Author Archives: Weston Deboer

About Weston Deboer

I am awesome

Technorati Score

I used to visit technorati all the time to see my score. I didn’t care about anything else other than increasing my score. My personal website had a super low score, but obeygiant.com’s score was rising. I kept adding blogs to it, and seeing how others had such high scores and doing the same techniques. I would favorite it, love it, do whatever to get the score higher. It never really got as high as I wanted it to be, and it only moved up a few places after all that work I did.

I figured out that obeygiant wasn’t tech enough for technorati, I mean duh, tech is in the title. So I moved on, Come five years later and Klout is the new technorati. I did the same thing, I gave out klout points to everyone, to random people in hopes that they would give klout back. Which they did in turn, the klout score got super high (this is all for obeygiant.com again), and I got some klout perks. Which I never ever used because I don’t want free shampoo or to see a live screencast or whatever they were giving away.

Now I just sign up for these services to sign up, to have a presence. When they first came out, I did spend a lot of time on them trying to improve the score. But for an artist, its harder to get high scores on these sites because art doesn’t translate well over the internet. A lot of people link to obeygiant.com, but there are smaller non techy sites. And I only did this because I thought that they would bring hits to the websites. None of them ever brought any significant hits to the website, except for wordpress’s showcase page. Obey Giant is listed as one of the most voted on links and that brings in about 100 clicks a day, everyday, and rising. Now 100 clicks a day isn’t anything, overall, but It adds up. While technorati, klout, whatever brought in zero links a day, brought in no more internet points ever.

Now this is old but David Galbraith, had said that technorati shouldn’t give up from it’s fight with google. That it should be a blog search engine. “I say all this because Google have finally got their act together with Blog Search, and the window of opportunity for Technorati to be what they are, and what they created, is closing.” Well I never think technorati was ever that, I just think it was only got tech blogs. I never thought that it was for anybody else.

Permalinks in 2007

I have done four posts so far for #throwbackthursday, And I thought I would share the general permalink structure for 2007. Some of the top websites (I am just guessing, but sites I think were top back then), have a .html or .php attached to the end of there posts.

kottke.org used .html, but the site is currently a custom site with a much different permalink structure.
a link of http://www.kottke.org/remainder/07/05/13417.html which now goes to http://kottke.org/07/05/on-the-battlefields-of-iraq-and-afghanistan. His website is one of the only websites which redirects the old post to the new updated post.

consumerist.com used a .php file extension for there website, I don’t know what the blog software was but it is now using WordPress. The permalink structure back then for them was:
http://consumerist.com/consumer/tools/farecast-can-save-you-50-260915.php
which is now:
http://consumerist.com/2007/05/farecast-can-save-you-50.html
They don’t have redirecting setup so I have to Google the title based on the url.

laughingsquid.com is exactly the same!
http://laughingsquid.com/virb-raising-the-bar-for-social-networks/

lifehacker.com used and uses a custom blogging software. The old links used to be:
http://lifehacker.com/software/exclusive-lifehacker-download/automate-timed-mouse-clicks-with-clickwhen-260445.php
and now they are:
http://lifehacker.com/260445/automate-timed-mouse-clicks-with-clickwhen?tag=softwareexclusivelifehackerdownload
They have a redirect from the old post to the new post.

www.boingboing.net is exactly the same
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/14/why_do_las_la_brea_t.html

Just a few examples. When I moved obeygiant.com over to WordPress, it didn’t have single pages for single blog posts. It was basically just archives of blog posts so I didn’t have to think about preserving the url or permalinks. But now that I move forward with websites I think hard about the permalink structure than I did before. I want to make sure that they last over time. And also, if there is a current one, not to mess with it.

What I Do

I don’t know why I saved this link to an article about Odd Jobs, Where they talk about how they can’t tell people that they are just web developers and that just isn’t enough. That they need to lie, and say that they do something more than that. This is interesting that it was posted in 2007 and here, five years later, When I tell my dentist that I am a web developer, he replies with, I have an idea for a website.

I personally don’t know that many people who program or do web development. But I know the term is becoming more well known, and I know that kids these days want to be a web developer for Facebook or Google. I know that now WordPress development is a business, I gave a small talk at a WordPress meetup not too long ago and afterwards everyone was coming up to me to hire me. And then the next question would be, well since you don’t want to do it, do you know anybody else who would be interested? Like WordPress development has become this hot commodity.

I started doing “Web Development” when I was asked to update the spreadsheet online. This was a recurring thing that was happening where a single product number had to be updated, or one had to be added for a different color. I got sick and tired of doing this by hand, so I wrote a program where my boss could just select all of the his worksheet in excel and paste it into a textarea box. I didn’t have to do any of that work anymore and work on things that I wanted to work on.

Peter Iliff Says He’s Writing ‘Point Break 2′

The start of something new, and I am going to throw it into the pile of throwback Thursdays. Since I have no idea where else to put it. I found a list of links here in the blog, basically just things that I wanted to write about. About %10 percent don’t work, And I have tried to google the title and they just don’t show up anywhere. Interesting a lot of the digg links do not work, and I try to google the title and nothing. But anyways, alas, Peter Iliff Says He’s Writing ‘Point Break 2′. And come to find out five years later, he actually is not writing a point break two. Or nothing has been in production based on his imdb page. But this made me realize that I do in fact like his writing. I loved Varsity Blues, I loved Patriot Games, those were two well written movies, but of course Point Break.

But this is besides the point, how come people care more about directors or actors in movies. When really they should be following the cinematographers, or the writers. These are the two people who do more for movies than directors. Great they can make sure that the actor is on cue, most of the time these actors do it themselves and the director just says cut.

You know which cinematographer I most love? Emmanuel Lubezki, he has done the visuals for some of the most beautiful movies of all time. From A Little Princess, to The New World, to The Tree of Life. This is the man you should be following, and praising everything he does. Who cares about Peter Jackson’s directing, when really Andrew Lesnie is the man you should be paying attention to. But when some of Andrew Lesnie’s, movies list include Babe: Pig in the City, I Am Legend, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes (but also all of Peter Jackson’s movies), you sort of understand a little bit.

What I am doing

This is what I have been doing lately. I won’t clean it up until it is full. Thats how to really do things these days anyways. I used to be so organized, but now i have so much going on, its hard to organize a desktop.

This was drafted on November 2007, I still work the same way but I only have a few things now. This is what my desktop looks like now, the screen is so much bigger.

What not to do to get into a Club / Bar

On my previous post about how to get into a club / bar, this is what you shouldn’t do. I have been working as a doorman for about five years, every Thursday. We have had the line around the block multiple times, VIP’s, celebrities, DJ’s who think that they are important, people who think they are important, etc…

1. Don’t be as asshole when you talk to anyone at the entrance. If we are having a bad day, we won’t listen to you, at all. You could be the most important person in the world and your a dick, you will be shut down. This goes from security, to the doorman, and they are your entrance into the world. I listen to the security for everything, if they say someone is being a dick, I won’t let them in out of respect. And if I say not to let someone in, they will do the same for me. If you were a dick before, that means you get to wait in line longer.

2. Don’t get upset if you are not on the list. If I don’t see your name on the list, it can mean a lot of things. I always get, oh so and so, put me on the list. I rarely ever have the dj’s put any names on any list.

3. Because your a promoter or DJ or bartender somewhere else, that doesn’t mean I am going to let you in. I have gone to your club/bar and you didn’t let me in. I gave up on that the first time I tried doing it at your club. And I have only done it once. Bartenders try and say that they will hook you up, that never happens.

4. You know the promoter. Great, so do I. What is his name? Oh you don’t know it, call him up then? Oh you don’t have his number? Line goes to the left.

Remember, The doorman, the security, we want you to get inside. We don’t want to hangout with you. We don’t want to talk to you. I want you to get inside as soon as possible. It is bad when police drive by and see a line, it is bad for the neighbors. We are not doing it on purpose. We want you to get inside and buy more drinks as soon as possible. We are doing the best that we can trying to make that happen.

OH, its simple, just don’t be a dick.

How to transfer mysql db from old host to new host

Today I had to transfer a mysql db from an old host to a new host. I used to do this with phpmyadmin and export the db and hope that it would work properly on upload. I did a quick google search today and came up with the line:

$ mysqldump -u username -p'password' old-db | ssh username@example.com mysql -u username -p'password' new-db

It took about one minute to transfer about 400mb of information. I am sure that there are other ways to do this, but it just worked for me perfectly.