While scanning Blogdex I came across this article yesterday entitled "20 Worst People, Places, And Things On The Internet For 2002". There were a bunch of the usual suspects: banner ads, pop-up ads, spyware, spam, etc. I was surprised to see Blogger:
Have you ever heard that old saying, "make a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door?" Well, in their own way, Blogger made a "better mousetrap". They made creating your own website and getting it hosted so quick and simple that anyone could do it. Then as the whole "world was beating a path to their door" they let it all slip away. Horrible technical problems, non-existent technical support, and grindingly slow hosting became the rule with their service, not the exception. The people who revolutionized creating your own website and inspired terms like "blogs", "blogging", "blogosphere", etc, have turned blogger into the "Geocities" of their industry. Now Blogger is only for amateurs to cut their teeth on before they move on to better digs. That's sad...In a small sense one could almost say the same of Livejournal. About the only consistently interesting weblogs I've found on Livejournal are Will's friends. A few months back I did some searching within Livejournal to try and find some "grownups" that lived in the Nashua area. There were plenty of users below 21, but few working adults, let alone folks with spouses or families. Blogger's problems with hosting delays are sometimes worse on Livejournal because everything Livejournal serves is dynamic content from a central location. That means the centralized servers have to compute on the fly every page you see. At least Blogger was usually pushing your static web pages back onto your own web space. It's a sad comment that the more interesting blogs I've found have usually been in Radio Userland or Movable Type. I think the teenager filter for those two is due to the fact that you need either a bit of money and/or a bit of technical savvy.
Daniel seems to be getting the knack of sleeping on a mattress on the floor. It does bother us that he isn't confined. We'd rather him sleep on a mattress than keep risking his safety climbing out of a crib.
Because of the local network and the network address translation that is done by my router, I was having trouble seeing bilikfamily.com from inside the house. I asked on Usenet for tips but got little result. I was thrilled to find that someone else had the same issues and wroteup a detailed description of how to setup name resolution behind an Apple Airport router. I thanked the author for his solution. This will make it easier to do maintenance and configuration of the webpage when I'm home.