I thought that new Federal Trade Commission guidelines going into effect December 1st of this year about bloggers disclosing compensation for product reviews would be a good opportunity for me to disclose any relationships / compensation I receive here on Gibberish. Short story: it isn’t much, but let’s nip this thing in the bud.
Read the rest of this entry »

This is the one thousandth published post on Gibberish Is My Native Language. What does over four years of posts add up to?
Read the rest of this entry »

I am not dead, but my main computer is. Sorry for not updating about getting home. I have a lot of updates and reviews to post, but it is tough when my main computer is busted ;)

If any of you have experience with Windows Vista and the “black screen of death” please let me know.

I have to moderate posts from new visitors the very first time they make a comment. Once their initial comment is approved, they can post as much as they want. So far, this has worked out okay, and no one has abused the comment functionality.

I use the Akismet plug-in for WordPress, the blogging software Gibberish uses. It blocks most of the automated spam, but I still get about five or six comments a day that I have to manually mark as spam.

Over the last three months, I have been getting a new type of semi-spam comment. A comment will appear for moderation, and it looks like a real comment. In fact, it might be a real comment. The poster will comment about a game I’ve reviewed, or a product, or about riding my motorcycles. I even approved one once, only to find the poster commenting on random things that I wrote months or a year ago.

Then I started looking at the Web site addresses the poster used as part of their identification. It changed from post to post, but it always advertised a gateway for a product. It wasn’t a store or e-tailer. It wasn’t another blog. It was a gateway designed to appear high in search results by keyword bombing popular terms. They also get higher rankings by being linked to by other sites — such as in a blog’s comment section. A search engine like Google searches Gibberish, picks up the gateway Web address via the poster’s name, and boom the gateway site goes up in Google’s rankings.

To a lesser extent, have not approved comments from people who were just out to troll. I don’t mind people who have a different opinion from mine, but a dissenting comment has to at least add value to the post. “You are stupid” may be true, but it does not add anything to the discussion.

So, here are some new policies on comments:
Read the rest of this entry »

DreamHost, my usually awesome Web hosting company, has been down for most of the day. Apparently one of their network backbones suffered some sort of disruption. Access to Gibberish has been intermittent or completely down for the last sixteen hours.

As much as I love DreamHost, does anyone know of a good Web hosting company that has built-in support for WordPress and Gallery 2?

I’ve moved drfaulken.com, and by extension Gibberish and the gallery, over to a more dedicated server on DreamHost. The site has been slow lately. I’d like to think it’s partly from my traffic, but I think there are just too many other sites on my old server. I did have a 10,000 unique visitor spike over a two day period last week, but traffic has settled down to slightly-more-than-prior levels.

I did manage to move almost 15GBs worth of content last month, which is a record for Gibberish. Pretty sweet for a blog started for a dozen readers. :)

The move is supposed to be seamless, but if you notice anything weird please let me know.

Do you think the site is performing better than before?

Gibberish was created as a way to keep in touch with my friends and family. I used to talk a lot about gadgets and games with my co-workers, and once I started telecommuting I wanted a way to continue that dialog. I never expected to get even twenty unique visitors a month. Last year I had just a touch over 66,000 unique visitors. Color me surprised.
Read the rest of this entry »

Headed to San Francisco for five days to see my family and some of my friends from a previous job. I’ll probably be on at some point during the day thanks to my Windows Mobile phone and my Asus Eee, but I am not sure if I’ll be posting all that much.

Be good while I’m gone :)

Thanks to Roclar and Starbuck for letting me know that the RSS feed for comments was broken. Apparently the WordPress 2.5 update changed the comment feed path to “/comments/feed/.”

You can now subscribe (or re-subscribe, as it were) to the comments by clicking on the RSS icon in the comment box. You may also click the link that says “Comments RSS.”

Gibberish will be down from 10PM Pacific until approximately 6AM Pacific time tomorrow. My hosting company is moving some of their servers to a new datacenter, and Gibberish is among some of the “lucky” ones. Keep your fingers crossed!