandwidth than a signup might turn out in the long run to be worth, so went with a third-party downline-builder for that. (Don't bother, unless you figure you can make much better use of it than I did. I only run it in autosurf exchanges and don't bother running plain old autosurfs at all presently as I have moved on to testing the latest wave of autosurf innovation... stay tuned, I will get to them.)

Paid-To-Surf Traffic-Exchanges

Somewhere along the line someone came up with the "bright idea" (sarcasm to be added by the reader, or not; it is up to you) of paying people to surf.

I didn't pay much attention to that, the pay is usually very low and although some of the exchanges I have used have been of that variety I always surfed for credits (display to other surfers of URLs of my own choice) myself and didn't really notice any big difference performance-wise between manual exchanges and manual paid-to-surf exchanges other than the amount of attempted click-fraud they seem to attract. (But how hard the admin fought against click-fraud was probably an important factor.)

That brings us up to just a few months ago, when I started testing the latest "bright idea"...

Paid-To-Autosurf Traffic-Exchanges

The latest wave of paid-to-autosurfs seem potentially characterisable as "ponzified" autosurfs. Take a look for yourself.

They seem poised to maybe bring some attention to the distinction between games (including simulations, including simulations played using "real money") and a classic prototypical fraud known as a Ponzi or a Ponzi Scheme.

It seems obvious to many that educating people about classic prototypical fraudulent schemes has potential merit. What might not be so obvious to some is whether or not education by means of simulations/games is educational or (at least from some possibly extreme points of view) defensible, especially if the simulation/game is played with "real money" to "make it more interesting" (as the saying goes).

So quite apart from whether this breed of autosurf-exchanges is effective as a means of advertising some folks might see other concerns which might even seem more important than whether the surfers actually respond well to the advertising that they are being "paid to autosurf". (For example "are they being paid?")

There are a number of sites that purport to monitor whether various admins of various paid-to-do-something sites do actually pay; that is not what I am trying to find out. Just a few days ago I happened upon a third-party downline-builder that includes a Top Ten of Paid-to-Autosurf Programs.

I have not even checked yet whether each and every one of the so-called top ten is in fact plainly described as a simulation of a ponzi, rather than being fraudulently described as not being a ponzi or (fraudulently or not) being described incorrectly.

That is, I do not yet know whether any of them are ponzi schemes, nor whether any of those which plainly by their own description fit a ponzi model have the key feature which distinguishes fraud from open honest descriptions of the actual rules by which a game or simulation is actually performed/played/run. I have, however, noticed that there are a few that do not pay members who have not put in any money ("upgraded"). Those might be the most likely candidates for the label "ponzi" because the basic prototypical ponzi is, as far as I am aware as I write, for paying participants only.

The way the test is run is to promote the downline-builder using the type of traffic-exchange that is to be tested. Thus I run this one in the ("ponzified"?) autosurfs that it contains. A nice side-effect of that procedure is that I am promoting it to people who are already "into" programmes of that type.

The reason why I selected this particular downline-builder is that it also contains manual-surf exchanges and even some of the classic traffic-building downline-builders of the manual-surf field: MPAM, Profit Rally and Joe Shmo 200. Thus if indeed people do sign up for stuff while paid-to-autosurfing it might serve (one can always hope) as a lifeline extended to any "victims" that might be out there someplace in the paid-to-autosurf field, inviting them into the possibly more productive waters of the free manual surf genre.

It seems probable that least some of the paid-to-autosurf programs inside the "SurfDownline" hub/downlinebuilder operate along the lines of a ponzi, but how many of them tell potential members something that amounts to "we are a simulation of a ponzi, the key difference between us and a ponzi is the fact that there is no fraud involved (we are not pretending that we do not operate the way we do; we are telling you how we are operating and we are in fact operating in the way described)" I do not yet know. Perhaps you might accompany me on that yet-to-be-undertaken investigation?

(Yes, that is an invitation to comment! Go ahead, comment! I will end this post here to give you a chance to go look at the things for yourself and see what you think.)

-MarkM-

Revisiting Omelas ;)

2005-09-24T22:44:00.000-03:00

Omelas!Wow, quite a "Blast from the Past"word! Possibly the word alone might have sufficed to lure me into reading further but hey, the word wasn't all by itself: it was just the last word of the four-word title of the weblog in question.

Oh go ahead, check it out. I won't mind... this post is over anyway. :)

-MarkM-

My Second Blog!

2005-09-24T13:45:00.000-03:00

Hey hey, I now have TWO blogs! Well kind of; actually the blog that I have just created is not really "mine" in the "personal" sense, it is really GoldDoubler.info's blog but technically I "own" it.

Yesterday at SourceForge I picked up a copy of Simple PHP Blog (at no charge, naturally; it is free open-source software).

It was nice and easy to install, all I did was make a directory for it, unzip it into that directory, tell my webserver to support PHP for that domain, change ownership of the directory and all its of contents to the user that my webserver runs as (so that my webserver would have permission to write stuff in that directory) then visit that directory of that website with my browser. Presto, sphpblog itself appeared and walked me through the rest.

-MarkM-

A Visit to SourceForge

2005-09-23T15:56:00.000-03:00

Wow, long time since last I posted here. What brought me here today was a visit to SourceForge ... I have not been there in quite a while, so of course I started coming across interesting projects.

Normally I would simply add the projects to my link-lists, for example by filing them under Info / Computers and Computing / Software but today I am not looking to "file and forget". My link-lists go back years; today I want to queue some things up to be looked at so I thought this might be a better place to stash them for now.

Not familiar with SourceForge? It is *the* distributed software-development site. Oh and guess what? I went to the dot com instead of the dot net and hey, the Enterprise Version is there! They have a publicly traded company (LNUX) now too! Wow!

So anyway, all this software is FREE and OPEN SOURCE. That is the BEST kind because when you work on, for example, GNU software, you don't lose all your work when you lose your job or leave your job. By putting all your work under the GNU license as you do it you ensure that you CAN take it with you. :)

Here are the projects that caught my eye today:

simplePHPblog: a simple blog, using PHP but not MySQL. (It simply uses flat files).

Nullsoft Scriptable Install System: I remember too well what a hassle it used to be, once upon a time, to try to get something installed on a Windows system. Maybe this thing can help with that. :)

libgmail: Python binding for Google's Gmail service.

GPACProject on Advanced Content: Multimedia Framework for MPEG-4, VRML, X3D, ...

vtiger CRM Customer Relationship Management. Yes that means leads and marketing and such. :)

BOXP Back Orifice XP. A SysAdmin tool for Windows systems. Control networkig and so on. Plugins for various additional features - even streaming video of the server's screen.

SQuirreL SQL Client: SQuirreL SQL Client is a graphical Java program that will allow you to view the structure of a JDBC compliant database, browse the data in tables, issue SQL commands etc.

WebGUI: A perl-based web application and web site framework designed to let the people who create the content manage it, and let the technical folks get back to tech stuff.

Emma3D: Emma (Extensible Multi Media Architecture) is an open-source, modular, extensible, dynamic framework for declarative authoring and display of 2D and 3D interactive multimedia. It uses Lua for scripting and Ogre3D for rendering.

Php-MultiShop: Market Place Multi Vendor: CMS & e-commerce cart system Multi Shop written in PHP MySql: a virtual mall, including various eCommerce stores (osCommerce) and content (PhpNuke). Each store could be managed in autonomy by its own admin as if it were independent from the e-marketplace.

bitweaver: Highly Modular CMS framework includes: Wiki, Articles / News, phpBB Forum Bulletin Board, Blogs, Image Photo Gallery, ... includes TikiWiki upgrader. Databases supported: MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, Firebird, IIS/MS-SQL for PHP on Windows or Linux.

MailManager: MailManager is designed to solve the problems companies have as the volumes of email they receive increase such as making sure email goes to the right person, making sure it is answered on time, ensuring information in email boxes is shared within the organisation.

Compiere ERP + CRM Business Solution: Smart ERP+CRM solution for Small-Medium Enterprises in the global market covering all areas from order and customer/supplier management, supply chain to accounting. For $5-500M revenue companies looking for "brick and click" first tier functionality.

There is a particular thing I am specifically to keep an eye out for, and that is anything that might be able to serve as a start toward a surf-exchange, even an auto-surf exchange.

-MarkM-

Say hello to Knotwork.biz...

2005-06-18T23:35:00.000-03:00

I have finally gotten around to separating Knotwork.biz from MakeMoney Knotwork which for a while it was simply parked over.

The plan is to leave all the little mini-hubs where they are - which is to say, in Make Money Knotwork, and in general separate the general idea of "biz" (presumably "business") from the "GNU Make Money Project".

-MarkM-

RSS2html: a little too wide open?

2005-06-15T16:01:00.000-03:00

Hmm,a nice service, it let me easily post a SiteFind.info Feeds page. It is wide open, hmm, consider the exploits...

-MarkM-

A Directory of RSS Feeds

2005-06-15T13:02:00.000-03:00

I came across ListGarden today so to check it out I started a Directory of RSS Feeds at SiteFind.info. I can now simply create feeds to log updates to sites and stuff like that instead of having to make a whole blog or blog-section per site/topic/niche/whatever.

In other news, I have finally separated the Graphic Omniscient Device from the main Knotwork.com domain, although www. continues to refer to the same webserver as does the raw domain name.

-MarkM-

Van is an ambiguous keyword...

2005-06-04T18:26:00.000-03:00

Hmm, I tried to set up a section for "van" on my Auto Knotwork site under van...

Oops, It picked up a bunch of people's names mostly instead of vans of the automotive variety. ;)

-MarkM-

Pinging my jewelry section...

2005-05-22T13:55:00.000-03:00

I have whipped up a quick little simple bit of infrastructure for a "jewelry" topic, mostly intended to help some silver jewelry artisans in Mexico. So hey little spiders, go take a look at my new Silver Gold and Hemp Jewelry site...

-MarkM-

Time to Ping again...

2005-05-22T09:42:00.000-03:00

Just dropping in for a quick ping to draw the attention of the spiders to some new infrastructure I've constructed at Auto Knotwork.

-MarkM-

Its Ping-O-Matic Time...

2005-05-18T08:30:00.000-03:00

Oh yeah, thank you Ryan, I do much prefer to write HTML, although truth to tell I have left the newline processing option to save me having to manually insert the BR tags. My habits would have me use P tags instead, and, yes, wrong I know, without using them as containers. My nasty habit is to just use P as a paragraph-break between paragraphs instead of using two BRs in a row. So this automation will hopefully save me from that without actually having to force myself to use real paragraph-containers. ;)

Oh what am I on about? Ryan commented on my previous post, the huge one that truth to tell was probably partly motivated by the fact that one of the blog traffic exchanges wouldn't run my blog in its rotation until I had at least two posts. So I made my second post massive to forestall any further such complaints.

Ryan also mentioned HaloScan which apparently (probably among other things) can provide a way for folks to mention their website when they comment instead of only being able to mention their blogger profile. I will try to get around to looking into that although hey Ryan, what about the new spam tools for posting spam to billions of blogs all over the net? Won't I just be inviting spammers to spam my blog looking for link popularity for their organ amplification programs? ;)

OK, that was initial housekeeping: checking responses to my prior post before posting. Now on to why I cam here today. Uh wait, maybe I should check all prior posts to see if any have been commented on since last time i checked them? Or would it have told me? I have lots to learn yet. (I checked; no new comments on first post. Which is just as well.)

OK, so what brings me here today? Well partly I just figured its been too long. Partly also I (blush blush) neglected to check out Ping-O-Matic before. So herewith a URL that I want to bring to the attention of the search engine spiders: The "Artists" section of my Graphic Omniscient Device. So now to ping... see you-all whenever...

-MarkM-

Sequels and Plickening Thots

2005-04-17T07:39:00.000-03:00

Hey hey, I'm back. Wow, only one tiny typo in my first post, unless I just haven't discovered all of them yet.

Wow, five people commented! Thanks for the "welcome" posts orange, useless and pam.

(Hey I just noticed there is a spelling checker, fiddling around looking for how to make those three nicknames I just wrote into links I saw the spellcheck option. So I might as well confess that I do not use the things. Maybe after all these years they might actually work but I got put off realy badly by WordStar, remember WordStar? I don't mean WordStar for Windows, I mean, like DOS 3 maybe. I tried its spell-checker - maybe SpellStar, not sure, maybe just part of WordStar - and OUCH! Painful! The thing had no vocabulary! The authors apparently wated me to spend countless hours of my valuable time teaching their program English vocabulary (like, say, words in common use in British Traditional Witchcraft, for example... ;)) So thats why I don't use them. Fully a third of the words it complained about were actually spelt correctly it just didn't know them.)

OK, I have just found a need for a feature that I am not sure exists. I doubt I am the only person in all of the blog noosphere who'd like to write in hyertext, right? As in, have references be links to that which they refer to? So, in making those nicknames into links it'd've been nice to be able to right-click on the nick as it appears in the comments screen, or sweep over it with the mouse using a certain button, or some darn thing, to be able to load into a paste-buffer the whole linkishness of the nickname.

As it is, as I write this part I have only the first three nicks up above (the ones that were "just" a welcome, a point I was going to get to being as how hey, the other two actually had a contribution to make or a question to ask) and am about to turn them into links.

I dunno if you have noticed this yet but the way people's nicks show up when they post a comment is as a link to their profile, rather than, say, to some arbitrary page that they wanted to attract traffic to. So actually if there was (as there might well be, maybe I juzst haven't stumbled upon it yet) a quickie method of grabbing those nicks link and all for mention in a post it'd just be a link to their profile, not to their actual blog directly.

So hmm, what kind of linking should I be doing? Yikes how long is mere writing (oh wait, that is not "mere", that is "authoring") taking? How many hours per day does blogging actually take if one decides to really give it a good try?

I am thinking hey maybe what I should do is go like "so and so, of [link to their blog]", with their nick/name being a link to their profile. But how much work is that?!?! Not only will I have to actually visit their profile so as to get its URL into my browser's addres-ntry field so I can sweep it into my paste-buffer... I'll also have to find on their profile a link to their blog and visit that to get its URL too.

Plus, lets not forget that if for example they are using blogger (which seems likely don't you think, as in how likely is it, really, that blogger would let them use their profile [i]elsewhere[/i] when they post comments hmm) then they have the technology to have more than one blog! How would I choose which one to refer to? How would I know which one their comment (that is, they at the time they posted the comment) were "from" ???

Maybe I'll find they have "my welcoming and socialising blog", "my pointing out what folks should do next blog", "my attempts to pierce the viels of time to predict the future blog" and billions of others?!?!?

OK, OK, so that isn't that likely. They might only have millions, maybe even mere thousands. But in principle, in principle!

While I worry about how to mark-up the unfinished section above about the three folks who "just" posted welcomes, I might as well continue, so hey, next was ryan pointing out that after eleven days a sequel was due; and finally rocky inquired into the future as in hey will there be a sequel.

Notice that I have cunningly confused terms here, because I think quite likely rocky wasn't referring to a sequel of my first post but, rather, a sequel of my first blog.

So, to rocky, yes I expect there will be a sequel [this is the marketing technique known as "pre-selling", of which the proponent who comes most to my mind these days is Doctor Neil Shearing (sp?). I can point you at lots of great free educational material about pre-selling if you're interested, courtesy of said doctor and his whole "make your site sell" etc etc etc empire of excellent (but not cut-price if you get my drift) hosting and website-development and website-marketing services and materials] to the blog, and, as this post itself demonstrates (in case you meant sequel to my first post), also a sequel to that first post (available in a browser near you at THIS VERY SECOND!!! ;))

Darn I forgot to punch a timeclock (read: make a mental note of the actual clock time way back up there where I noticed that this could eat up quite a bit of time). I have however noticed that posts can be editted later. After all, I corrected a typo in my first post that way just before commencing this (my second) post. So, it is actually getting tempting right now to just publish the post-so-far and continue work on it later...

...which reminds me of a whole sequence of posts on my MakeMoney Knotwork site...

(What MakeMoney Knotwork site, you ask? [Go on, ask, ask!] Well gee, don't rush me, I'll get to that, have patience, the P-word as PIPSters call it. I will mark up this post eventually. Do you want me to author the darn thing or mark it up? Markup is an editorial job isn't it? So let me author the darn thing first THEN look for a markup tool that will run through it turning everything linkable into a link.

Aha, see how I have again cleverly moved things along toward yet another long-outstanding issue?

Well OK, maybe you didn't yet know that this even [i]was[/i] a long-outstanding issue. So hey, if ya didn't know, let me be the first to tell ya.

It has long been an issue that folks ideas of what constitute authoring tools seem to have gotten confused with layout tools or doodling/illustrating tools, or even typesetting tools.

I mean, like, look at all this GUI crap of drag and drop and so on, I mean hey yeah being able to drag commentator's nicks into the authoring window to link to them easily in posts would be nice but hey, is that even a feature the idiots in charge of authoring tools even thought of?

From my earliest exposures to hypertext the authoring tool that always seemed to me to be the most-needed was one that I still have not happened upon. A markup tool. Basically a tool that will turn words and phrases ("references" mostly, since just linking each word to its dictionary entry and each pixel to a page about the hue shade and intensity of that pixel and the qualities of that frequency of light and so on might be a kind of overkill, a kind of "too much information") into links.

I mean would it be so hard? Based on my experience with SpellStar (or WordStar's spellchecker anyway) even a spell-check tool expects its user to have to spend countless hours teaching it words. So saying that many of the links might need to be reviewed/approved by the user and many users might not think it was doing a good job until they had wasted huge swathes of their life working on it trying to teach it to do it right just doesn't seem to be any excuse for such a tool not to have been one of the first tools off the block way back when.

I mean how hard would it be? Turn any mention of any registered company or trademark into a link to the company's homepage, any mention of a nation into a link to that nation's homepage, any reference to a person into a link to that person's homepage and so on?

Well heh, at first it was hard because although Apple and IBM had homepages I dunno if even Dell did way back then. (I mean, like, the Mosaic era: pre-netscape...)

I really should time myself at this. I wonder if this one post has taken an entire hour yet? How many hours per post is normal in this business? ;) :)

So hey, I am going to save this now. I don't really see the point of saving it as a draught/draft as that sounds like it might mean that folks won't be able to see it. Or is there a "view draughts/drafts in progress option, a kind of "visit the artists in their studios" feature?

I will find out I guess. Oh but not at cost of having folks not see this. I'll post it as "published" first and [i]then[/i] look around (such as by going visiting the blogs of my commentators... ;)) to see if visitors have access to any kind of "see what drafts/draughts this author has in progess" feature...

So hey, will this be the end of this post? Will we meet again some blog page, same blog post or same blog page next blog post? Only time will tell...

[Time passes while the author nips off and hyperizes (hypericates? hyperificates? ;)) three nicks earlier written into an earlier part of this post... and no, he doesn't, as it turns out, actually hit the publish button yet nor even save a draught/draft though maybe a save an hour or maybe even more frequently might be wise? The author also realises that he has not yet found out - possibly the hard way - whether this authoring tool, loke some forums, has a session timeout so that if he nips off for a quick power-weekend-seminar and doesn't press the post button until he gets back the post might not take...]

Sheesh, maybe useless blogs should have an alternate nick: useless profiles

Aaaarg this input is weird. There does not seem to be any way of putting another character on the same line as the above useless profiles anchor without it being sucked into that link. I wanted to place a ! immediately following "profiles" but not as part of the link anchor. I want "useless profiles" to be the anchor, then have plaintext ! hard up agsinst it. As is, I cannot even put a space after the word, even a space just extends the anchor. Somehow this thing has gotten it into its head that only a linefeed (newline, end of line, carriage-return/linefeed pair, whatever it thinks it is using for linebreaks) can end an anchor?

Just trying to mark up the text is painfull, ouch. I heard today of a purported abilty to email posts to one's blog, maybe I am going to have to email raw HTML files written in a plain text editor, because as usual the main thins the stupid GUI (Grpahical User Interface) is doing is getting in the way, preventing the user from doing even the simplest and most trivial things such as inserting end-of-anchor tags. Sheesh. Its a wonder that GUI folks ever get anything done at all. Visualise them having to go browsing through an iconic online dictionary looking for the icon of the word they want to type because they are not allowed to type actual alphanumeric characters they are only allowed to type pre-made pre-approved letter-co,binations that someone else once upon a time not only decided to permit as a legitimate word but also to permit the paricular use, under certain probably very limited (not to mention expensive oh what the heck lets mention that too) conditions, to use...

How many thousands of commands do I have in the /bin and /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin etc etc directories of my machine? Thats a lot of icons even if I only had to choose an icon or menu-entry for each entire application or command.

Look I would not mind these stupid garbage GUI pieces of crap if they at least didn't get in the way of simply doing stuff. But when they start to breask stuff they are going too far. The text input widget seems to be broken by whatever tricks this thing is using that hide from me even the target of the links I have made.

In a proper text-input widget I wouldn't even be seeing the links I've made as live links, I'd be seeing the actual code of the link, all the optional and hidden fields etc. This thing right now wont even show me what the targets are of the links by hoevering the mouse over them so that my browser's status line will tell me. That is because they are not real links. I cannot even click on them to find out where they go. So what the heck use is it to me to have the important info about them - to wit, what/where they are linked to - be hidden?

I did in fact resort to saving as draft/draught.

Guess what?

There is no view option for a draft/draugh FOR THE AUTHOR! It will let me load the draft/draught back into this stupid pathetic editor garbage but aso what, what the heck use is that, suppose I come back next millenia or nanosecond or whatever and wonder what the heck I thought I was gonna link to?

Seems like the only way that even the author can find out what the heck the thing ended up linking to is to publish.

So hey, my hands are forced. I have no choice, it seems, but to publish unfinished posts as the only way to actially get a decent look at them as I go. Like wow, no preview button. Sheesh, I am so used to phpBB (which, by the way, probably unlike this blogger software I am for some braindead reason wasting time with, is free open source software so that not only can anyone use it on their own machines but also anyone can try to fix it if they think it is broken) that having no preview option when posting is weird, very weird. Who the heck came up with this tihng anyway? This isn't the way that real blog software - as in the stuff you can download and install on your own servers - works is it?

Oh and as to why I am wasting time on crap that isn't even free open source - blame that on Michael Russell, as I said in my first post it was his "20 steps" lesson that led me to come here to do this. Personally if I had wanted a blog I'd probably've installed one myself on one of my own machines. As far as I know we're only using this crap here because Google bought it and thus Google spiders it fanatically thus folks lacking in google-spider-popularity might need to go through this crap. But hey, that is not me! Google crawls all over my sites constantly, has done so ever since Google started.

Sheesh the crap I put myself through for the sake of "the common user", to find out what crap "the common user" gets put through by the marketing morons who use theuir evil drug "money" to pervert the ideals and principles of anything and everything they can lay their wallets on (or maybe even jsut anything they can lay...)

-MarkM-

First Blog, First Post!

2005-03-19T15:13:00.000-04:00

Well well, I finally got around to creating a Blog! How about that!

Actually it was Michael Russell of MPAM (Massive Passive Advertising Machine) who put me up to it. A while ago he added some 160,000 (yes, one hundred and sixty thousand) niche-sites to his system, and added niche site revenue streams to the lessons in his system.
So just recently I have put links from various of my own websites to his niche sites and submitted various of my sites to various of his niche sites to get links from his sites.

The last couple of days I have been adding some Amazon-based shops to my sites. For example Goddess Kn otwork has a Wicca and Witchcraft Books area in its Wicca and Witchcraft section, Makemoney Knotwork has a Books on Business and Investing section, and G.O.D (Graphic Omniscient Device) Knotwork has a Craft Supplies area in its Activity section under Craft.

I suppose you quite likely noticed that I put quite a few links in the above paragraph. Aha! Yes indeed, so I did. That is actually a primary purpose of creating a Blog, in the "20 steps" niche-site lesson of MPAM. The idea is that you create a blog, specifically a blog on blogger/blogspot, and every time you add an article or feature to your niche site or to any of MPAM's niche sites you post an entry about it to your blog.

The reason for specifically choosing blogger/blogspot is that Google's spiders spider blogger/blogspot daily. So by posting a link here that leads to a new page or site, you attract the spiders to your site nice and fast.

The next step is to also get a "My Yahoo" page at Yahoo, and add the RSS feed of this blog to my "My Yahoo" page. That is because Yahoo spiders their "My Yahoo" system nice and fast just like Google spiders its blog service fast. So by adding the feed to "My Yahoo" the spiders from Yahoo should come crawling here real soon now, which will lead them to those links I just posted, which will lead them to the new areas of my sites.

So I am off to do the "My Yahoo" part now. See you again next time I have something to post about!

-MarkM-