And I'm back on Wordpress (partially)

I have spent the last week trying to see if Tumblr could replace my Wordpress blog. This experiment has taught me some interesting things:

  1. The community on Tumblr is amazing.
  2. Tumblr is primarily geared towards sharing shorter thoughts and ideas. Want to throw a picture online. Easy. Share a video. No problem. Compose a more complex post with multiple images and videos. Much harder. Wordpress beats Tumblr hands down for longer posts.
  3. I love the Tumblr dashboard. So much great material scrolls by (assuming you are following the right people).
  4. Many Tumblr sites simply reblog others posts with out adding much original content. This is OK. Tumblr is designed to reblog and share material. Some Tumblblogs remind me of Myspace–endless pages of flashing gifs of talking heads.
  5. Despite optimizing some things, Tumblr sucks at SEO compared to Wordpress (unless you put in a lot of work).

Point #2 is what is giving me problems. It is too hard to create more complex posts compared to the Wordpress workflow I have established. There are also many things that I want to reblog but I don't want them cluttering up my site causing my original content to get lost.

So I have decided to move my "proper" blog back to Wordpress. This is where I will post my thoughts, write articles, and share links to things I find compelling. But I will still cross-post my articles from Wordpress to my Tumblr site1 so my Tumblr followers can conveniently follow what I write from their Dashboards. This also frees me up to reblog things to my hearts content on Tumblr without cluttering up my main site.

I look forward to continuing to develop relationships with my fellow Tumblrites.

  1. Using the Wordpress plugin Tumblrize ↩

The Astrophysics of Bedtime Stories

Chad Orzel's clever analysis of the children's book Goodnight Moon:

The attentive toddler will find a lot to look at in the pictures-- there's a mouse in every one that SteelyKid delights in pointing out-- but an inquiring adult might well ask "Just how long does it take this bunny to say goodnight to all this stuff, anyway?"

Well, we can answer this question with SCIENCE! You see, there are six pictures in the book showing the moon through one of the room's windows, and as the book goes along, the moon moves higher in the window. This provides a way to estimate the passage of time in the book.

How to increase the robustness of a custom domain on Tumblr

The Problem

About a month ago I began to notice that I could not reach Tumblr websites that use a custom domain name1. This became a problem when I decided to move the blog portion of Quantum Pie over to Tumblr and host it on my subdomain blog.quantumpie.com. Not being able to access your own blog from home sucks.

After doing some digging, I came across this informative post by the bảohouse about how to make a Tumblr custom domain more robust. All Tumblr domain names, by default, are routed through a server that is hosted by Rackspace. This is the 72.32.231.8. IP address that Tumblr tells you to point to when setting up a custom domain name. For some reason I could not reach this server from home.

The Solution

There are other servers that Tumblr uses to deal with custom domain names, but it does not publish these publicly. The trick is to let the internet know that these other servers can be used to find your custom domain.

To do this you must create additional A records in your DNS settings that point to your site. Just repeat the standard Tumblr instructions for setting up a custom domain name to create an A record for each of the following IP addresses:

  • 50.22.53.155
  • 50.22.53.157
  • 72.32.231.8 (the default Tumblr IP address)
  • 174.121.98.156
  • 174.121.66.230

It may take a few hours for the changes to take effect.

If you use a custom domain name with Tumblr, you should add these extra records. It will increase the robustness of your website.

  1. My ISP is Teksavvy. I highly recommend them. Much cheaper than many of the alternatives and they offer superior customer support. I am not sure if the fault for this lies with Teksavvy or with Tumblr and a poor server configuration. ↩

The Dumbest Idea In The World: Maximizing Shareholder Value

A succinct summary of the reasons behind the rot in our financial system.

Imagine also […] that the coach and his top assistants were hugely compensated, not on whether they won games, but rather by whether they covered the point spread. If they beat the point spread, they would receive massive bonuses. But if they missed covering the point spread a couple of times, the salary cap of the team could be cut and key players would have to be released, regardless of whether the team won or lost its games. […]

Suppose moreover that the whole league was rife with scandals of coaches “managing the score”, for instance, by deliberately losing games (“tanking”), players deliberately sacrificing points in order not to exceed the point spread (“point shaving”), “buying” key players on the opposing team or gaining access to their game plan. If this were the situation in the NFL, then everyone would realize that the “real game” of football had become utterly corrupted by the “expectations game” of gambling. Everyone would be calling on the NFL Commissioner to intervene and ban the coaches and players from ever being involved directly or indirectly in any form of gambling on the outcome of games, and get back to playing the game.

Steve Denning, writing for Forbes, provides a compelling review of Roger Martin's new book Fixing the Game. Sounds like a smart read.

(Via John Gruber)

The Toronto Star on the Awesome Foundation

I love the idea behind the Awesome Foundation. Jaime, Nancy, and Nyree took part in the Cardboard Fort Night this past April, and the Star mentions their cardboard candy house (emphasis added by me):

There were cardboard dinosaurs, a cardboard candy house, cardboard igloos and a cardboard TV that people could perform inside.

Here is a repost of the video I took of the event which was also used by Maclean's magazine:


Kids skating in the snow

Kids skating in the snow

Kids-Skating.jpg

Children skating at Uptown Waterloo during the first real snowfall this winter.

Shot with a Panasonic GH1 and Olympus 45mm f1.8 lens.

An Angry Birds Christmas

I still remember when Angry Birds first came out. I spent a month playing the game obsessively trying to get all three stars on each level. I haven't kept up with any of the new incarnations, but it has developed into an impressive franchise. This time lapse is an awesome (and painstaking) Christmas tribute to the game.


Christmas Cat

Christmas Cat

Christmas-cat.jpg

This is the most festive our cat gets.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas

Merry-Christmas-2011.jpg

Merry Christmas!

Shot with a Panasonic GH1 with 20 mm lens @ f1.8

Goodbye GoDaddy

I like to keep my domain name registrar and web host separate. For the last couple of years I have used GoDaddy as my registrar because they are cheap and any changes I make to my nameserver settings are quickly picked up. The downside with GoDaddy is that they are a sleaze bucket company. Putting aside the horrific user interface that makes me want to stab my eyes with flaming icicles, earlier this year their CEO killed an elephant for sport and now they support SOPA1. Enough is enough. I am joining the GoDaddy boycott on December 29th.

For anyone else who is thinking about transitioning away form GoDaddy here is a helpful guide. The only remaining problem I have is that I am not sure who to switch to. Ideally they will be cheap, have a decent user interface, and not be in cahoots with the Beelzebub daemon. Some poking around the internet has turned up Namecheap and Dynadot. Anyone have experience with either of these registrars? Any other recommendations?

Thanks!

Update: Looks like GoDaddy just reversed their SOPA support. Good start, but not enough for me to change my mind about leaving.

  1. SOPA is a bill being discussed in the US that would destroy the internet as we know it. Or as @sschillace puts it "Under SOPA, you could get 5 years for uploading a Michael Jackson song, one year more than the doctor who killed him.". ↩

Goodbye Scotiabank

Since Jaime and I have started using You Need a Budget, we have noticed how much we pay each month in bank fees. With Scotiabank we each have a personal account and a joint account plus Visa cards and lines of credit. Last month we spent over $60 in total bank fees. This is money the bank is charging us to leverage our money to make themselves more money. Fed up with this "double dipping" we have started to look for alternatives. The proverbial straw came tonight when we noticed a $50 service fee charged to one of our accounts. The account was formerly a student account, but has since switched over to a regular account (completely fair). The problem is that the bank did not inform us of this switch over. The response from the customer service agent was "You should periodically review your accounts for upcoming changes in the status of the account."

It is OK for Scotiabank to harass us with unwanted phone calls and junk mail trying get us to sign up for new services, but when it comes to informing us of important account changes that could involve hefty service fees the communications burden is too great. This horse must be in charge of Scotiabank's customer communications team.

After spending some time on the phone, Jaime managed to get the account type changed and the service fee reduced. The pile up of fees has left a bad taste though. We are definitely going to make the switch now. I have been a Scotiabank customer for thirty years continuously, but I don't think it is worth it anymore.

Any suggestions for better, more customer (and wallet) friendly banks would be greatly appreciated. Here is what we are looking for:

  1. No service fees of any kind. I should not have to pay a bank for the privilege of leveraging my money.

  2. Accessible ATMs.

  3. A good online banking interface that makes it easy to transfer and manage money.

  4. Some kind of physical presence so we have someone to talk to if need be.

  5. Simple account structure. ScotiaBank offers a byzantine labyrinth of account types for personal banking. There is the Scotia Moneyback, Scotia One, Basic Banking Plan, Powerchequing, Basic Banking, Scotia Power, Money Master, Scotia Daily Interest, Scotia Gain Plan, and many others. The only reason for such a complicated plan structure, most of which are only marginally different, is to confuse customers and charge more bank fees. This is a (profitable) mess that I expect most banks embrace. It would be refreshing to find one that aspired to more than this.

So far we are looking at PC Banking, and ING Direct. If anyone has experience with either of these or other banks post them in the comments below.

Thanks!

Pair of Robbers Want Only iPhones, No BlackBerries

Katy Tur from NBC New York:

Twice at 526 114th St., and once at 556 114th St., the suspects demanded the victims hand over their iPhones, police said.

The first victim complied, but the second only had a Droid, according to police. The thieves apparently didn't want a Droid -- so they took cash instead. [...]

"It's insulting they don't want my BlackBerry," said a female student.

More bad news for RIM. Not only are investors dumping their stock, but even thieves don't want to carry their inventory.

(Via John Gruber)