MT.Net

There are 150 posts filed in MT.Net (this is page 7 of 15).

Google search-by-image

Because I love to see where my public-domain photo of Raleigh will show up next, I decided to give Google’s new search-by-image service a test drive. I uploaded a small size of my pic and lo and behold, Google provided me many, many search results showing where my photo is being used.

So far that’s ABC11 (WTVD), NBC 17 (WNCN), the City of Raleigh (who Photoshopped a light pole out of it!), MSNBC, Business Week, Yahoo! Finance, several local businesses including Four Points Sheraton in Cary, Allied movers, Signs By Tomorrow, and several real estate companies and taxi companies among many, many others. Good to see how far it’s traveled!

Neuse Radio almost here

I’ve been perfecting my Neuse Radio streaming station lately and I’ve almost gotten it to the point where I can let the world listen.

It’s running on the open-source Rivendell radio automation suite, patched through the open-source JACK audio server, encoded with the open-source DarkIce encoder, streamed with the open-source Icecast2 server, and hosted on my CentOS-based VPS in Ashburn, Virginia.

It’s so automated that I don’t have to do anything to keep the music flowing. If I want I can add some chatter (called voice-tracking in the industry parlance) between songs to give it a live sound, but I tend to let the music run without interruption.
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Press released

In my inbox today was a request from the City of Raleigh’s public affairs department for my resume and bio. The city is apparently working up a press release about my becoming chair of the city’s Parks board and my fellow boardmember Kimberly Siran becoming vice-chair.

Of course, it would have to take a really, really slow news day for this to get into print anywhere. I’m talking like double-dog slow. Even so, it’s pretty novel for me to be the subject of a press release.

At least one news source will be covering it: my blog! Once it’s released I’ll post a copy!

Blogosphere fame

Out of all the thousands of people at Reynolds Coliseum today I was amused to see Shawn Rocco walking by, a day after the photo he took of me ran in the newspaper. I stopped him and said hello.

“Thanks for the picture, Shawn,” I told him. “That was great.”

No problem, he told me, and asked if it had led to anything yet. I laughed and told him no but I was staying hopeful.

“Hey,” he said. “I didn’t realize you were so big in the blogosphere!”

Well, that makes two of us! I chuckled and shook my head.

I’ve had others tell me that and it’s always news to me. Sure, my blog has a brag page and each of the things on it are most certainly true. My blog is but one of millions, though, and I really only write here because I love to write. It seems some people take it more seriously than I do, or at least consider it more seriously than I do.

And that’s fine. I enjoy sharing my thoughts here. Some of them I may even be proud of. But I do it really for me and if other folks enjoy my blog I consider it a bonus. For those of you who’ve been following along, thanks!

(… and don’t let the others know I’m making this up as I go!)

Roger Ebert: obsessive blogger

I was taken by this excerpt from movie critic Roger Ebert‘s memoirs, discussing how profoundly becoming a blogger affected him. I’ve always admired Ebert’s writing and to hear him praise blogging in this way means a lot to me.

My blog became my voice, my outlet, my “social media” in a way I couldn’t have dreamed of. Into it I poured my regrets, desires, and memories. Some days I became possessed. The comments were a form of feedback I’d never had before, and I gained a better and deeper understanding of my readers. I made “online friends,” a concept I’d scoffed at. Most people choose to write a blog. I needed to. I didn’t intend for it to drift into autobiography, but in blogging there is a tidal drift that pushes you that way. Getting such quick feedback may be one reason; the Internet encourages first-person writing, and I’ve always written that way. How can a movie review be written in the third person, as if it were an account of facts? If it isn’t subjective, there’s something false about it.

via I was born inside the movie of my life – Roger Ebert’s Journal.

Keep people from linking to your images

The IRS scam email below links to the IRS logo, on the IRS website itself! The government could avoid having its own bandwidth used for scams by adding some rewrite rules in Apache.

When I saw some of my photos being linked from other websites (usually forum-type sites that don’t provide their users the ability to upload their own files), I decided I didn’t want to foot the bill to host images shown on other websites. I followed this great tutorial and implemented my own RewriteRules, which have worked like a charm:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} \.(gif|jpe?g|png)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !no-direct-links\.png [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?markturner\.net/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?planettrilug\.org/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !search\?q=cache [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.markturner.net/wp-content/no-direct-links.png [R,NC,L]

These rules allow images to appear on my website, the PlanetTrilug website, and Google’s image searches, but any other sites linking directly to my images get a “No Direct Links” image instead.

I am pretty easygoing with the use of my images (many of them donated to the public domain), but hosting them for other sites costs me money. If you would like to post one of my images on your website, if it’s a public domain (or Creative Commons) one feel free! If it is not, shoot me an email and let me know your plans. Whatever you do, though, please use your own server. Don’t link directly to my images. Thanks!

5,000th post!

I just checked the official MT.Net counter and this marks my 5,000th blog post ever! That’s 500 posts per year for almost ten years (November 24th marks my decade blogging anniversary).

Thanks to all of my readers who’ve found something useful in what I write. And here’s to many more years of blogging!

Coffee and Google hits

I decided to wade into Google’s Webmaster Tools tonight, just to see how Google sees ol’ MT.Net. As typically happens on these adventures, I was amazed at what I learned.

One thing I never appreciated when I first began blogging is the power of images to attract web hits. I take hundreds of photos each week, and my lazy nature dictates that I often don’t bother naming them something descriptive: I simply copy them to the blog and assume the visitor will figure it out. Of course, web spiders, search engines, and the like cannot make sense of images, so services such as Google’s Image Search (GIS) must rely on metadata, filenames, and other information to properly index the images it finds. The long and the short of it is that my search hits have increased dramatically now that I’ve been giving more descriptive names to my images.

Tonight I discovered that my blog is one of the top hits for the “coffee” image search. My site earned 22,000 impressions from that term, leading visitors to my musing about the power of coffee.

Attached to that post was a wonderful image I obtained from Wikimedia Commons taken by Julius Schorzman (and seen above). Julius’s Creative Commons license stated that I did not have to attribute the photograph to him provided it was used on a non-profit site.

MT.Net is still free and worth every penny. Regardless, in light of the image’s popularity in GIS, I want to give credit where it’s due and thank Julius for allowing me to use his image.

AOL Mail is hopelessly FUBAR

You've got stupid!

I swear, the folks running AOL Mail couldn’t find their asses with both hands and a flashlight.

First, they lose their customers’ email in a huge crash, taking until yesterday to restore the email archives of users. Then in the middle of this disaster, they mistakenly flag my mailserver on their spam list. Only one anti-spam list (Barracuda Network’s) out of a dozen showed my server as blacklisted, but that was enough to kick me off of many services, as I said before. Barracuda immediately cleared my server but AOL continued to show it as a spam source. When I learned that a friend’s mailserver had also been mistakenly blacklisted, I grew more concerned.
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Could the Internet be shut down in US?

Wally Bowen of the Mountain Area Internet Network ponders whether the U.S. could be cut off from the Internet the way Egypt was.

After seeing what some anti-spam servers can do, I can say wholeheartedly that it can.

On National Public Radio last Saturday, host Scott Simon opined that a “central shutdown” of the Internet as occurred in Egypt was “unthinkable if not impossible” in the United States given the “thousands of Internet routes and providers” here.

Simon noted that Egypt’s four primary Internet service providers could be shut down “with just a few phone calls.” But the U.S. has only four companies — Comcast, Time-Warner, AT&T and Verizon — controlling most of our broadband access. More than 90 percent of U.S. broadband users have only one or two providers, a cable or telephone company, to choose from.

via Could the Internet be shut down in US? | citizen-times.com | Asheville Citizen-Times.