March 11th, 2010
According to an article I ran into today on CNN Money Amergence Group acquired the domain name panpacificinternational.com.
So what’s the big deal, domain names are bought and sold everyday?
Well, when I see an article on CNN Money that a domain name exchanged hands I am expecting to see a sale price of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. But guess how much Amergence Group paid for the domain name? $1,088. Is this really news? Thousands and thousands of domain names exchange hands each day with similar price tags, so I don’t feel this is news worthy. You can see the prices of some recent BIG sales on DNJournal.com.
Tags: Domain Names, news
Posted by Josh in Domain Names | No Comments »
March 7th, 2010
Each year it seems like more and more children are being named Joshua or Josh, so I did a little research to see what I could find. Thankfully, the United States Social Security Administration tracks all of this information. In the table below I show the percent of total males named Joshua in a given year, along with the percentage of males that were named Joshua in that year.
- In 1960 Joshua was the 453rd most popular male name in the united states. That year parents named 0.0146% of male children Joshua. That is only 146 out of 1,000,000 children.
- Compare 1960 to 1985 where Joshua was the 4th most popular name. That year 2.1946% of male children were named Joshua, that is 21,946 out of ever 1,000,000 children.
| Year of birth |
Rank |
Percent of total males born |
| 2008 |
4 |
0.8799% |
| 2007 |
4 |
0.9309% |
| 2006 |
3 |
1.0172% |
| 2005 |
3 |
1.0927% |
| 2004 |
3 |
1.1447% |
| 2003 |
3 |
1.1942% |
| 2002 |
3 |
1.2581% |
| 2001 |
4 |
1.2582% |
| 2000 |
4 |
1.3194% |
| 1999 |
4 |
1.3375% |
| 1998 |
4 |
1.3860% |
| 1997 |
5 |
1.4160% |
| 1996 |
5 |
1.4565% |
| 1995 |
5 |
1.5283% |
| 1994 |
4 |
1.5397% |
| 1993 |
4 |
1.6268% |
| 1992 |
4 |
1.7263% |
| 1991 |
4 |
1.9459% |
| 1990 |
4 |
2.0095% |
| 1989 |
4 |
2.1047% |
| 1988 |
4 |
2.1324% |
| 1987 |
4 |
2.0525% |
| 1986 |
4 |
1.9550% |
| 1985 |
4 |
2.1946% |
| 1984 |
4 |
2.1468% |
| 1983 |
5 |
1.9708% |
| 1982 |
7 |
2.0160% |
| 1981 |
6 |
2.0980% |
| 1980 |
7 |
1.9454% |
| 1979 |
9 |
1.7385% |
| 1978 |
12 |
1.4762% |
| 1977 |
14 |
1.2912% |
| 1976 |
18 |
1.0326% |
| 1975 |
26 |
0.8982% |
| 1974 |
29 |
0.7120% |
| 1973 |
42 |
0.4995% |
| 1972 |
59 |
0.3010% |
| 1971 |
80 |
0.2007% |
| 1970 |
150 |
0.1141% |
| 1969 |
197 |
0.0722% |
| 1968 |
270 |
0.0414% |
| 1967 |
312 |
0.0317% |
| 1966 |
341 |
0.0266% |
| 1965 |
352 |
0.0244% |
| 1964 |
407 |
0.0193% |
| 1963 |
418 |
0.0179% |
| 1962 |
435 |
0.0161% |
| 1961 |
424 |
0.0162% |
| 1960 |
453 |
0.0146% |
Data from United States Social Security Administration (ssa.gov)
Tags: Josh
Posted by Josh in Josh | No Comments »
March 6th, 2010
There are two ways you can create a blog powered by WordPress — 1. WordPress.com a free, WordPress hosted, more limited installation, or; 2. WordPress.org a self hosted, more complicated, and more powerful installation. Both of them have their pros and cons and WordPress support oulines the difference as follows:
WordPress.com Benefits
- It’s free and much easier to setup
- Everything is taken care of: setup, upgrades, spam, backups, security, etc
- Your blog is on hundreds of servers, so it’s highly unlikely it will go down due to traffic
- Your posts are backed up automatically
- You get extra traffic from blogs of the day and tags
- You can find like-minded bloggers using tag and friend surfer
- Your login is secure (SSL) so no one can get into your account if you use wifi
WordPress.com Cons
- We provide 70+ themes (and adding more every day) which you can modify and edit the CSS, but you cannot run a custom theme*
- You can’t hack the PHP code behind your blog*
- You can’t upload plugins
WordPress.org Benefits
- Ability to upload themes
- Ability to upload plugins
- Great community
- Complete control to change code if you’re technically minded
WordPress.org Cons
- You need a good web host, which generally costs $7-12 a month, or thousands of dollars per month for a high traffic site
- Requires more technical knowledge to set up and run
- You’re responsible for stopping spam
- You have to handle backups
- You must upgrade the software manually when a new version comes out
- If you get a huge spike in traffic (like Digg or Slashdot) your site will probably go down unless you have a robust hosting setup
Why do I share all of this with you, you ask???
Well, I have hosted several sites on WordPress.com and one of my favorite features is that almost the second you publish a posting, search engines like Google and Yahoo index your post. Naturally, when I decided to switch josh.net from a Joomla powerd site to WordPress.org powered site I assumed that this great feature would follow. Wrong!
I began creating new entries in josh.net and it was taking DAYS for Google to index them. I checked robots.txt and nothing was procluding the search engines from indexing or crawling my pages. I checked my .htaccess. I check the update services feature of WordPress.org and my site was sending update through Ping-O-Matic. For the life of me, I could not figure out what was wrong.
Right about the time I was going to give up, I came across Joseph Scott’s blog and information on a plugin RSSCloud that he created for the self hosted WordPress.org sites. It turns out that this plugin is automatically installed and activated on all WordPress.com sites, but if you are running your own WordPress.org installation you need to install this yourself. If you are looking for more technical information I encourage you to check out Joseph’s blog.
Tags: Google, WordPress
Posted by Josh in Uncategorized | No Comments »
March 2nd, 2010
If you haven’t seen the YouTube video “Drinking Out of Cups” by Dan Deacon then you have to check it out. It has NO relation to the disgusting “2 girls and a cup”.
According to Wikipedia, Deacon recorded the popular video “Drinking out of Cups” in 2003. The piece recorded for a school project in exaggeration of the stereotypical Long Islander. The piece appeared on his 2003 album “meetle mice.” In 2006, Liam Lynch created a video to accompany the piece. The compilation has been viewed more than 7 million times on youtube.
So enjoy it!
Tags: Funny video, YouTube
Posted by Josh in Funny Videos | No Comments »
March 1st, 2010
For years people have dreamed of an affordable tablet computer, but does the announcement of Apple’s iPad live up to peoples dreams? Sure, you can surf the web, check email, view photos, listen to music, maps, calendars and contacts. Might I add that you can do all of this via wifi or 3G internet.
3 years ago this might have been enough, but to me the iPad is just an oversized iPhone that lacks a camera, cannot fit into your pocket or multi task.
I have not completely written off the iPad and am anxious to give it a real demo. So check back soon.
Tags: Apple, iPad
Posted by Josh in Technology | No Comments »
March 1st, 2010
Eventually I plan on creating a very unique custom theme for Josh.net, but until that point in time I have decided to stick with the default theme that ships with WordPress for reasons I outline below.
I spent a lot of time looking through the gazillions of templates available through WordPress and had a very hard time finding one that I could respect for both its creativity and for being technically sound. Let’s face it, picking a theme for your blog is a very, very big decision. You want it to look nice, but you also need it to perform well behind the scenes (at least if you are hoping for search engine traffic). One might have great style, but when you analyze its compatibility with plugins or valid CSS it would fail. Just as you could find a template with great CSS and XHTML, but it would look like crap. So at the end of the day I decided that ‘default’ is super clean, nicely organized, easy to read AND it has valid XHTML, CSS, compatibility with many plugins and not to mention very SEO friendly. Also, since so many people use the template there is great advice in forums on how to customize and work with the template.
After I decided to stick with ‘default’ I wanted to understand more about who created it, and here is what I came up with…
Today WordPress ships with a standard template named ‘default’, but that was not always its name. When Michael Heilemann developed the theme he named it ‘Kubrick’ after his favorite director, Stanley Kubrick. On first brush I wondered what one had to do with the other, and then it hit me. When you come across a ‘Kubrick’ WP theme site you instantly know what the theme is, what platform the site runs on etc., in the same way that you would recognize a ‘Kubrick’ film at first glance. According to Mr. Heilemann’s website, ‘Kubrick’ was born in the summer of 2004.
In the coming months WordPress will be releasing WordPress Version 3.0. It will be very intersting to see what changes they make to the template.
Tags: template, WordPress
Posted by Josh in Uncategorized | No Comments »
February 28th, 2010
Canada, thank you for hosting a beautiful and exciting 21st Winter Olympic Games. It has been the most exciting games in memory and surly 16 wonder days that the world will never forget. Congratulations to the athletes, win or loose your sportsmanship is an example to people all over the world, and that makes you all winners. Let this remind the world that we can all live together in peace, regardless of geographic borders, religious beliefs or the color of our skin.
Tags: canada, olympics, peace
Posted by Josh in Uncategorized | No Comments »
February 27th, 2010
Ok, so I removed my installation of Joomla and I am going to try WordPress for my blog now. Stay tuned.
Tags: Joomla, WordPress
Posted by Josh in Uncategorized | No Comments »