Wednesday, August 21, 2002

Wednesday topics: Humor; Links; e-Organization; Radio Education. [New British law makes many British web sites illegal, unless we know how to comply.]  Watch out for broken links from here, when exploring related stories. The rules are now legally binding on everyone who advertises or sells goods via a website, mobile phone or through e-mail.  Everyone in UK, to UK, from UK ??? Does this NOT apply to services?  They are not going to enforce it against spammers, and no one will be held liable for illegal stuff that manages to flow through their networks, so basically legitimate businesses have regulations that should apply to any e-commerce enterprise, while the e-gangsters continue to overwhelm everyone. Let's assume for the moment that we are a business. I am not, but business is in the eyes of government agencies that want to tax and regulate us. If anyone places an order through my web site, I must promptly acknowlege it. I am not selling anything, but if someone wants to send me a check to buy the Brooklyn Bridge or the Eiffel Tower, I will happily cash your check and print up for you a certificate of sale. Whole bunch of other good rules for commercial sites. 10:42:53 PM

Battling Information Overload in general is the topic today Aug 21 from [Search Day] written by [Mary Ellen Bates].  [How Much Information] measures how much is generated in the world each year.  [Inc Data Data] figures how much time people waste looking for it. Battling Disk Space Overloaded on your home PC is today's Aug 21 topic from [Woody's Windows]. 10:20:25 PM

Thanks [Blogfish] Lance Knobel has an interesting scandal map on his weblog. from [John Robb's Radio Weblog] Tuftian version of the business section.  UNQUOTE [Blogfish] 1:34:09 PM

Here is a challenge that will come to all of us sooner or later, so perhaps we can learn from this how we can cope when it happens.  In the last 24 hours my Radio has gone from 98% to 97% of 40 Meg free.  I think it is probably due to my new stories, and I am now up to 22 News Aggregation Channel Subscriptions. [Christian Crumlish (xian): salonika] QUOTE Yes, the problem is I've maxed out my server space at Salon's host, so I suppose this means moving over to my FTP server again. Even then, though I'll need to replace the home page at blogs.salon.com/0001111/ with some sort of link or redirect to the new address, or it will look like a dead blog to anyone coming in from an old bookmark or link! But how do I do that when my allocation is full? How do I clear out the remote host without killing my site? UNQUOTE [Christian Crumlish (xian): salonika] Am I stating the obvious? Ask your ISP about buying a larger allocation. I added some more thoughts in Radio Discussion Thread. My most useful idea, in my opinion, is to search the Discussion Archives for the practicality of running two versions of Radio on same site at same time, for ease of moving stuff from old site to new site, and replacing old copy with pointers to new site. If you do that, first move to the new site, that on the old PC copy never got to the old site, so that does not get to the old site as you clean out enough disk space to make room for the pointers. URL not coming across so here it is http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/2002/08/18/understandRadioCategories.html In my essay "Understand Radio Categories", note the very last section on What else good to know about Categories where I direct you to Radio documentation on how to publish a category to a different FTP server.  If you organize your stuff into Categories that are each hosted by different ISP, then it will be a longer time interval between incidents of having to deal with this. When you get your new url operational. carefully review if there is anything on your old archives that you could move to your replacement site.  Especially anything that is a reasonably large chunk of text. The reason for a large chunk of text is to clear space on your old allocation, with minimum effort on your part. After you know for sure the old archives stuff is on the new. See if the old archives will let you edit so as to replace that large chunk of text with a one liner that redirects people to the new location. The reason for that is courtesy for anyone who has linked to stuff in your old archives. Now see if the verbiage that exited your old archives was in sufficient volume to permit the addition of a post on top pointing people to your new site. In the future, create a dummy post that is large enough to accomodate this kind of information, linking people to another site. The game plan is that when the ceiling is hit, and you have the new site, replace the dummy post with the new link. Consult with your filled up ISP. They may be able to improve on these suggestions. 12:55:07 PM

Tuesday's Topics were: Current Events, History, Humor, e-law, e-organization, Radio Education.  Continuous Improvement is one of my Goals.  I applied John Patrick's technique yesterday, and it is looking good.  I am pleasantly surprised to see a recent addition to [Don's Documentation Directory] for Radio Weblog users ... I am planning others in my Understanding series, and have added a few Categories as I implement what I have learned. 11:32:33 AM

For those lamenting about how fast we use up our available disk space, my Weblog is now at 98% of 40.0 Meg unused (it was at 99% free for a long time). 12:12:03 AM

Timothy Leary. "Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition." [Quotes of the Day] [dws.] I have seen variations on that before.  One of my favorite 'dumb men' jokes (that is not off-color): How many men does it take to change roll of toilet paper?  We not know, it has not happened yet. Or computer technician humor. How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?  None - that's a hardware problem. 12:04:11 AM

© Copyright 2002 Al Macintyre.