Projects Possible

Projects Possible is a pretty young blog.  We don’t have high Google rankings and we don’t get thousands and thousands of hits per day (at least not yet) but we certainly seem to get a fair share of comment spam.  These are the spammers that want to post comments to my valid postings to get you to go to their porn site, or their prescription drug site or any myriad of other non appropriate or sales related Internet destinations.

WordPress allows me to block this spam in a number of ways including Akismet (their spam filter plugin) and options to not post comments automatically but to wait until they have been approved by me.   Unfortunately, I do not have the time needed to review every piece of spam so Akismet has been a lifesaver for me.   I can periodically just load up my comments and see that Akismet has already flagged them as spam.   With one click they are gone and if I never do anything with them in 30 days they are automagically gone.

Bloggers beware…  If you are new to blogging you need to get yourself protected and sooner rather than later.  I found when I first started the blog that I very rarely received a piece of spam but now it can be literally a hundred or more in a weekend and as I continue to post additional content and opinion it just gives them that many more messages to latch onto.  Do yourself a favor, get your spam protection in place early!

I have updated the blog to the current version of WordPress. I have also modified the theme and have removed most of the widgets (these will be coming back) I just need to work through HOW I want them to come back.

If you have any problems with anything on the site please let me know and I will get it corrected as quickly as I can. You may have to search for a few things as I begin a major cleanup of Categories and Tags. As I’ve learned more about what I want to write about, my original structure just doesn’t make sense so you will see changes here as well.

Enjoy the blog!

As many of you know, WordPress is now out with their 2.5 version.  There are a number of plugins that I use that are NOT going to work so I thought now might be time to do a thorough review, clean up the old, make way for the new, reclassify things.   Call it Spring Cleaning for Projects Possible.

There may be times over the weekend that the blog will be unreachable as I work through things.  I might even play with a new theme or two.  I’m finding that I’ve had a couple of comments about things being somewhat difficult to find so I might simplify.   I love 1Blog (my current theme) but if you aren’t using the features it doesn’t do any good to have them right?

Stay tuned… we’ll see what happens!

I recently read an article about blog and website promotion where the author was offering tips for bloggers to help increase their traffic.  One of the simplest of suggestions was to simply ask readers to link to you and you do the same for them.  So the purpose of this post is to layout the offer for you to do a shameless plug of your blog or website in exchange for allowing me to do the same.  (Reciprocal linking.)

The ground rules are going to be pretty simple…  I’m going to periodically create a post that will have a direct link to a page on your blog.  All I ask is that you do the same.   Give me a link in a post on your blog. 

What do you need to do?   Simply leave a comment on this thread with the following information:  

1. The URL you want to link to. (your domain URL is fine)
2. Some text the describes your post the post I am linking to in #1. (your site focus if linking to your domain URL)
3. The URL of a link-back to me… www.projectspossible.com - A general purpose blog where the author shares things that he WORKS on, PONDERS, and ENJOYS!

Exclusions:  I won’t post adult sites and/or sites that condone illegal activities or topics.  I also reserve the right to NOT post content that I do not believe is approprite for my general family audience.   

Just for future reference I am in the process of creating a TOPSITE for Weblogs for the purpose really of sharing links.   I will let all of the commenters know when it is fully operational so you can add your site

In the past month I have had two full weekends that the blog has been inaccessible due to problems at my webhost - Flexihostings.   I was left no alternative, after another full day today where they could not resolve the problem, but to change webhosts.

This evening I moved the entire blog, all images, databases, etc… so if in your reading you happen across something that doesn’t look quite right please let me know as soon as possible and I will be sure to get it corrected.   (You can just leave a comment on this post.)

To my readers,  I apologize for the inconvenience that you may have experienced.  If you tried to submit posts for the carnival please try again.  You will have until the end of the month for your submissions.  I hope that this move to the new host will produce an environment that will be a bit more stable but will also give me access to a tech support team that I am confident will be able to resolve issues in a timely manner.

Now about the retraction…  On January 8th I posted an article about choosing a webhost and I refer to my webhost of about 5+ years.  The interesting thing about this article is that it doesn’t mention the reason that I had to change hosts… Reliability.   It is incredibly important that when you consider a webhost that you absolutely choose a host that has a proven track record of reliability.  You might also want to take a look at what their definition of UPTIME is and what kind of a guarantee they offer. 

The other area that I have had to reconsider in that original article is the section on Customer Support.   Originally, I thought that email support was good enough.   This is definitely something to reconsider.  In my exchange with tech support starting this past Friday I’m still not sure that they understand what the problem is, or why their attempted resolutions are not working.  (My gut feel is there is a symbolic link somewhere that has pieces of my account pointing to one server and other pieces pointing to a different server in which Apache was compiled without MOD_REWRITE.)   Being able to get in touch with a support person 24/7 is important and still not having a resolution after 3 days is just not acceptable in my opinion.

So the retraction is that I would no longer recommend Flexihostings as a webhost based on recent experiences with Reliability and Customer Support.  Perhaps after I’ve been with my new webhost for awhile I will offer a review and opinion on them.  In the meantime choose carefully and make sure you know what is important to you and your operating environment.

Projects Possible has decided to host a Blog Carnival on Email Productivity. 

To set the stage I think it is important to understand what a “blog carnival” is.    If you look at the Wikipedia link you will see that a “blog carnival” is a blog event.  It is described a really nothing more than a collection of permalinks on a particular topic.  It is likened to a “magazine” in that the host, acting as the editor, compiles the stories into a post and lists all of the links to the blog articles that were submitted.  The readers of the post have a plethora of information at their fingertips on a specific topic, and the blog authors have a link back to their blog.

The Email Productivity Carnival is anticipated to be a monthly compilation of blog posts related to email productivity and email tools that increase productivity.  Submissions will be accepted through the last day of the month and then I will edit them and create a posting in the “Carnival” category on the Projects Possible blog approximately 1 week later.

Article or Post Suggestions:

• Reviews of software applications
• Tips and Tricks
• Email Etiquette
• Feature and Functionality of Mail Clients

The Email Productivity Blog Carnival is posted on Blog Carnival if you would like to submit links.   You can also submit links by clicking on the Contact link at the top of all of the blog pages.   Comments on this post might also work but there is no guarantee that I will get them included in every posting…

Check back around March 8th for our first posting…

Do you remember the baseball movie with Kevin Kostner called “Field of Dreams”?  The phrase - “If you build it they will come”  - may work for baseball fields in the middle of nowhere but it does NOT work for a blog.  You have to do some level of marketing. 

Buzzfuse offers a unique marketing opportunity for blog owners as well as those that would like to share pictures, audio and video, or flash content.  The process is relatively simple and involves signing up for an account (which requires email validation), placing some code into the content that you would like to share, and then activating that code by clicking on it.   It is at this point that Buzzfuse becomes a bit unique in that it would then like to send your content to a group of individuals that you designate as your reviewers.   It gives them an opportunity to create a “buzz” about your new content and to share it with others that they indicate as well. 

As a nice added bonus there is a bit of a revenue stream for the top “buzzing” items for the month.   I’ve added a buzz to my Geek Speak post… check it out and click on it… letting me know what you think… share it with your friends.

I use amung.us on my blow to show what posts people are currently viewing and where they come from… that is what this icon at the bottom of the pages does.  If you click on it and go to the MAPS you will notice that there is a large gap of missing stars in the continental US where you would find North and South Dakota and Wyoming.   Now I’m sure there are people in those states connected to the Internet so the next question I would have to ask myself is why aren’t the visiting me?   Must be a content thing I would guess.  What would you like to read about Dakotas and Wyoming?

I have been watching a couple conversation on other blogs that seem to focused on the issue of disclosure.   To be fair I had to go take a quick look at what the word disclosure “technically” meant.  I know what I thought it meant but I wanted to check anyway. 

At dictionary.com the word disclosure obviously had a number of entries.  I liked: “the act or process or revealing or uncovering” and “the speech act of making something evident”.  Both of which solidified what I thought disclosure meant.

Some of the questions being raised include:

• How much disclosure and in what form should a blog author make about his postings or his blog in general? 
• Is it important to you the reader to know that an author is being compensated for his post in some way? 
• What about links in a post that would lead you to the authors affiliate link where he is then compensated? 
• Does the character of the blog matter in these disclosure decisions?  ie. Is a personal blog subject to different rules than a corporate run blog?

When I started blogging - and it hasn’t been that long ago  - I never considered these questions.  I recall in my initial thoughts about the blog that if I put a few Ads on the site they may help pay for webhosting.  (At this point in my readership I don’t expect that I will be paying for my webhosting any time soon.)  I failed to think about disclosure that’s for sure.

So what’s a blog owner to do?  Does it really matter?

I’ve decided that the answer for Projects Possible is disclosure.  Not because I think it will matter on what I post but because I think it may add credibility to my content for my readers.  I also believe there is a growing trend on the Internet that the reader’s simply want to know.   I would like to hear your thoughts on the questions I posed above.

In the meantime you can find my Disclosure and Privacy statement HERE.

Much to my surprise I opened up a web page to Projects Possible this morning and I was greeted with a Virus Infection alert.  I was quite surprised and then began to wonder if somehow through my comments I was being infected.   I started a web search and what I found is that there is most likely a bad virus definition update from CA e-Trust (my virus scanning software) that is causing legitimate web pages that use JSQuery and Mootools to report as being infected with JS.Snz.A.

I checked on my CA eTrust and I currently have the update dated December 31st, 2007 - 31.3.5417.0.  This was loaded automatically on my system last night.  Hopefully CA will check it out and issue an update quickly.

There are a couple of additional postings that you can check out:

• Channel Register talks about it here.
• Dynamoo discusses it here.