Occam's Razor

Thanks for all the hits

Thanks, Google! Thanks, Washington Monthly! Thanks, WordPress! Thanks, all those of you interested in satisfying your prurient interests! Thanks, casual surfers! I have all of you to thank, as well as my loyal regular readers, for visiting my blog.

For most of us bloggers, our blogs are at least in part an expression of our vanity. In real life, we may be too young, or too old, or too ugly, or too fat, or have too many annoying habits for you to want to have anything to do with us. Of course, on the Internet none of this matters because you cannot tell what I look like or how I sound. (Actually, I do have a small picture of myself on the About page, and you can see the back side of me here.) Here on my humble blog I can be judged, if not for who I am, then at least for what I write. Here is where I reveal at least a little part of myself: the part that I am proud of and I feel worthy of your time and attention.

For me, how many pseudo-friends I have on Facebook is meaningless. A significant part of what is meaningful to me you will find here. For I enjoy writing. I also like to analyze events and issues and provide my perspective on them. What I was missing prior to December 2002 was an audience. Thank goodness then for the Internet. I do not need the hassle of trying to market a book in order to find readers. The Internet has removed the middleman and well as given me many more readers than I could get writing a book. You are my audience. Moreover, in some ways, I am not just the writer, but also the performer.

A year ago, I mysteriously dropped out of Google’s search index. For about two months, I struggled without much success to rectify the situation. During November 2006, I eked out a mere 2000 or so page views. For October 2007, I had 9170 page views and 6430 visits. That averages to 295 page views a day.

Obviously, this is a mere pittance compared to many more popular blogs. I will likely never be a major blog. Yet I still am vain enough to aspire to someday be elevated into to the middle tier. For most of this year, I was averaging 100-150 page views per day. Currently I am averaging a bit over 400 page views per day and 300 or so visits per day. Moreover, these are just my SiteMeter statistics. I also have an unknown number of readers who are reading my blog with newsreaders. There are likely a few others reading via email or who are smart enough to configure their browsers so SiteMeter cannot track them.

I would like to assert that my content has gotten so much better and that is why my web traffic is picking up. I do not think this is the reason. Rather, my new traffic is a result of marketing decisions that I made, the volume of material accumulated here after nearly five years and finally a wee bit of luck.

Thanks to WordPress. You would not think that switching to new blogging software would make much of a difference in finding new readers, but it did for me. I should have gotten off Movable Type years ago. Perhaps Google has an easier time indexing content in WordPress. My traffic picked up by about a third as soon as I made the switch. Looking at my SiteMeter log, part of it also is that my tags are easier to find. Anyhow, to me it is clear that the WordPress effect is real. If you want to increase your blog’s traffic, try moving to WordPress.

Thanks to Google, which traditionally accounts for 75% of my new visitors. Since moving to WordPress, it has re-searched my site. Perhaps by having more links inside my pages it now judges that I am more worthy of additional traffic. A year ago, it took me two months to figure out why Google had dropped my blog from its search index. It upset me so much that I almost gave up blogging. A year later, all is forgiven.

Thanks to Washington Monthly. Its editor, Paul Glastris, noticed my little post praising their blog, which is authored by Kevin Drum. I said that in my opinion it was currently the best blog on American politics. As a result of his short post, I received nearly 1200 page views on October 25th . I received over 800 more page views the following day, most from Washington Monthly. Since his post, I have average more than 400 page views per day. I am hoping that a substantial number of those visitors found the site sufficiently good to come back and visit regularly.

Thanks to all you normal human beings with active sex drives. I do not often write about topics like pornography or sexuality. However, when I find something to say on these topics it usually drives up my page views. I certainly do not want my blog to turn into a digital red light zone. However, sexuality and pornography are undeniably popular topics that interest people. Bloggers who ignore these topics just drive away potential new readers. Consequently, I feel no shame writing about these subjects from time to time. My latest post on YouPorn.com seems to have been well received by the Internet community. Since it was published, about twenty-five percent of my traffic is from people wanting to read that post. Meanwhile, my April 2004 post about ex-porn star Sharon Mitchell still routinely accounts for between 5-15% of my daily traffic.

I have been blogging for nearly five years. It has occupied much of my free time. I average a dozen or so blog posts a month. Each post is usually 1500 or more laboriously edited words. I sweat over this blog because I think a blog should be worthy of your time. If it is worthy of your time, it should be both interesting and well written. A good blog post should be written so well that it is like a hot knife going through butter. The best ones should carry you from first word through the last like a roller coaster ride. I am not sure how many of my posts meet this goal, but I always keep this goal in mind. (The posts I am most proud of are in my Best of Occam’s Razor category.)

I started to blog before the word had even become generally known. For most of this time, I have dwelled in some back corner of the Internet. It has been a long slog. I may still be in the Internet wilderness, but the sky is looking brighter. I think there is a clearing ahead.

Thank you all for reading and visiting Occam’s Razor. Occasionally, particularly when the search engines do not seem interested, I wonder why I bother to blog at all. My motivation may be pure vanity, but readers provide the fuel that keeps me going. I will do my best not to disappoint you and to make this blog worthy of returning here regularly.

November 1st, 2007 at 10:15pm Posted by Mark | Life 2007 | no comments

Making the new look

Before I resume general blogging, here are some notes and observations from moving my blog from Movable Type 3.3 to WordPress. If you are considering WordPress for your blog, you may find this interesting.

Printer-friendly versions. For those of you wondering what happened to printer-friendly versions of my blog posts, they have not gone away, just changed. Simply print whatever page you want. Ads, comments and text in the right two columns will not be printed. To see what I mean do a Print Preview. As part of upgrading, I decided that using @print Cascading Style Sheet commands was a more intuitive and better way to implement this feature.

Redirection. I felt it was crucial that links that used to work on MovableType still work in WordPress. I documented some of how I solved this in this post. In some cases, changing WordPress’s permalink structure did not solve my problem. I had to dig into the details of an Apache mod called mod_rewrite. Like many things about Apache, the syntax was a bit cryptic but I struggled through it. I discovered an undocumented “feature” that WordPress will periodically rewrite part of your .htaccess file between the “# BEGIN WordPress” and the “# END WordPress” lines. Once I put my mod_rewrite redirection commands before the “#BEGIN WordPress” line, my redirection commands were no longer overwritten. I had to redirect both my category and newsfeed links using mod_rewrite. I also had to edit a number of blog posts to correct URLs to my tag libraries.

Widgets vs. Plug-Ins. Widgets are objects that show some form of content which you can drag and drop into your sidebars. Plugins are programming extensions that add to or change the behavior of WordPress. Widgets require no programming, but plugins generally require a certain amount of programming skill to integrate them into existing templates. While I am a competent programmer, I found that if I looked long enough I could do it faster and easier with a widget. Go with widgets if you possibly can.

Things I like about WordPress

• Administrator Interface. It is much easier to navigate its administrator interface. The tab and sub-tab metaphor is so much more natural than Movable Type’s combinations of menus and tabs.
• Themes. The number of ready themes for WordPress is staggering and they look good. There are clearly many first class artists out there anxious to show off their talent. Even better, they are all free! I had a hard time choosing between them, but eventually settled on the Andreas-04 theme by Tara Aukerman. I chose it primarily because it would look familiar, but was classier than what I had (which in itself is quite a complement).
• Plugins and Widgets. Like with WordPress themes, there seem to be an almost unlimited number of these gizmos that will extend and customize WordPress. The hard part is finding the one you need. Some only work on earlier versions. Some are a bit flaky. With a couple of exceptions, I was able to find a plugin or widget for each of my complex needs.
• Pages that are not posts. I like the fact that I can use the editor to create pages that are not posts. The “About” page in the top right corner is an example. This gives me a way to put up relevant information like “I am going on vacation for a week” without it being treated as a blog post. If Movable Type had such a feature, I missed it.
• Blog post editor. Finally, a WYSIWYG blog editor. I may have to stop using MS Word to compose my blog posts. In addition, adding objects like images is done by simply pressing a button. Sweet.
• Blog post protection. You can password protect a post so only those who know the password can read it. I also understand you can create communities of users who are privileged to read certain categories of posts. I do not need this feature but it is nice to know it is available.
• Emails to all subscribers. MT 3.3 could not do this.
• Search. Text search is built-in and very fast, unlike MT 3.3, which was unnaturally slow. Moreover, there is nothing to program. Just drop the search widget in on one of your sidebars and you are done.
• User accounts. I like that users can create accounts and see versions of the blog. Users can also be granted special privileges.
• Dynamic text generation. Finally, the end of static pages. Blog content (except for specially designated permanent pages) are rendered on the fly. Static pages simply add overhead and reduce flexibility.
• Blog hiding. With one button, you can hide your blog from search engines.
• PHP based. PHP is much easier for the layman to program. So if you need to tweak or extend WordPress you do not necessarily have to be a rocket scientist to do it.

Things I liked better in Movable Type

• Archive and category management. In MT, archives and categories by default will show all entries. In WordPress, the number you get in an archive or category is the number that you allow displayed on your index page, which are typically 10 or 15 posts. I hope WordPress eventually fixes this limitation. Meanwhile, you can use the Different Posts per Page plug in that will give you equivalent functionality. However, WordPress does allow archives and categories to be placed on sidebars by dragging the widget to the spot you want.
• Tags. WordPress seems to have a bug in that it cannot distinguish between a tag and a category when they are named the same. MT does not have this problem. In general, tags are better thought out in MT, perhaps because they are brand new to WordPress. MT will suggest tags to use if you type part of it on the command line. This is more intuitive.
  

Useful Widgets

• Daiko’s Text Widget. This is very useful because you can embed PHP code inside it yet drop the widget into a sidebar. It became my solution for showing “The Best of Occam’s Razor” posts in my sidebar.
• AdSense Manager. This widget made adding Google Adsense code very straightforward. Its only limitation is that there appears to be no way to tell it to display ads only on certain pages. I would prefer to hide ads on my index page.
• Creative Commons License Widget. This widget made it easy for me to add my licensing information without hard-coding HTML.
• Get Recent Comments. In MT, I found I had to code some template tags to show my recent comments on my blog pages. With WordPress, I just used this widget and I could place recent comments on all my pages.
• Subscribe2. Handles advanced email notifications. With the Subscribe2 widget, you drop the control on your page. With it, your readers have much more flexibility. You can unsubscribe (a feature not available in MT 3.3) as well as select to get emails only for certain categories.

Useful Plugins

• Akismet. The Akismet plug in is a godsend. It redirects comments and trackbacks through the Akismet spam engine, which seems to be a foolproof way to ensure spam does not affect your blog. Akismet is so essential that it is built into WordPress. However, it must be enabled. To enable it, you first need to get an Akismet key by creating an account on the WordPress site and then enable Akismet spam filtering on your blog. If you do not bother you will soon wish you had.

October 25th, 2007 at 10:11pm Posted by Mark | Technology | no comments

A new look

As you may have noticed, the blog has undergone something of a facelift. After a couple weeks of struggling, I moved my blog from proprietary Movable Type software to open source GPL WordPress software. While not all the features of the old blog are in place it is 95% there. It is good enough to switch while I tackle the remaining features that still need work.What is still missing? I have not yet succeeded in moving over the post tags. I tried to write a program to do it for me, but it is complex. It may be easier to copy and paste the tags for all 700+ posts piecemeal over the next several weeks than to finish debugging the program I wrote.

I have not yet found a WordPress plug in or widget that will show all tags on a master tag page. Instead, for now I have a “tag cloud” which you can see in the second column. The tag cloud lists popular tags, but not all of them. In addition, since I have tagged recent posts only, the tag cloud does not accurately represent all the post tags.

Email notifications are also incomplete. Notifications in WordPress are fancier than what I had in Movable Type. To receive an email when a post is made, simply enter your email address in the box in the second column and press the Send button. You can unsubscribe the same way.

If you take the time to create an account on this site, then you can subscribe to notifications for certain categories only. By creating an account (look for the link under the Meta section in the right hand column), you can also tweak your notification settings to request either an excerpt or the full post. In addition, you can request the post be formatted as HTML or as text.

Other features not installed: a Google Search box and disabling ads on the main index page. In addition, some utilities I wrote (such as one that lists all my posts with word counts) need to be rewritten. Perhaps these will come with time.

Overall, with a fair amount of research, ingenuity and elbow grease I was able to replicate virtually all of the features I had on Movable Type.

I hope you enjoy the new look. I believe that by using WordPress I will be able to offer more features for readers. I will also have an easier job of maintaining this place. In a future entry, I will get into my lessons learned from this rather major move.

October 22nd, 2007 at 07:24pm Posted by Mark | Life 2007 | no comments

WordPressing

I hope to change my blogging software to WordPress within the next month. Currently I am using Movable Type to host this blog. I would like to say I am a loyal Movable Type customer, since I have used it for the nearly five years I have been hosting this blog. However, since its license allows me to use it for free for personal use, I never actually bought the software. That is not to say I have not given its owners, SixApart, some money. I needed to buy support when I re-hosted this year in order to make the dynamic publishing feature work. That cost me $50 and made me start wondering if I wanted to convert to WordPress, which serves all its content dynamically.

No, I stayed with Movable Type not necessarily out of loyalty, but mostly out of convenience. Just as after a certain point it is hard to move from Quicken to Microsoft Money because of the hassle of retraining, so it seemed easier to stay with Movable Type than work my way through the myriad issues associated with moving from one blogging solution to another.

Nonetheless, I am taking the plunge. I recently received an announcement from SixApart informing me that Movable Type 4.0 was ready. It extolled all its wonderful and latest features. Did I really want to upgrade and spend the considerable time learning how to use all these new features, particularly when I would not use most of them? Should I stay with Movable Type 3.3 until it gradually deteriorated into irrelevance? On the other hand, should I bite the bullet and move to what most of us non-commercial bloggers use today, which is WordPress?

Since yesterday was a holiday for me and being geeky looked more appealing than weeding the garden, I took the plunge. Installing WordPress, an open source blogging solution, turned out to be painless. I had to create a new MySQL database instance (easy enough to do in phpMyAdmin), copy the files over to my web server, edit a few settings in a configuration file, and then run the installation program. Installation time: about 15 minutes.

Next step: move 700 plus blog entries and 400 plus comments from Movable Type to WordPress. After digging through the WordPress documentation, I discovered I had to export my entries in Movable Type then import them into WordPress. It was relatively straightforward. Total time: another 15 minutes.

Unfortunately, by default all my WordPress posts will have URLs that are completely different from the URLs generated by Movable Type. All those search engine links would become obsolete meaning that Google might unlist my blog again. This would not do, so I went hunting through the documentation to find out how to solve the problem. Blessedly, WordPress has a way so that you can create a customized path and post names for your entries. I could make the resulting URLs look just like on Movable Type. Problem solved?

Not quite. There was a significant number of impedance issues resulting from blogging for five years with Movable Type. For one thing, until mid 2005, Movable Type limited entry name URLs to 15 characters. (Before that, entry names were numbers, like 000001.html.) Therefore, if your entry was titled “This is a long entry name” the resulting URL was “this_is_a_long.html”. If you wrote another entry with a similar name Movable Type would make sure you didn’t reuse the same name, so the next one was “this_is_a_long_1.html”. During one Movable Type upgrade, this limitation went away so I allowed entry name URLs to be up to 50 characters long, but this still left hundreds of entries where the entry name URL was truncated at 15 characters. In addition, WordPress puts dashes where blank spaces would be in your URLs. Movable Type substitutes underscores. I followed the helpful online advice but still had hundreds of mismatched URLs. Eventually, in frustration I wrote a little PHP script that identified the mismatched URLs. I also came up with a strategy for fixing discrepancies in the 15-character entry name URLs. Many of these entries had underscores in the last character that had to be fixed. Most of these could be fixed with one SQL statement.

When I make the switch to WordPress, my individual entry and monthly archives should now match correctly. Category archives though are not so simple. Had they been stored under /category/archive_name it would be straightforward but I have them under /archive_name. I am still pondering how to solve this one. The most expeditious way seems to be to create symbolic links.

In addition, currently there is no way to move over my Movable Type entry tags. This is an issue that must be solved before I can migrate the blog. The good news is that by examining how tags are stored in Movable Type and WordPress, I think I have found a way to do it using SQL and PHP. I will be testing it when I have some spare time. Moving over the tags was not possible until I first had addressed the inconsistent URLs.

I know there are all sorts of other embedded URLs that will break that will need to be addressed. These include tag archive URLs, feed URLs and differences in the search interface. Then there is the look of the blog itself. There is no utility to move over Movable Type templates, so once rehosted in WordPress, this site will have to look a bit different. Fortunately, WordPress has hundreds of themes to choose from, and they are much easier to edit than Movable Type templates. My WordPress blog is a work progress and can be viewed here. If you have any feedback on the look and feel let me know.

Overall, WordPress is slick. The user interface is much more straightforward and feels more powerful than Movable Type. It is also wholly written in PHP. Movable Type started out as a Perl application, and in my current incarnation, it is a mixture of Perl and PHP. However, I understand PHP and loathe Perl, and I know that PHP is highly scalable. WordPress will be very fast and easier for me to customize with my own programs than Movable Type. WordPress, being open source, is unlikely to disappear. Both Movable Type and WordPress have plug in architectures, but WordPress has a huge user community. Consequently the selection of templates, plug ins and widgets is much greater. Moreover, it is likely that upgrading WordPress will be much more straightforward and less of a hassle than Movable Type. Therefore, I am confident this project will pay off in the end.

I thought there would be more users who had moved over their blogs from Movable Type to WordPress. While there are clearly some, the online documentation was inadequate. Therefore, I have been contributing to improving the documentation by adding my experience in the WordPress Wiki. While wikis have been around for a while, I am still taken aback that I can make changes instantly to their official online documentation and no one bothers to review these changes.

So I expect things to look a bit different around here within a month. One thing will not change: I will continue to set high standards for myself for all the entries I place here.

October 9th, 2007 at 09:26am Posted by Mark | Technology | one comment

Is this the best political blog?

So many blogs and so little time! So many blogs, yet most of them are just spinning variants of the top news stories that show up on Yahoo News. This means if you read many blogs then you are also dealing with a lot of noise, because you have likely read much of the content elsewhere. (I strive to make my blog different. It is my hope you get generally unique insight from my blog. I cannot say that of most of the blogs I read.) While blog sites offer a comfortable feeling of community for like-minded people, not that many of them can put it altogether. This is especially true in the complex world of American politics.

Many bloggers claim to be able to see the forest through the trees, but few have the combination of education, experience, content and depth of knowledge to see the forest clearly. Billmon used to share this amazing talent with the world. Alas, Billmon’s blog is no more. Steve Gilliard’s blog is no more either. (In Steve’s case, he actually died. Billmon just retired.) Therefore, for some time I have been hunting for a political blog site that could do both Billmon and Steve Gilliard justice.

Some have come close. Digby, for example, is full of useful political analysis of current events. In my mind is the best political blog written by a woman. Others are noteworthy. The Veracifier video blog hosted by Talking Points Memo has Joshua Micah Marshall dissecting current events by inserting actual recorded political events. Huffington Post is something like the National Inquirer of political blogs. It is sassy and spicy and throws in the latest celebrity news for our consumption. Juan Cole’s Informed Comment remains excellent because he is an academic specializing in Middle East studies. However, when he strays outside his area of expertise he is not as sharp. Atrios has a huge following but little in the way of detailed political analysis that I need. Still, Atrios may be the Strunk and White of bloggers. Each word is pungent enough to carry ten other words with it. He is a master of being expressive while being terse.

There are a number of journalists associated with The Washington Post worth reading. For general snarkiness and for meticulously documenting the context of Washington’s political events, Dana Milbank’s Washington Sketch is a must-read. He is not really a blogger though. He is a paid columnist. Dan Froomkin of the Washingtonpost.com’s White House Watch blog is full of useful insider Washington facts that generally do not appear elsewhere. He deserves book marking too.

I wait for the unlikely return of Billmon. Meanwhile, there is Kevin Drum who arguably is just as good as Billmon. If my blogging time is limited and I need someone who can both find the golden nuggets of political news and put it into realistic perspective, Kevin Drum’s Political Animal blog is the place to go. His blog on the Washington Monthly web site offers what I consider the best mixture of insight and content, much of which either cannot be found elsewhere, or which ordinary blogs do not deem worthy of comment.

So who is Kevin Drum anyhow? Thanks to Wikipedia, I learn that Kevin is a 48-year-old man who hosted the now defunct CalPundit blog. For someone who seems to understand Washington like the back of his hand, he hangs out in Long Beach, California. He is married and has two cats. Pictures of his cats tend to show up on Fridays, when he like many bloggers feels compelled to share the latest pictures of his furry friends lounging around the house.

For a career that included being a city editor, high tech marketer and an IT consultant, he seems an odd choice for being such a top-notch political blogger. In fact, his career does not look too different from my own. I studied journalism, but my bachelor’s degree was in communications. I moved into the information technology field because I found it fascinating and it paid much better than communications. I was never in the marketing side of IT, but I am currently in the management side, which pays very well indeed. Unlike Kevin, who now earns his money as the paid blogger for Washington Monthly, my blog site at best generates only a couple hundred bucks in Google Adsense revenue a year. I have a feeling that if Kevin lived down the street from me we would be great friends.

As you might expect his blog has a liberal bent. Unlike many political blogs though, he is not blinded by his liberalism. He can see merits in other points of view and is not hesitant to write cautions and concerns into his blog entries. Like the best bloggers such as Atrios and the retired Billmon, he can find the connections that elude most of the rest of us.

If you are a political animal like me, you too should be reading Kevin’s Political Animal blog regularly. In fact, if your time is very limited Kevin’s blog should be the only one you read. He is that good.

October 7th, 2007 at 01:05pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2007 | 13 comments

It’s too soon to say goodbye, Steve

The still nascent blogging world lost something of a minor star yesterday. Steve Gilliard, a prominent liberal blogger and one of the first guest bloggers to contribute regularly to the megablogging site DailyKos died yesterday at age 41.

I never met Steve although I did trade some minor correspondence with him. I am sure if Steve were still alive he would not know me from Adam. My fascination with Steve goes back at least the last seven years, which in Internet time is forever. For I knew Steve before blogging even got started. You might say that Dilbert introduced me to Steve. Dilbert parodies the frantic overworked world of the information technology professional, of which I am one. Netslaves.com was the premier site where disgruntled IT workers came together to bitch. I was not particularly disgruntled. As a civil servant, I could at least count on regular hours and a decent salary. However, I did feel a certain voyeuristic thrill reading Netslaves.com. For a number of years it stood true to its purpose: to give IT people a place to gripe. Over time, it evolved into more of a political site where hotheads, principally men, spent their time bitching at other hotheads from the other side of the political spectrum. In that sense, it was probably unique. The liberal and conservative political camps all have their separate blog sites now and generally, they do not bother to post on each other’s blogs. If they do, they are likely to get troll rated and thrown off the blog.

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, that kind of sophisticated software was not commercially available. Netslaves was one of many discussion sites that rolled their own discussion software since open source solutions like phpBB were not generally available. The flame wars were thick on Netslaves. Occasionally though a few voices of sanity would come through. Steve Gilliard was one of these voices. If I recall correctly, Steve was also one of the founding members of Netslaves. Alas, Netslaves is no more. The domain exists but has no meaningful content. It exists simply to re-serve ads.

A few times a week Steve would post profound little essays with his opinions on the political issues of the day. Steve wowed me with the quality of his writing, the depth of his analysis and his pugnacious, in your face attitude. When Netslaves folded, I was devastated. I was used to my Steve Gilliard fix and sites like Commondreams.org just were not cutting it. By early 2002, I was Googling his name. I found he had relocated to this site called DailyKos.com, which was something called a blog. Back then, blogs were mere curiosities.

I was one of the early members of DailyKos, finding it within a few months of its startup when it was just another MovableType blog. Steve Gilliard drew me in but I was soon also consumed by the other guest bloggers on the site including Kos (Moulitsas) and Meteor Blades. Finally, here was a site with the up to date political news, analysis and perspective that I wanted plus I could talk back in the comments. I was one of many hungry people on the Internet that turned blogging from a curiosity into a social and political force. Soon, I was hooked. I started this blog in December 2002 and I am still at it. (This is entry 678, BTW.)

DailyKos kept growing and it became harder for people like Steve to get a word in edgewise. Steve eventually figured he needed to move on and he created his own blog, The News Blog. I was one of many who encouraged him to get his own blog.

Steve was an unapologetic liberal blogger. However, do not make the mistake of thinking he was some namby-pamby limp-wristed liberal. He was African American and a New Yorker and proud of it. Few things got his dander up more than right wing African Americans like Clarence Thomas. When he blogged, he was a take no prisoners type of blogger. He had balls. From the wholesale cut and pasting of news stories off Internet sites to his fearlessly raising tough issues that other blogs would not touch, The News Blog was singularly unique. Reading The News Blog you also got some personal insight into Steve. You learned about his partner Jen (although his relationship with her was murky, I did discern that she was white) who posted occasionally. You also learned about his fascination for food. I have to wonder if this fascination contributed to his hospital stays. The first hospitalization took him offline for several weeks, but fans of The News Blog simply used the site to keep up his spirits. Some weeks back he was rushed to the hospital again. He had open-heart surgery and clearly never recovered. To satisfy the morbid curiosity of his fans, I hope the family will eventually get more details of his death. It sounds like heart disease was the culprit.

What astounded me about Steve (and which was true about most bloggers I admire) was how well read he was. On military matters, he had few peers. He was one of the few brave souls who before our debacle in Iraq began was jumping up and down saying, “Don’t go! Don’t go!” It was not because he did not think we could whip Saddam’s ass; he was certain their government would quickly fall. It was because he was fully up on the history of Iraq, including all the ethnic tensions. He knew about the long problem the British Empire acquired when Iraq became one of its spoils of World War I. Democracy had been tried before in Iraq, and the result devolved into an ineffectual king, his eventual overthrow, the rise of the Ba’athist Party and Saddam Hussein. He knew that Iraq was a country in name only and that when push came to shove its ethnic differences would triumph over its weak nationalism. He knew our invading would allow those forces to become unleashed. He did not think the United States military should be kept on the sidelines after 9/11, just used where it could be effective. He kept asking the same question repeatedly, “Why aren’t we going after Osama bin Laden?” Arguably, 9/11 made us a bit crazy as a nation. Steve was one of a small minority of people who had the maturity, knowledge, political perspective and confidence to assert that our invasion of Iraq would be the folly that it is.

In some ways, Steve was not as liberal as he might appear. While he certainly believed in equal rights for all, he was not one of these strident supporters of homosexual rights. I got the feeling homosexuality left him a bit squeamish. Where Steve excelled was in putting events into their proper context and seeing through the tons of political bullshit. I do not know much about his upbringing, but I got the feeling he was streetwise. If you are streetwise, you develop a sixth sense about a person’s true character. Steve had that ability. Hillary Clinton was one of many politicians, including Rudy Giuliani whose façade he easily pierced.

His blog The News Blog was a very active site. Sadly, I felt it devolved into mediocrity. I suspect Steve’s health issues played a big part. He felt he had to put out the goods and so every day he posted of dozens of verbatim news articles that he found interesting. His comments though were often superficial and trite. Sadly, after a while I read The News Blog less and less. Usually at least once a week though I would go through it and look for those nuggets of insightful commentary that Steve was known for.

I think Steve would have done much better had he posted just one tenth of what he did. Bloggers like the lamented Billmon (who is still very much alive, just not blogging) prove that you do not have to post multiple times a day to be an effective blogger. That has been my approach here on Occam’s Razor. I try to post every two to three days, convinced that less can be much more. For those of us trying to add value in a crowded blogging world, I think we are most effective when we give new entries a few days to percolate before they are publicly consumed. Otherwise, blogging can devolve into mediocrity.

Still, I am mourning for Steve. I felt like I knew his soul. I read testimonials that in person he was uniformly a sweet and gentle person. Regardless, he was one of the Internet’s first powerful blogging forces. Some day the history of blogging will be detailed in a book. There had better be a chapter for Steve Gilliard in there. He earned it.

Rest in peace Steve. God, I am going to miss you.

June 3rd, 2007 at 05:34pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2007 | no comments

SiteMeter vs. StatCounter: a comparison

As you may have noticed, I use SiteMeter to monitor traffic on this blog. I chose SiteMeter about three years ago because it had name recognition and everyone else seemed to be using it. As I mentioned in this entry on SiteMeter, its hit count is imprecise at best. This is because it can really only monitor traffic on your site served as web pages. (That is why I also use Feedreader for those who prefer to use newsreaders, and offer users the option to subscribe to receive my entries via email.) Moreover, it will not catch all your traffic served as web pages. A surfer may elect to turn off Javascript, not to display any images, or hide details about themselves. There is no guarantee that the SiteMeter’s code in your web pages will successfully report back to SiteMeter. We all get “page not found” errors regularly. A similar error can happen when the SiteMeter code is executed, except it is less likely to be noticed. Even if the tracking data reaches SiteMeter, there is no guarantee that it will actually be recorded in their log. SiteMeter is not alone. Any service like SiteMeter suffers similar limitations.

The basic SiteMeter service is free. It shows detailed statistics for only the last 100 page views. Nevertheless, it suffices to give you an idea of your site’s traffic. Its reports may not be comprehensive, but at least the information is instantly available and up to the minute. If you have to depend on log analysis tools that come from your web host (typically Awstats) your information will be up to 24 hours old.

So SiteMeter mostly works, even if it is imprecise and occasionally slow. It satisfies my curiosity to know how heavily trafficked my blog is and if a particular entry is spurring any interest. Lately though, SiteMeter has been failing me. My statistics are collected on their sm1 server. It experienced problems on March 3rd and SiteMeter is still trying to recover. (It looks like they may lose all my historical data.) As a result, I have not been able to get my daily buzz from examining my metadata.

SiteMeter will probably get their act back together in time. In the interim, I decided to try a similar service. With a little Googling, I found StatCounter. I have been running it for a few days. I am trying to decide if I like it better than SiteMeter. Like SiteMeter, its free version limits detailed information to the last 100 page views.

SiteMeter takes you right to the pay dirt. You are instantly shown a statistics page showing things like the number total visits and page views, along with today’s total number of visits and page views. StatCounter has the same information, but it makes you dig for it, and you frequently have to log in first. This adds a lot of unnecessary clicks and keystrokes. However, StatCounter’s summary page shows more information and includes both graphical and textual statistics on the same page, including textual page and visit counts. SiteMeter has this information in graphs only.

SiteMeter has a convenient “who’s on” link that tells you how many visitors you have had over the last X minutes, as well as some high level details about each visit. (You get to configure the value. The “who’s on” feature is misleading. The World Wide Web is inherently stateless, so there is no way to really know if someone is actually viewing your page at a given moment.) StatCounter has essentially three variations of this report, but with more detail than you probably want. Nor is it quite a “who’s on” feature because you cannot limit the recent visitors or page views to a given time period. Instead, you have to pick one of the “recent” reports.

SiteMeter has a traffic prediction feature. Based on your current traffic it will infer how many page view and visits you will get over the next hour, day, week or month. StatCounter has no such feature.

SiteMeter allows you to view visitors by details, referrals, world map (it places dots on a world map for recent visitors), location, entry pages and exit pages. StatCounter offers similar features but again provides more detail. SiteMeter does offer an out clicks feature. This can be quite useful. Unfortunately, StatCounter does not offer it.

SiteMeter offers handy graphics showing traffic by month, week, day and hour. StatCounter has the same information, but it also shows quarterly traffic. In addition, it provides the exact numbers, rather than just a graph. However, it is harder to find these graphics. You have to select the Summary option, and then look for the links.

SiteMeter offers some “navigation trends” like visit depth and daily durations, but only as graphics. StatCounter has nothing similar. SiteMeter can track usage by continents, countries, distance and time zone. StatCounter cannot do continents or time zones, but instead offers state/region statistics. (These statistics are likely meaningless, since the web host may be in a hosting center in Georgia, but the user may actually be in Virginia.) SiteMeter tracks visitors by their language, operating system, domain and organization. StatCounter does not track language but does a better job of tracking by domain. Both can track browser share, Javascript capability and monitor resolution. Unlike SiteMeter, StatCounter cannot track color depth.

Overall SiteMeter offers more ease of use, but fewer details and features. Stat Counter does offer some unique features. These include reports over date ranges, area graphs, better drill down features, tracking by search engine, icon hiding, export features and IP labeling. It also offers information on how many visitors are returning, a feature I find quite useful. Its recent visitor map is actually a Google Maps mash up, which is more useful and navigable than SiteMeter’s service. These extra features make it more cumbersome to use and navigate. For many people it will be TMI (too much information).

I cannot speak to StatCounter’s reliability and accuracy compared with SiteMeter’s. To be fair to SiteMeter, my recent problems have been the first in three years that have been severe. Its other past problems were annoying, but considering the price, I could live with them. If I do end up losing all my historical statistics, I will be upset with SiteMeter, since I will have lost the yearly history that shows traffic growth for this blog.

If you value simplicity, SiteMeter is the better service. SiteMeter’s categorized links makes it much easier to navigate to essential information. If you value depth of information, StatCounter is probably the better choice, even though its screens are often unnecessarily busy. Either solution is free with upgrade options if you want to track details for more than the last 100 page views, so it does not hurt to add code for both. Now that I have started using StatCounter, I will continue to use it. However, I will not get rid of SiteMeter either. Both have their uses. Some months of experiencing both side by side will give me a better appreciation for the features of each.

March 15th, 2007 at 09:56pm Posted by Mark | Technology | one comment

Not just another blog

Here I am at entry number 637, four years, two months and ten days since my first blog entry in 2002. Yes, it is 701,906 words later and sometimes feel like I have expounded about everything possible. Yet curiously, I have never taken this time to explain what this blog is about.

I have explained why I blog. I have also provided periodic blog entries where I captured most popular entries and my blog’s growth statistics. However, I have never explained the purpose of my blog, Occam’s Razor.

This blog is not here to discuss Occam’s Razor or to suggest all of life’s weirdness can be understood through the rigorous application of its principle. Wikipedia does a decent job of explaining Occam’s Razor:

The principle states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating, or “shaving off”, those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory.

To put it more simply:

All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one.

For me the key words here are “tends to”. In my blog, I do not assert that the simplest explanation is always the explanation. The principle only asserts that the simplest explanation is the safest bet. If I had to bet my life on two explanations for something I did not understand, I would choose the simpler one because I would be more likely to survive. Perry Mason endings are entertainment. Real life is typically more prosaic.

This is not to say that if you scratch beneath the surface a bit, the ordinary cannot be quite complex. In essence that is the raison d’etre of my blog Occam’s Razor. Its intent is to examine the ordinary and discern what really makes it tick. A good example is my entry Infidelity: It’s Not So Simple published in June 2004. That adultery happens is hardly extraordinary. At the surface level, infidelity is about cheating. However, this is like saying your backyard consists of grass. It is not until you take a spade to your lawn and see the life teaming in and under it, that you realize that there is more to grass than grass. Grass depends on soil, water, sunshine and a host of other factors. Similarly, infidelity happens for many of the reasons that I suggested in that entry, not because “the bastard cheated on me”.

My blog Occam’s Razor asserts that everything is connected. Because this is true, things can be both blindingly simple and inordinately complex at the same time. This blog is my attempt to pull back the curtains of our existence and expose the real Wizard of Oz. It is my attempt to discern and explain the complexity that most of us cannot or choose not to see that exists in the simple and the ordinary.

Some of you are going to have problems with this idea. “How can something be simple and complex at the same time?” (Hmm, it occurs to me that I gave Catholics a hard time for just this reason recently. Please excuse the hypocrisy.) If you believe in black and white, but no shades of grey, then you might as well stop reading. The premise behind my blog is that the world is what it is. It often provides the illusion of simplicity. However, tilt the prism and what looks simple can become devilishly complex. I am driven to try to find and document the complexity behind the simple. I rarely categorically assert that my analysis is indisputable, but hope that you will give it some consideration.

Perhaps I have a mental problem, but I seem to be driven to analyze everything. My brain is constantly sifting through patterns, some explicit, some covert and looking for connections. It may be that most of the connections that I infer are not there, but I need the connections for my own sanity. Otherwise, the universe is simply random chaos. If there is one thought that terrifies me, it is that underlying the universe there is nothing but utter meaninglessness.

Unfortunately, inspiration does not come every day. I also have a busy life outside of my blogging. When these occasions occur, it becomes a convenient distraction to pull out something from the ether and expound on it as an entry. Items that fill my Life categories fall into the miscellaneous noise that I encounter during life. I feel it should be documented, mostly for my own purposes. I offer them to the universe in case anyone finds them interesting.

This blog often feels like a Seinfeld episode. If Seinfeld was a show about nothing, this blog is a blog about nothing in particular. It really has no principle theme. However, it does desire to be a smorgasbord of well-structured and well-written thought. It prefers to enlighten, but it is sufficient if it just amuses. It abhors only your indifference. I try very hard to write quality original content. Of course, there is very little in the world that is truly original. Many of my ideas have been stated before somewhere else. With luck, I might package them better.

Perhaps now that I have explained what this blog is about, you will be able to appreciate it more. If this sort of place tickles your fancy then please bookmark it and return regularly; your time and attention is appreciated and makes me feel flattered. Please share my blog with any friends of a similar mind. And please, leave thoughtful comments. I enjoy all comments that I receive.

Now that I have this off my chest, back to my regular fare.

February 23rd, 2007 at 06:43pm Posted by Mark | Life 2007 | one comment

The Blog Returns

Google seems to have found its senses. I reappeared in its search index today around 12 o’clock Eastern Standard Time, after being ignored by Google for two months and 18 days.

I am not sure why it happened today. Perhaps it occurred because a few days back I requested a Google reinclusion. This was something I had not tried before, mainly because it was deeply buried in their web pages so I didn’t notice it.

I am skeptical that I will get the traffic I did before I was dropped, but time will tell. Anyhow, it now behooves me to be good on my word to my readers and resume blogging again.

Resuming blogging this week will be challenging because life finds me in Boulder, Colorado. I am at my brother’s fiancée’s house. I will be in the Denver area all week to participate in some training. I will likely see plenty of Denver this year. I should be back at least three more times before July. But hopefully my evenings this week will leave me reasonably free and I will have time to do some serious blogging again.

My thanks to all who left comments telling me how much they appreciated my blog. I will try to live up to your high opinions of me.

January 21st, 2007 at 06:24pm Posted by Mark | Life 2007 | 5 comments

The blog goes dormant

I wanted to have a blog that meant something to me, and that provided some unique thoughts and perspective to the world. Until early November 2006, my modest goals seemed to be within reach. It was about that time that Google unceremoniously pulled my blog from its search index. More than two months later, I am still stuck in the Internet’s version of Siberia, with no way to change my situation. My SiteMeter page views, which reliably were between 150 and 200 page views per day before last November, dribbled to as little as 14 yesterday. A simple query on Google’s search index on “Occam’s Razor” returns nothing related to my site. In fact, if you try this query you will see that its search index contains not a single reference to this blog.

There almost seems to be a cascading effect. I remain in other search indexes like Yahoo and MSN, but because I am not in Google’s it seems like with every passing day that I rank lower and lower in their search indexes too. This translates into fewer and fewer hits.

So I am at a loss. I can continue to write blog entries for my own amusement and for a handful of family or friends that visit this place regularly. Or I can decide that blogging when my content cannot be found amounts to a waste of my time, and I should be doing other things instead.

I choose the latter. I will continue to do what I can to influence Google to index this site again, although I have followed their guidance to the tee. Creating and managing a quality blog is hard work. I have worked very hard to provide a quality blog for more than four years. Nevertheless, creating and updating a blog that hardly anyone can find is a waste of my time. Life is too short for my time to be squandered on a futile endeavor.

Unlike President Bush, who thinks that more of the same failed strategy in Iraq will work wonders, I am under no illusions. I may post the occasional entry here from time to time. Moreover, I do hope to be back in force once I am listed in the Google search index again. Until that happens, this blog goes dormant. I will use my time more productively: to read, research, indulge my other hobbies, play the good father and husband, and maybe actually smell a rose or two. However, I will be back once I am indexed by Google again.

Please do not throw away your bookmarks to my blog. I hope this is just a sabbatical and not the end. If you enjoy a good discussion, consider becoming a member of my forum, The Potomac Tavern, where you will always find me having conversations with my friends. Enjoy my archives because I believe I have left a lot of thoughtful and rich content. My Best of Occam’s Razor category is especially worth your time. In addition, feel free to leave comments (which I will approve) or send me email. You can also call Google to complain.

Let me extend my thanks and appreciation to all who have spent and enjoyed your time here. Thank you for all those who have posted comments. Whether this blog comes back to life though is no longer in my hands, but in Google’s.

January 14th, 2007 at 09:42am Posted by Mark | Life 2007 | 6 comments