I was blogging, about 6 months before Manila came out. Didn't call it blogging then, called it a news page. We used Frontier's news page technology, with the shared menus on my Mac Classic, I could copy text from a web page in Netscape, hit a menu (still in Netscape) and a Frontier dialogue box would open (made with MacBird) with the URL and title of the page and the text in the clipboard already pasted. The system also went and added this news item to an email which was posted out to subscribers. Ah! It was a revelation. And so, so easy. We soon noticed our traffic growing. Alas, I never kept a copy of the site.

Happy birthday Manila. Can't believe it's five years.

And now, referer callbacks and comment callbacks to combat spam. I've been using a rough method that's been quite effective at fighting the porn referers: I'd see if the word 'sex' or 'adult' or other common porn words were in the domain name of the referer, and ban the IP. Mostly the same IP would try several times with different domain names. Obviously, it's a machine. So far, in nearly two months, I've collected just over 1,000 IPs.

Recently, though some had been getting through. Those referrals with unknown (to me) porn words, or even clean (non-porn) sites. So, I installed Thomas Creedon's referrerRemover. Which cleans up after the event. (I'll dig into this and add something so that anything banned with it goes into my ban list too.)

Luckily, I, nor any of the machines I monitor, have been targeted (yet) by the more insidious comment spam.

I do love Manila. Much easier for meatheads to use than the more complex and powerful Radio. I've just added some RPC-XML calls to my Thumbnailer plugin which now allows me to shoot a script at a folder of images and have them placed in a page, as thumbnails. Wicked. Though I wish I could write this script as a stand alone app, for my meatheads.

"...government could play a bigger role in setting up systems of trust for online communities too. Proposals for ID cards, for instance, could also be widened to see if they could be used online."

I've long thought that one day blogs will ber a legal requirement for everyone. Your web address will be in your ID card. Those who need to could check out your postings to see what type of character, or religious, or political animal you are. Also, your utility bills, credit card details, birth certificates—everything is stored there, for both yours' and the Gov's convenience. They may or may not be called blogs.

Two bloggers put themselves up for auction.
Darren Barefoot from DarrenBarefoot.com and Jeremy Wright from Ensight.org

Currently, the going price seems to be $650 for 10-15 posts per week, plus other services like putting up the blog, and the consultation involved. Nice, clean eBay descriptions of who, what and why.

They're interesting because they're pushing blogs to those who would not have considered them for themselves. This way they can hire a pro blogger who'll do some good stuff. It should be a good intro, then the company could take over themselves, and add that deeper knowledge and conviction that only the CEO (or near) can demonstrate.

I'll put them in my eBay watch list. I'm interested in how much they get. Not that I'm going to auction myself off, too much work right now, but eBay is a good indicator of the price the market will pay for anything. Funny that they are both Canadians?

Here's some more links that others may find valuable:
Latest version of Opera (another browser, said to be even better than Firefox—I'm still to enamoured to consider looking at another lover at the mo).

MOOX, a rebuild of Firefox optimised for particular processors (identify yours with CPU-Z).

Check out some extensions for Firefox.
I recommend:
Image Zoom still awaiting the update for Firefox 1.0
Ad blocker does what it says on the tin
IE viewer, see what a page looks like in MSIE from the rightclick menu
Search tools! I'm trying these out, there's just too many new ones! Finally installed All-in-one search button 1.1
Web developer. Obviously.
Tabbed browser. Fan-fucking-tastic!
Fire FTP. Brilliant, free ftp app.
Tweak network. Wow. I thought I was fast anyway, but...

Their servers are being hit too hard, I'll wait a week or so, before really playing with the extensions.

I too think nickle and dime blogvertising isn't the way to make money by blogging. Nor is product endorsement.

For sure Google adsense is nickel and dimes for most, and for some (like me) the height of crassness. Rather like putting adverts on the door of one's car, or one's letterheads. (I'm such a blog snob.)

Product endorsement is pretty hard. Easier to say one doesn't like something, much harder to say one likes something, and keep that up. Think how many products one comes into contact with. Many aren't liked and discarded, those that are kept are kept forever. I just couldn't keep on and on and on, endorsing a product, it'd get pretty boring, and very transparent.

However, I've got to think of a way of writing about flower delivery. Mother's day delivery of flowers. Sending flowers to say "sorry," sending wedding flowers, delivering bouquets, sending bunches of flowers, flowers, flowers, lovely flowers.

Oppposite is how much it would cost for me to buy the Google adwords for flowers and flower delivery = £44,000 a day Or £1,320,000 a month! I can't afford that, not that I've got a UK flower shop anyway. But I'd love to get a revenue share of the click throughs. "Har, Har, Har! Bloody flowers! Lovely flowers!" I'd be certain to say every month the cheque dropped through the letterbox.

So, if you want to be as big as Bill Gates, start a blog about flower delivery, floral delivery, and ordering flowers and the rest of those £3.00 click through bids.

You'd need 25,000 click throughs, so 5,000,000 good hits per day (the low industry average @ 0.5% click through, some sites have reached 5%).

And sometimes Google gives up to 90-100% of the revenue, sometimes more than 100%. We're talking big numbers here. Now, how do I write stuff about flowers to achieve 5 million hits a day? Hmmm. I'd better sleep on that. I'd better sleep hard, since I know not a jot about the damned things. Flowers? They grow in the ground and look pretty.

Scott Johnson from Feedster contacted me about my rant regarding Technocrati and Feedster (and pubSub).

I'll still say that these services and much of the blogging industry is becoming too difficult for too many, remembering that many coming to blogging have zero technical and usually very low internet experience.

He pointed out that is is indeed simple to get a subscription feed for searches. Too simple for my hurried eyes! There's an orange XML icon top right on any returned search. I see so many of these these days, I must be blind to them. Still, I can't get any such search feed to validate, thus I can't sub to them.

Yet, I can sub to exactly the same search criteria feeds in pubSub and the newer blogDigger. And I still cannot figure out how I can do such with Technocrati, I figure that there isn't such a feature there.

Also, Scott pointed out that there are reasons for claiming a feed, which I glanced over. Now glancing a bit slower, I can't see a compelling reason for going to the bother, especially as it'll be for the second time. (In the instructions for claiming a feed I missed the part about adding their special link and only their special link to a blog post, mine was buried deep in my rant, thus, it hasn't worked.) Putting only their link into a post is not for me and my site. I could drop an email explaining this, but I see no big benefit.

Again, I must emphasise that both Technocrati and much more so, Feedster are very opaque and difficult sites. Sure some things are easy, simple searching for instance, but others, for time pressed techies like me, are too detailed or too simple. For non-techies, well...
Saying that, the power of Feedster's advanced searching is wonderful if ever I needed such power, which I don't think I do at the moment.

I wonder if it's a case of Jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none? If blogDigger and pubSub can do search feeds, and do them so painlessly, and seemingly do nothing else (to my racing eyes, anyway), perhaps Feedster are doing too much.

Or, as I advised Scott, Feedster needs better navigation, a site map and better copy writers. And a sit down with the UI and somebody's mum ";->"

Though I'm using the fantastic masterPing tool (by Patrick Ritchie) to ping Technorati, (and others) I still don't seem to be picked up by this service. I also notice that their section on how to ping from Radio Userland is very out of date and makes it look like UserLand don't care. Surely, Radio UserLand should get on to Technorati to fix this error in their page?

I've added my photo to my profile, claimed my blog, but still it doesn't show on any searches. It used to, I know, though that was a year ago or so when I looked last. I guess one doesn't expect to be dropped.

Weblogs.com was the only service I bothered pinging, mainly because Radio did that as a matter of course, along with the Manila sites I host. Though I think that weblogs.com isn't being used by many of these services any longer, probably because it's mostly broken (as it is yesterday and today when I looked) thus, I need to ping several services. Thus, any search in the blogosphere needs to use several services to be complete. This is the Balkanisation of the blogosphere.

Setting up a Pubsub search feed is easy, or it is for me as I've done it several times, sure it could be much, much easier. But setting up a similar service in Technorati and Feedster... Well, I can't.

Technorati will let me set up a feed which is essentially a search on a URL. Thus, I can create a search feed for "www.cybersaps.org" which, seemingly searches for those sites linking to me. But I cannot set up a search feed for "cybersaps" which would return results that don't necessarily link back to me. I say seemingly, because the results only show some of the blogged item, with a load of crap and unnecessary [img] and [IMG miniXmlButton.gif] stuff, which gets in my way.

Feedster: while I am in their index and I'm in there PDQ, and for this I'm very grateful and appreciative, setting up a search feed is again, impossible. Wait, I think I've found it. Boy, Feedster's navigation sucks. Worse: the feeds won't validate! Neither in Dave Winer's nor bad boy's atom/RSS validator.

And to claim my feed in Feedster I need to:

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster

What for, I don't know.

Pubsub: I love you. Though the terminology used in your website is a little blog-geeky. If only you picked up more blogs in your radar. And if I could edit out livejournal results. Mind, you seem to be the only ones who draw on livejournal. And right now, the site is off-line. (I'm having poor luck with these RSS service at the mo :-(

The long and short of searching the blogoshere: far too complex, far to annoying.