So, why am I starting this site? Well, as I said, I love TV. I’m tired of posting about TV here and there always seems to be a lot more about TV that I want to post. Also, I need to take my mind of politics. You might know I run Grand Old Parody and I need to have something else to occupy my time. Politics is too stressful. I need something fun!

Anyway, go visit the site, look around, and if you’d like, subscribe. I hope you enjoy it!

First off, I want to point out that I am not a TMZ, Perez Hilton, US Weekly, People celebrity stalker. In fact, if you look at the celebrities I follow you would find a bunch of names that rarely, if ever, appear in that type of celebrity drivel. The celebrities I follow are people from TV show, music, and movies that I really enjoy. Their updates are usually really good and provide me with entertainment. Denis Leary always has great one-liners. Rob Lowe embraces his fans and frequently talks about his role on The West Wing. Nathan Fillion and Colin Ferguson are just regular guys that tweet just like anyone else. Roger Ebert provides thoughtful political and film essays. Louis CK posts clips from his very funny show and tour dates for his stand up.

The thing is, I get quality tweets from most of these people. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t follow them. Sure there might be a few on there that don’t update, but for the most part they all do and I enjoy most of their tweets. It’s gotten to a point where I enjoy their tweets more than most of the other non St. Louis people I follow. Twitter has evolved from a place where I can see what other people are currently doing to a place where I can get info on my favorite TV shows, movies, musicians, and actors. I still enjoy seeing what my fellow St. Louisans are doing, but that’s about it. I used to enjoy reading what other people were up to or things they found interesting, but that has definitely changed, and I can probably pinpoint two reasons why that has changed.

The first reason is I started following too many people. I follow a lot of people but the people I follow, I follow for a reason. This has disadvantages though. The people I tend to follow update more frequently. Follow a lot of heavy users and statuses begin to fly by one right after another. Even though I find what they have to say interesting, I can only read so many tweets before they are lost forever in a never-ending stream of unreadable text. After a while of not being able to catch up, these updates become noise and provide nothing meaningful. The second thing is what I’m going to refer to as static. These are tweets that interfere with an otherwise good signal and will often contribute to the first issue. These tweets can be anything from a Four Square check in or a re-tweet to get into a contest for an Apple product (which I swear no one ever wins). Then you have paid tweets. That one bugs me the most. With celebrities and other high profile users, it’s easier to get high quality content without a lot of noise. You know if there is an update it’s not going to be a Four Square check in, a RT for a contest, or what song they are currently listening to. It’s going to be something that I find meaningful.

So, have you changed the way you use Twitter over the years? Do you still find it as valuable as before? Do you use it to make personal connections or more broad connections for your interests?

Every Wednesday databases from several WordPress sites are emailed to me. I use the WordPress Database Backup Plugin to automatically email me the database backups each Wednesday at a time I set in the configuration. I then have filters set up in a Gmail account so that labels are applied automatically. When the Piece of Shep database comes in it goes directly to the Piece of Shep label and gets marked as read. If I want I can also have an on-demand backup emailed to me or download it directly from the WordPress interface.

Now that my database is safe, on the web and available to download anytime I want, how do I backup my files? The actual website files I download less frequently. I host several sites on my hosting account so a full backup is actually quite large, several gigabytes. Because of this, I only backup the actual files once every month. Using my host’s control panel I generate a full backup then download it to my iMac and then it is backed up to an external hard drive using Time Machine. I also have the full backups backed up over the net using Mozy. Because they are quite large in size, I only keep an archive of two or three of the latest snapshots. Since databases are typically small, (200-600 KB) I keep a much larger archive of those.
So that’s how I backup my sites. What about you? Have you ever lost an entire site and years worth of work? Do you have a backup plan in place? If so, how often do you backup? My motto with web hosting is always plan for the worst because when you don’t, that’s when the worst happens.

The stats that are provided are the type of stats you’d find in most statistics software. Clicky presents it in a very appealing way. No more getting lost in the different menus and submenus of Google Analytics. Clicky is simple and intuitive, providing numerical and graphical stats.  It displays everything I want it to.  It tells me what search engines visitors are using, the terms they are searching for, their entry and exit pages, the time they are on the site, the browser, OS, and screen resolution.  If I want to see where they are going once on my site, I can see all the pages they go to.   I can even see a Google map of where they are located in the world.

The best thing about the stats package is that it’s all real time.  I’m not running a mission-critical business that needs stats right away.  I just enjoy seeing what is going on at my site(s) and any given moment.  Clicky makes it easy to do that and presents it in a way that is superior to other stats packages that I’ve tried. If you’re looking for a great affordable real-time stats package, I suggest signing up and giving Clicky a try. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. There are a lot more features not posted in these screenshots. These are just the ones I like/use the most.

Please stop using the horrible piece of software that came pre-installed on your PC known as Internet Explorer. Not only do you make the job of web designers a lot harder each and every day you use it, but you also leave yourself more open to attacks from malicious websites. I recently spent several hours over a few nights fixing a computer for my sister and brother-in-law because they were infected with a nasty bug that they got while using Internet Explorer. If they were using Firefox they would not have installed the ActiveX and gotten the bug, but they weren’t so they did. IE fails at security and fails at complying with web standards.

My beef used to be with the people who still use Internet Explorer 6, even though 7 has been out for well over a year now. Now my beef is with anyone who continues to use IE at all. I’ll tell you why. Microsoft had the chance to make IE7 standards compliant. What that means is it would properly render pages that were coded to the standards and rules set forth by the web development community to make the best looking and most usable websites possible. They didn’t. While it was better than 6, it was far from the other web browsers, such as Firefox or Safari. The first release candidate of IE8 recently came out. Again, they had the chance to make it standards compliant. They failed again. That makes the job of web developers harder. Now they have to support 3 versions of IE, each one supporting different standards that Microsoft decided it wanted to follow, and not true web standards. Please do yourself a favor and see the web the way it was meant to be seen. Use Firefox (or Safari, Google Chrome, Opera, etc). Thanks.

Your friendly neighborhood Web Developer and Family Computer Help Desk,
Mike Schepker

One thing I noticed after I changed domains was that WordPress uses absolute image paths instead of relative. That sucks if you change domains, as all my images were still pointing to mikeschepker.com. Luckily, I found this plugin that allowed me to search the posts table in the database and replace the upload paths on all the posts with images to the new domain. Worked like a charm. It’s a must-have tool for anyone thinking of moving their WordPress installations to a new domain. Also, thanks to Chris Meller, Caius, and BigJibby for their crazy .htaccess ninja skills which allowed me to redirect all the posts on the old domain to the new perfectly. They rock.

Everyone who visits my site knows that I like to change themes. The lack of quality themes on Habari is one thing that is keeping me from changing. Themes aren’t a make or break deal, but I do like to change things up and not having the ability to do so with a variety of different themes is something that will weigh heavily on my decision. If there was nothing else that made me hesitant about switching, I’d do it. But there are other things.

Lack of widgets or modules built in are something I really want. Because I like to change themes often, not having a widget system for sidebars and whatnot makes things difficult. I like to rearrange the contents of sidebars, footers, etc. without having to edit code. It’s not that I don’t know how to edit the code, it’s just that, these days, I shouldn’t have to.

Lack of documentation makes it hard to do the things I want to do. Back in the pre-widgets WP days this page was my Bible. When editing themes, I still use this page quite often. Habari’s documentation is seriously lacking and it’s difficult to find what it is I need to accomplish certain things. WordPress’s codex spells it out in a great way. This isn’t Habari’s fault, they are young. It took a long time for WordPress’s Codex to get to where it is now. Even a lot of the plugins that are released for Habari have come without clear documentation.

There are also other things that aren’t as big, but I wonder why they aren’t included. For example, Habari uses tags instead of categories. So why isn’t there a template tag to display a tag cloud? You have to use a plugin in order to display it if you want one. I’m sure there are other things like that but I’ve not dealt with it enough to see what they might be. Also, since the codebase is ever changing at this early stage, it takes a lot to keep up with themes and plugins as they are changed quite often and, well, WordPress is much easier to do with the introduction of the automatic plugin upgrading. I can’t tell you when the last time I had to edit a theme because of a WordPress upgrade.

So, there are a few of my reasons why I’m not switching to Habari…. yet. Hopefully, once they mature a little, these things will be introduced and worked on and it will make the transition from WordPress to Habari easier.

When you finally want to break ties with someone, you have to go and delete them from every service and website. This is a giant pain. It’s amazing how much of our lives we share with others and even more amazing how much it takes to get them out of your life completely. Of course, even if you do remove them from the services, that doesn’t mean they are completely out of your life. They have the potential to keep tabs on you via your personal website, checking status updates on Twitter, checking images on Flickr, etc. It’s amazing how open we are with our data these days and how truly hard it is to break ties with someone. I wonder if services like HelloMyNameisE will allow you to remove the users just as easily as you add them. I think it is definitely something to look into. I wonder if, say in 10 or so years, we’ll see our openness backfire on us, or will we become even more social?

Hopefully this week I’ll be able to work on The Technology Classroom some more. I really like the idea of this site and am looking forward to what comes of it. I plan on updating the site with several new articles and even install some forum software on the site.

I know I shouldn’t stretch myself so thin with all the website, but I’m very passionate about technology and with this being an election year, I think it’s important to update Political Jackass as much as possible.

Last.fm displaying artists I've played (click to enlarge)

Notice how nice and clean they look. They charts are now ajax-ified and are quite nice. The color scheme of the site is much easier on the eyes. They managed to create a new site that totally changes the look but still feels familiar. It goes to show you can have a complete redesign without losing your identity. Overall, it is a really successful redesign. Maybe MySpace and Facebook should take note. Much props to the design team at Last.fm.

Now if I could just get Adobe to allow for the most recent flash to be on the Wii so I can watch Hulu, I’d be happy. Not the Wii’s fault. Not Hulu’s fault. It’s all on Adobe.

Yes, I’ve blocked you msnbot. I’m tired of finding you in my stats coming from random searches that don’t even show my site in the search results, such as “keeping,” “album,” “comments,” or any of the other thousand or so one word searches you come to my site for. I don’t show up in your search results (at least not high enough for me to care) nor do I really want to show up in the top 100 pages in search results for the word “keeping.” So, you are no longer welcome here. I don’t want to see you on my property anymore. I don’t really care that this may drop me out of live.com’s search altogether. It’s a crappy search engine and anyone who uses it is an idiot and shouldn’t come to my site anyway. So, in conclusion, stop visiting my site msnbot. You’re not welcome here.