This post ends up being the end of an impromptu three-parter. Parts one and two for your perusal. Last time I said AdSense diagnostics showed that my robots.txt file was blocking their web crawler.

I think this problem stems from when I first created this WordPress install and set it to private while I was customizing the theme. During this “private time” I was writing some draft posts and also getting the look and feel just right before I unleashed the Google search hounds. When I finally decided to publicly post I stil had the private option checked and didn’t realize it until later. The date I went public (the 21st) also corresponds to the date the site was last crawled as evidenced by the diagnostics.

Usually when you make a new post in WordPress the Ping-O-Matic tool will notify all the relevant engines that you have a new post. I’m not sure why this system wasn’t working. The solution I came up with is a little different. I created a Google sitemap and submitted it to Webmaster Central. Webmaster Central is a place where you can monitor how often your site is crawled by the Googlebot and also submit your sitemap. I can go into how to generate a sitemap in a later post if the need arises but just to wrap up, I am now seeing relevant ads on my Xterra filter post. Ahhh, much better. Even with no visitors.

As I said in the last post, I thought something fishy was going on with my ads since they were so narrowly focused on one single topic (b l o g s) even though I have written about other things. It has been my experience through other sites that even though ads may not be properly targeted to the specific topic you write about, they vary when you write about a different subject.

I’m not sure why this didn’t occur to me sooner, but I finally decided to check the Google AdSense diagnostics and lo and behold I found a problem. As you can see below it says that the Robots.txt file is blocking attempts to crawl the site and hence this place hasn’t been crawled since the 21st. So, that’s why I’m since such narrow ad focus.

The thing is, I don’t actually HAVE a robots.txt file. Not one that I can see anyway. It’s not a hidden file, I checked for that also. Hrmph. I’ll do some more research on this and report back tomorrow. No new visitors today by the way.

No other visitors have shown up, so the first one was a fluke. This isn’t a surprise since there isn’t a lot of content yet. I’m still sticking to my experiment and not commenting or listing the site anywhere else. This is starting to be more and more difficult since I’m getting impatient, but I’ll hang in there a little while longer. And really I would rather make the site “public” with as much content as possible. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway.

I do still have the Google ads up on the site but something unusual is happening. Almost all the ads are b l o g related even though I wrote the Xterra piece. I expected to see the ads diversify more than they have. I’ll check into this to see if I can figure out why.

Prepare to be shocked. Seriously. To some of you the following entry will be unbelievable. I swear that all of it is true. It’s really quite astonishing when you see it all written down. Here we go. These are all (that I can think of right now) the TV that I watch.

• American Hot Rod
• American Chopper
• Survivor
• ER
• Heroes
• Curb Your Enthusiasm
• Attack of the Show!
• The Sopranos
• Big Love
• The Wire
• 24
• The Daily Show
• The Colbert Report
• This Old House
• The This Old House Hour
• This Old House Classics
• Inside This Old House
• Ask This Old House
• The New Yankee Workshop
• Bob Vila
• Dirty Jobs
• Myth Busters
• Pardon The Interruption
• Grey’s Anatomy
• The Office
• Lost
• American Idol
• Real Time
• My Name Is Earl
• Monk
• Psych
• Nip/Tuck
• Reno 911
• South Park
• 30 Days
• Family Guy
• Driving Force
• Studio 60

Wow. Those aren’t in any order because I just wrote it as I thought of them. I’m sure that’s also not a complete list. How you may ask is it possible to consume that much crap on television. To state it simply, Tivo. Or for those less fortunate, DVR. It’s not as simple as just saying Tivo though. It’s actually two Tivo’s and a cable company provided DVR box.

There is one modded 360GB Series II Tivo in the living room hooked up to the big screen (*link dead), another Series II Tivo in the bedroom that mainly records the wifes “soaps”, and there is the dual-tuner DVR in the living room that also delivers the HD content. If you’re keeping score at home it’s possible to record four tuners worth of shows at a time. Also, as a backup, you know in case a live game runs long and I happen to miss part of a show there is always EZTV *updated EZTV.

I suppose a post like this doesn’t really belong on this site, but what the hell, it wouldn’t really be a blog if we didn’t go on a tangent now and again would it. So I’ll call this category “In Other News”.

First I’ll set this up with a little backstory. I drive a Nissan Xterra. That pretty much wraps up the backstory. Anyway, I take the car to the dealer to get the oil changed and it also happens to be time for the 30,000 mile maintenance. I know, I could take it somewhere else besides the Nissan dealer and get this done much cheaper. Actually the oil change price is relatively competetive with the other places that I would consider taking it if you don’t consider the 7 Minute E-Z-Quik Lube’s that charge 12.95. But I don’t always trust those places since I’ve had some bad experiences with them before (looks like yer’ oll pans got a dent in it).

So the Nissan service department quotes me a price of around $709 to do the whole 30,000 mile maintenance. I hurriedly tell them “thatsok, I think I’ll just have the oil changed this time around”. The service manager tells me that they will go ahead and inspect all the usual 30,000 mile stuff for free just to see if anything is in need of immediate repair. I begin hearkening back to experiences with the Jim Bob’s Auto Repair’s of the world that I used to deal with and expect them to try to screw me. Oddly enough, they do the inspection and it doesn’t happen. “We changed the oil and everything looked fine except (here we go) your In-Cabin Microfilter needs to be replaced,” he says.

I ask him how much it is and he tells me it will be $89. I tell him I think I’ll do that next time I’m in. I pay for the oil change and head home where I promptly start checking online for this filter. I check out the excellent Xterra Owner’s Club forums and bingo, the first search I do there brings up a link to XterraParts.com. I find the filter there for $27 plus shipping which will bring the total to about $37. No tax. Just like that I saved myself 50 bucks.

Not content to just take the first deal I see, I search around and find MyNissanParts.com and they have it for 21.99 plus shipping. No tax . I order this one for a grand total of $30.49. I got it via FedEx today and I’ll probably install it tomorrow. You can’t beat saving $60 with about 10 minutes of searching.

Just as I finished the AdSense and Visitor Update post where I said there had not yet been any visitors to the site, I happen to go check the stats one last time and the first visitor has arrived. They were from Jacksonville, New Brunswick, Canada. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. They weren’t referred from a search engine so I’m guessing the first visitor was actually a misspelling of some type. One last tidbit of information from this visitor is that they were using Internet Explorer 5.5. That is quite outdated.

One down, many to go.

I’ve seen other people do this before but I’ve been wanting to put this list up on a site for a while now. I can remember many times that I’ve had tried searching Google to find a tool to, for example, edit mp3 files. Actually go ahead, search for “mp3 editor” in Google. It’s a mess right? Who the hell knows if any of those programs are any good or not. I’m sure a lot of them are legit, but most of the links will take you to crippled shareware that just won’t get the job done.

This stuff should be simple. This is one instance where Google really does come up short. I remember back several years ago (pre- digg, pre- fark, pre- web 2.0) when I would check download.com every day.  The top 10 most downloaded and later top 50 was where a lot of people (me included) found some of the coolest new stuff on the internet. After the original napster went away I remember seeing Gnutella on the list for the first time. That picture isn’t an advertisement, it’s actually the Download.com logo from around 1997. Cool Stuff. Maybe in some way this list can be a more editorialized, waaaaay more simplified list of the tools around today.

I make no guarantees about this being the “best” software, it’s simply what I use. I will probably change some of the items from time to time as they come and go from my regular usage. I think for right now I will just list the name and a link to where you can find the software. Later on I may include an explanation as to why I use it. So where to start? In no particular order for now. Just as I think of them.

On the Desktop
Web browser: Firefox
Email Client: Thunderbird
PDF Viewer: Foxit Reader
Media Player: iTunes | Windows Media Player 11
Audio / MP3 Editor: Audacity
Photo Editing: Adobe Photoshop
Photo Organization: Windows Explorer | Picasa2
FTP Client: Filezilla
SSH Client: Putty
Text Editor: Notepad++

Online Apps and Services
eMail: Gmail
Backup: Mozy
Feed Reader: Google Reader

I’m sure there are a multitude of ways to do this, but here’s a really simple quick solution.

1. Open the window (or tab) containing www.drudgereport.com.
2. Hold down Ctrl on your keyboard and at the same time use your mouse scroll wheel to scroll downward (towards you) one click.

That should do it. The page should look exactly the same in Opera as it does in Firefox and Internet Explorer. All we did there is make the font on the page one size smaller. I know this is a really minor problem on the grand scale of things but it’s just one less annoyance when experimenting with alternative web browsers.

click to enlarge

Now that the solution is out of the way, lets wildly speculate as to the reason this is necessary.

The Drudge Report has been around forever and as far as I can tell the only real change I’ve seen on the site is the addition of advertising. I would say that when the site was originally designed it looked perfectly fine in whatever version of Internet Explorer was out at the time and that is all that was needed. Since then no standards compatibility or browser interoperability has been attempted as other browsers gain in popularity. Hope that helped you out.

Ok, let’s do this thing. Hey. I see you found me. Just where the hell have you been? What is this place? Well to be honest, I don’t really know yet. I really wanted to create a blog that leans tech, but those have been done to death right? Not quite. You can add one more to the list (or your RSS feed list) because I’ve decided to give it a shot anyway.

This isn’t my first blog though. Yep, back in 2002. It lasted for a couple of months. I checked the Wayback Machine and May of 2007 would be the five year anniversary of that blog. Wouldn’t that have been awesome if I could have kept writing on it that whole time? I could have been a blogging superstar by now . I do have other blogs right now though. I can’t really tell you what they are though. No, they aren’t of the “adult” variety (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but I will explain later why I’m not telling you their names. More reason for you to come back.

I can’t promise you I will stick with this for very long (months? years?) but I have taken steps to try to avoid burnout. The original version of this first post (w00t?) was probably written a month ago. See, from past experiences I know that blogs are all exciting and fun and to some extent cool when you first start them but that quickly fades and the dreaded laziness strikes. This sequence of events has killed many a blog in a relatively short period of time, but I don’t want that to happen here. This is long enough, I’ll continue in part 2.