Several contests worth noting going on lately:
:: Moblogs By TextAmerica – create a moblog template, add it to the library, have a chance to win a phone. [via Chris Pirillo]
:: Blogshares Tournament – $500 Real Cash Give-A-Way.
:: Popdex logo contest – winner receives a $25 Amazon Gift Certificate. More info at the Popdex blog.
Maybe it’s just me, but I think that Dave Winer needs to read Natalie’s post from earlier this week. Then Dave needs to get a grip on reality.
I’ve had a blog in one form or another since 1999. I started writing regularly in 2000. I have never read Scripting News on a steady basis. I only recently started reading it to learn more about RSS. Dave tosses out there that the RSS feeds generated by MT are funky – but won’t say what is wrong. Whatever. Does he not realize that to probably 98% of all bloggers out there it’s just noise? We don’t care. We blog, we share, we enjoy it all. If my RSS validates, which it does, then it is alright with me.
If you want to know the honest truth – I probably don’t read the blogs you think I read. There is a lot of noise out there, and I’ve learned to filter a lot out. There are some things I just don’t need in my life. It’s interesting to me when I notice.
Sorry Dave, but I won’t miss you. I appreciate the part you played in creating RSS, and it has become a daily part of my life. But if you go, someone else will take your place, someone else will fill your role. We’re all giving to the blog community in one form or another, but the blog community will not grind to a screeching halt if any of us leave.
First I started to wonder why I wasn’t getting any e-mail messages. I knew that tickets had come in to the Blogomania helpdesk, and I’m normally notified of them. Plus I had sent out a PayPal refund, I should have a payment receipt. Wow, no e-mails for two hours? Not even spam? This is odd, very odd.
Then I came to my site to see if it was online. Only to be greated with a blank white page. Augh!
So tonight I learned that if you’re 8mb over your allocated disk space on the server, mail shuts down. If you rebuild MT while over the limit, MT will generate a plain blank white page.
Nothing like a little jolt like that to wake me up! Everything should be back to normal now – let me know if you see anything odd. I deleted almost 1000 spam messages out of my spam folder without reading through them to verify whether or not they were legit – so if you send spam-like e-mail often, let me know. I glanced at them and didn’t recognize any names, so hopefully I didn’t delete any that I should have kept!
I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’ve been working hard to weed out the spam I was getting. The first step that I took was to set up my e-mail accounts as IMAP accounts. You do this by adding a new account just like you would set up a POP3 account – except most e-mail programs ask you what type of server it is and you select IMAP instead of POP3. That’s it. Easy as can be!
What makes IMAP really wonderful is that I use two (sometimes three) different computers. With IMAP I get the following perk:
:: Your mail is left on the server – so you can get it anywhere.
:: If I read the mail on one computer, it’s flagged as read when I pull up the IMAP account on the other computer.
:: When I send e-mail, it’s stored with the IMAP account and I can access it on all the computers.
:: Same thing for draft messages.
:: Sort your mail in to folders? The folders are available everywhere, with the mail sorted just like you want it. (You might have to sync to get the new folders.)
There are some down sides – one of the computers I use has somewhat slower access, so there is lag time waiting for the mail to load. The tradeoff of having my mail marked as read, etc.? Worth it for me!
One thing to note: If you accidentally download your mail as POP3, it will be downloaded. Next time you go to your other machines, it won’t be there. I discovered this the hard way.
I’ll be writing a much longer post on this for ScriptyGoddess soon, but I have to finish my research on it. For now, Stanford University has a handy page about your first day with IMAP that is a great read.
IMAP doesn’t get rid of my spam, but it allows me to set up a folder for the spam that got away (the ones that Spam Assassin didn’t catch) which, because it is on the server, can be used to “teach” Spam Assassin about the spam it missed. Anything helps!
IMAP is what makes Info Aggregator so cool. If you read something on one PC, it’s marked as read on the other. Delete a news item because you’re not interested? Deleted when you come back on the other machine. And when you log in to your account on their site, you can read your feeds online through the “webmail” option. Feeds Everywhere! I couldn’t ask for more!
Amazing. Discussion at Blogroots about a RSS to IMAP service. Wow. I mean … WOW! “There is no need for a separate application like a RSS News Aggregator. Your current mail application acts like the Newsreader. Therefore you can start right away, no learning curve. Deal with the feeds like you do with mail.” Awesome! [Via Adam.]