Thought and Freedom

I recently ran into a problem transferring GoDaddy hosting from one account in their system to another. It appears that domains must be unique across the entire shared GoDaddy system.  I decided to write a quick article on how to prevent downtime with such a transfer.

So for future reference, it may be beneficial to do this if you need to transfer from one GoDaddy hosting account to another:

1.  Create a new temporary subdomain A record pointing to the new hosting server (i.e. my.domain.com).
2.  Setup hosting on new hosting server for the temporary subdomain.
3.  Setup an apache site on another non-godaddy server for the main domain.
4.  On the non-godaddy server, setup a temporary redirect from the main domain to the temporary subdomain (www.domain.com->my.domain.com).
5.  Modify the DNS record of the main domain to point the non-godaddy server.
6.  After propogation, cancel the original hosting service (or change it to another domain on the account).
7.  After cancellation is finalized (48 hours), modify the main A record to point to the new GoDaddy hosting account.

It is unfortunate the GoDaddy has to enforce uniqueness in hosting names because it forces a massive outage on those wanting to transfer within GoDaddy. As long as your instance is on a different server, it should not matter too much (I know there are technical issues, but it is something that could be fixed with a different setup behind the scenes.

The Republican Mother has posted a good video summarizing the dangers of the protect IP act. Contact your congress person today and tell them to get their hands out of the internet.

Take action right now. Go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and send a pre-written email directly from their site.

John Stossel once said “I used to be a Kennedy-style “liberal.” Then I wised up. Now I’m a libertarian. But what does that mean? When I asked people on the street, half had no clue.”

Most of us are in the same boat. Is the libertarian an Ayn Rand supporter? Are they a reader of Mises? Do they support anarchy? Are they in support of home schooling? Do they drink raw milk?

The answer to this series of questions is yes. And no.

The fact is that libertarianism is a rather vague term, which roughly means that you believe coercive power should be limited, whether that power could accomplish good or evil.

Most libertarian thinking individuals fear the “worst that could happen” more than they anticipate the “good that could be done” when someone hold a certain power over another person.

Historically, this aversion towards the collection of power has merit. Societies that amass power tend toward state worship and servitude. Such practices create a very powerful, yet very corrupt state, eventually leading to the downfall of a civilization.

Christians, like other people, have this temptation to use power to advance their causes because, after all, they “won’t abuse that power.”  And yet, nation after nation has seen the consequences of giving one man, or group of men so much power.

Jacqueline Otto, over at Common Sense Concept, has a very good article on Christian libertarians. She references a number of scriptures that show that Christianity is about voluntary submission to Jesus. The whole nature of a relationship with God is that the relationship exists on your own volition.

This meshes with the core concepts of libertarianism. The core belief of a libertarian is to reject the use of force on others. They also have a tremendous respect for logic and for the various intricacies of human nature. Jesus never commanded the Christian church to” go out and make subjects of the Christian mission.” He commanded Christians to “go out and make disciples of all nations.”

The only true relationship is one that is entered into by your own free will. As a Christian I choose to support liberty wherever possible because I believe that our message is strongest when our fellow Christ followers arrived there, not by coercion, but by their own choosing.

Do you have a blog and consider yourself a Christian Libertarian? If so, post a comment with a link to your blog!

If you are reading this on my blog, you will notice that there is a new domain name in the address bar! I’ll explain how you got here in a second, but first I’ll explain the reason why.

As you may know, Jessica has her own domain name, I have my own domain name, and Abigail has her own domain name. Jessica and I both have blogs that have traditionally focused on very different issues. Mine focused on technology and politics, with some references to family and mountain biking as well. Jessica‘s blog focused on Knitting, Cooking, and Family. Then Abigail‘s blog was a spattering of posts about her. They were usually crossposted from Jessica‘s or my sites.

I wanted to build a more integrated solution where we could have one main domain with subdomains for each blog. Then I don’t have to keep buying new domains for each child that we have. I also wanted to have one cms/platform for all blogs. Finally, I wanted the main site to aggregate all posts from each of the subdomains.

This was to be fulfilled through WordPress 3. The latest version of WordPress merges the features of WordPress MU (the multiuser version that powers WordPress.com) and the standard WordPress package.

So I talked it over with Jessica and we bought the domain name ‘iPearson.net’. I would have loved to have Pearson.com, but it seems a small book company took that first .

After purchasing the domain, I had to setup the server. I’ll talk about that some more in future posts. But please know that right now, we are redirecting anyone that goes to a post on blog.terrypearson.com, blog.jessicadpearson.com, and abigailpearson.com over to their new blog locations:

• http://terry.iPearson.net
• http://jessica.iPearson.net
• http://abigail.iPearson.net

One of the best parts is that you can go to http://iPearson.net and see all our latest blog posts in one central spot.

I’ll post a little more technical details about how I got there in a future posting.

Twitter Pollution

Excessive targeted marketing using a social network’s status updates.

Most people have at least heard of Twitter by now. The mini social network seemed like a great idea when it was born out of Odeo (a podcasting company). It can be highly addictive, and can even save you money on your text messaging bill.

Twitter does have a major problem. The biggest of these is money. As of this writing, Twitter still has not found a way to generate income. If Twitter does find a way to generate advertising revenue, will it’s users continue to embrace the service?

But an even bigger problem looms for the messaging site. Twitter has opened the floodgates of a very open protocal. Marketing companies, universities, and even politicians are utilizing the networking site to flood users with advertising. As twitter grows more popular, more companies and organizations will get on board.

Unless something drastically changes, Twitter will likely see it’s peak within one to two years. Afterwards, it is quite possible that user-ship will decrease as as rapidly as advertising (from inside and outside) increases.

The biggest problem with advertisements on Twitter is that there are no “banners”. Banners were designed to take a portion of the message on a website and turn it into revenue.

With only 140 characters per message, there is no way to insert advertising into these messages. Therefore, advertisers are forced to send separate messages for advertisements. This is the equivilent of a website sending popup messages throughout the day because you accessed the website at some point. Nobody would agree to such a proposition.

This advertising can be seen as “Twitter Pollution.” Unfortunately, Twitter itself may be the final casualty of Twitter pollution.

I was just looking at RobsNotebook.com and came across a really good solution to a common problem with WordPress.

Lately, I have been getting a lot of error messages on my blog that said “MySQL server has gone away.” I looked through the Godaddy support forums hoping to find a solution. Unfortunately, I did not.

But then I found RobsNotebook.com and they had a page dedicated to this problem. It turns out that it is caused by the SQL connection being open for too long. Essentially, WordPress does not close the connection every time.

Godaddy’s (or insert your own host here) configuration of MySQL tells it to time out after a certain period, and that can happen in the middle of your call to the database.

RobsNotebook.com has provided a php file that you use in wordpress and just replace your existing file. He made it so easy that it takes only about 5 minutes to put in the solution.

P.S. I verified that the php page was correctly coded and had no “funny business” on it, but as the file could change at any time, it is always good to look through it for yourself whenever you download and use PHP from the net.

You probably think I am crazy if you read the title of this article. Right now, I bet you are saying “Of course the subject of politics is online. Just ask John Kerry or Dan Rather what a bunch of bloggers equipped with your dirty secrets can do. Or look how much influence the fascist run move-on.org has on politics.”

But I am referring to the main political candidates and politicians. I recently moved to Inver Grove Heights, MN and I had the hardest time finding out about the local political scene in the area. In fact, my congressional district is different depending on if I look at Congress.org or House.gov. It is strange that it is so hard to find who your representative is.

Politicians are even harder to find. Yes, big name candidates have websites, but even those are sometimes hard to navigate and void of real meaning. But try searching for a candidate’s personal campaign site. It is almost non existent.

Going even further down the line, look for your local BPOU (Basic Political Organization Unit for those of you that don’t speak politic). Type your county followed by a political party and “BPOU” in Google. You will likely find at best an outdated site from a few years ago, announcing that they are excited to start the 2004 campaign season. Usually all the contact info is out of date, and there is no detailed information on party platforms. Worse yet, they do not even say a good way to get involved.

I know there are exceptions (if you know of exceptions to this, post a comment and let me know), but the vast majority of sites are useless. I think that politicians underestimate the power of the web and search engine optimization. Candidates have a great opportunity to sell their ideas to an audience. Candidates also have a powerful recruiting tool.

It is time that candidates and BPOUs realize the power of social networking, forums, blogs, online advertising, and a good website. I believe that websites may play a major role in the 2008 elections. Whoever can capitalize on this market, will likely gain an easy 5 to 10 percentage points in the election.

I’ve always had the best success with good content. Some of my most successful weeks (in number of hits to my website) were do to some popular original articles.

However, sometimes it helps to boost your ratings and get your site out there. Especially when it is new.  There are several good link exchange products out there. Most of the time, you spend time surfing on their linked sites in return for them sending traffic your way. I have compiled a list below:

•  Traffic Swarm
• Blog Village
• Blog Soldiers
• Blog Advance
• Blog Mad
• Blog Explosion

These may be an option for some, but it is not a cure all. You may not necessarily generate the “best” traffic for your site. Dean Phillips suggests that traffic exchanges do little good, other than add “clicks” to your statistics. Of course your site may look catchy enough to get people to stay.

Keep in mind that these can be good for getting your name out there, but also keep in mind that good content, trackbacks, and putting your web address in your email and forum signatures can be even more successful in the long run.

It’s amazing how much software is out “there” right now. You could literally spend an entire life just examining new software products that are coming out.

You can often find these new titles from places like download.com or tucows.com. These are top of the line directories of software.

But what if you do not know what you are looking for? Maybe you just wish to try something new. Well, you could browse through the endless categories on one of the large sites mentioned above. Or, you could go to http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/.

The site features one COMMERCIAL software per day that is temporarily free. The catch is that after the day is over, the software returns to normal price.

If you think about it, it is a great way to get people talking about your software. This company is really set up to be a blogosphere magnet.

A lot of blogs already mention the new software, or at least mention the site info, found on Giveaway of the day.

Check them out often, its a great opportunity to get something for nothing just for visiting the right place at the right time.

If you have multiple computers, or just use several computers throughout the day, you know how hard it is to keep all bookmarks up to date on all computers.

When you save a bookmark, it only posts to your local computer. When you go somewhere else, the bookmark is not there.

For a while now, you have had the option of storing “live bookmarks” on sites like del.icio.us, but the interface could be cumbersome.  It involved going to their website, logging in, then posting your bookmark. All this took time.

Now, there is an easier way. If you have Firefox (and you definitely should), you can use the new Del.icio.us add-on to integrate bookmarks into your web browser. The add-on website describes the  extension as:

This extension integrates your browser with del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/), the leading social bookmarking service on the Web. It does this by replacing the default bookmarking functionality in Firefox with a new experience that offers the following advantages:

- Search and browse your bookmarks
- Access your bookmarks from any computer at any time
- Keep your bookmarks organized with tags
- Share your bookmarks with friends or anyone on the Web
- Import your existing Firefox bookmarks

You can find a description of this and other great tools that are “must haves” on the internet, check out  the top ten list at http://www.joyfuljubilantlearning.com/joyful_jubilant_learning/2006/12/10_cool_tools_i.html.