Webmacster87.info is the official blog/website of Douglas Bell, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, California (USA), and is currently an incoming senior in high school. When not spending his time working on homework, he is a volunteer and student representative for the San Mateo-Foster City, 17th District and California State PTA. He is also a peace activist and president of his school's Peace Club. Online, in addition to managing this blog, he co-hosts (and edits) the phpBB Weekly podcast and is a contributor to MacFocus Magazine.
This blog is home to his rants and ramblings about personal and school life, links and responses to news stories and videos that he's found on the internets, as well as home to a number of his techy and non-techy articles. To learn more about Douglas, see the About page. To find Douglas around the web, look at the listings on the right-hand sidebar.
This is just to let you know that I will be having little-to-no activity on my blog over the next few weeks, as I have a very busy couple of weeks coming up, between preparing for two AP tests (along with associated practice tests) and SAT Subject Tests, missing 4-5 days of school for a State PTA Convention that I’m working at, etc. Therefore I will be forcefully diverting my attention away from blogging and many of my frequent internet activities until things calm down for a little bit. I appreciate your understanding.
The following article was written by blogging about blogging extraordinaire, Lorelle VanFossen. She has one of the oldest personal blogs in existence, Taking Your Camera on the Road, which began in 1994. She is also the author of the awesome book “Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging”. She and I talked quite a bit about personal blogging back in September on PreviewCast #044, and so I asked her to contribute some more thoughts on the importance of personal blogging. Enjoy! –Douglas
The Art of Personal Blogging
When I started my first website - an online journal back then - it was a combination of technical articles and stories about our life as we prepared to quit our jobs and take off six months to a year to travel full-time around North American. Fourteen years later, and still living on the road, such a site is called a blog - a personal blog.
A personal blog is the story of your journey. No matter where it takes you.
There are a lot of names and purposes a personal blog can have. It can be about your day-to-day life, a sort of online diary. It can be a place where you can rant and rage without censors. It can be a place to tell your stories. It can be an online classroom where you share your knowledge and expertise.
Which makes it hard to define a personal blog as it can be anything and everything.
However, there is an art to personal blogging that makes it work for you and be the success that you want it to be. It begins by defining what personal success is for you and your personal blog. Continue reading »
I’m going to be going on a school-related trip in the middle of February which will force me to be completely away from the computer and the internet-at-large for about ten days. Now, I had considered not doing anything on this blog for ten days, but I’ve changed my mind and decided that perhaps something that I should do is take the opportunity to invite folks to write a guest blog article to be featured here on Webmacster87.info during my absence, just to keep the blog going.
So here’s how it works. If you would be interested in guest blogging on Webmacster87.info, please let me know in the comments of this post and I will send you an e-mail with additional information. I’m currently just planning to run the guest blog articles while I am away (February 14-23), but if I get an overwhelming response, I may decide to expand them to cover the month of February.
If you indicate that you are interested in guest blogging, your post will need to be submitted to me no later than Sunday, February 10th. (Earlier than 2/10 will be great too.) I will be scheduling the posts in advance so that they will show up on here while I am gone and nowhere near the computer.
What kind of content? I would be interested in any guest bloggers who want to write an article about technology and/or teenage life. (You do NOT have to be a teenager to participate–in fact, I’ll probably be inviting a few people that I know who aren’t teenagers to contribute.) Note that unlike Lorelle VanFossen’s two months of guest bloggers, I will not be entirely opening up my blog to guest bloggers; I will be reviewing guest blogger articles that are submitted to me primarily for decency before I schedule it in the posting queue. However, if you are interested, I certainly invite you to join in and relieve me while I am away from the computer.
(Incidentally, I will also probably be doing another one of these guest bloggerthons for another long trip that I’m taking in June, so this will not be the only opportunity.)
Anyway, I just wanted to extend the invitation to anyone who’s interested. As for the trip that I’m taking in February, stay tuned for more details coming in the next week or two.
You know that WordPress is really getting popular when government uses it. Indeed, the elections office for my own San Mateo County recently (as in a few months ago) launched a blog right on WordPress.com, called Inside Elections: The Blog Behind the San Mateo County Vote, which offers a number of insights behind everything that happens behind the scenes before voting day (which was today, by the way; the polls just closed a few minutes ago). Want to get inside tips on how those new eSlate voting machines work? Want to learn how all those sample ballots and voter by mail ballots are processed? Did you know that if you’re voting by mail, you can track & confirm the receipt and processing of your ballot, or that in San Mateo County, you could have voted on Saturdays October 27 and November 3 as well as today?
Bravo to our County Elections Office for adopting blogging, which can help us, as citizens, understand the process better. It’s one of those things that makes me more proud to be from San Mateo. Now I’m off to start tracking the election results…
Today, October 15th, is Blog Action Day, a day when over 16,000 blogs on the internet will blog about the environment. Check out the video for more info, and then proceed to my blog post for today.
On PreviewCast #044 (which every blogger in the world should listen to), Lorelle VanFossen and I talked about the importance of blogging in our world, especially personal blogging. However, one thing that we talked a bit about in regards to the importance of personal blogging is that it becomes a journal, an archive, a place where you’re putting down information about yourself and your life so that the archaeologists of the future can go back and learn more about our world today. (That is, assuming that your website is kept alive and doesn’t disappear into cyberspace when your web host turns off your connection.)
But a personal blog can be a lot more about just your boring life. I mean, the archaeologists of the future may be interested in knowing that you got a new iPhone and that your work sucks and that you had to have that godawful oatmeal for breakfast this morning because there were no more Eggo Waffles in the freezer. But for the readers of today, you can turn your blog into more than just a journal of your boring life (Twitter is probably a better tool for recording your boring life, anyway), and actually use it to draw attention to things that you’re interested in, which means that the random reader who stumbles across your blog might also get interested in it as well. Anyone who’s read my blog for a long period of time knows that it redefines the meaning of potpourri.
But how does any of this help the environmental debate? Actually, blogging is probably one of the most powerful assets of the environmental movement today. In the last decade, as we have watched the media become more and more controlled by the corporate powers and less and less of a free press, we have at the same time and at practically the same rate watched the so-called ‘blogosphere’ grow. John C. Dvorak himself says that when a news item breaks, he doesn’t hit the news media first, he hits the blogs. What can the news media say? “Oh, um, yeah, so such and such happened, and it looks bad, and the President has responded to it by saying such and such and meeting these people, and the situation on the ground is still pretty bad, and we’re going to go to a commercial now, be right back.” But blogs can provide someone’s unique, first hand experience. When that guy from the University of Florida got tasered at the John Kerry event, the media was mostly speculatory people watching from afar. However, if you were to hit the blogs, you’d find bloggers who were other students at the event who could give their first-hand experience of what happened and be able to explain some things that didn’t exactly get caught on camera. This is the power of the blogging community and the internet. As the freedom of the press starts to fade away, the freedom of speech is becoming ever more emboldened by the revolution of the internet.
This past weekend, Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The so-called “liberal” media went on the attack, questioning the award and what the heck peace has to do with the climate change. (And I could go on a whole justification for exactly what peace has to do with the climate change, but that’s not the point of this article for now.) However, it’s clear that Al Gore’s movie gets credit for really propelling awareness of the climate change. As Stephen Colbert has said, “Because of the success of Gore’s movie, I now believe that global warming is real because the market has said that it is real.” That may be considered a joke, but is not too far from the truth. The climate crisis has become a major global issue not because many people have taken the opportunity to see the film, but also because the film has touched people so much that they have dedicated themselves to blogging about the crisis and raising the awareness. The reason that so many people have done this is because the climate crisis really is a global issue. The climate crisis is responsible for the exceedingly active 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons which severely crippled Florida and the gulf coast and obliterated New Orleans. The climate crisis is responsible for the temperatures of over 90 degrees in Chicago which forced their annual marathon event to be shut down due to dehydrating runners. It’s responsible for the serious droughts in Darfur which is probably one of the causes of the genocide in that region. Everyone, globally, is affected by global warming, and that’s why so many someones are stepping up to raise awareness and advocate for a solution.
The true significance of what the blogging community can do to help the environmental debate has been made manifest by today’s Blog Action Day as bloggers all across the internet blog about the environment and help to raise awareness of the climate crisis. This event is one of the biggest ways that we can spread the word that our planet is turning in the wrong direction and for us, as bloggers and citizens of the world, to offer solutions so that we can overcome this challenge.
Do your part as a blogger and be a part of Blog Action Day today.
The title is a pun on the classic joke “Why does a fireman wear red suspenders? To hold his pants up!”. Except that the only problem with the joke, “Why does WordPress.com wear red suspenders?” is that I don’t know the punch line, and it’s apparently going to take me awhile to find out.
I woke up this morning, about a half hour ago, actually, wanting to update one of the blogs that I host on WordPress.com, when to my surprise, I wasn’t logged in. I went to try to login, and got a thing saying “Error: Account suspended.”
WHAT? WHY?!?
Now, I’m trying to figure out on my own why on earth my account on WordPress.com could have been suspended. The only blogs that I have on WordPress.com are Aragon Peace Club, which hasn’t been updated since August 30th (I was about to update it this morning, actually) and The Neglected Former Existence of Webmacster87 which hasn’t been updated since July 2nd! I’m also an admin on the Don Havis 4 SMUHSD Board site since I function as the webmaster, although the blog actually “belongs” to another user. Even then, that hasn’t had much updating in awhile. The only other blogs accredited to my WordPress.com username are my self-hosted blogs that plug into the WordPress.com Stats plugin.
Frankly, the only real recent activity that I’ve had on my WordPress.com username are the couple of guest blog articles that I’ve done recently on Lorelle on WordPress. I’ve even read all of the legalese on the fascinating terms of service and haven’t seen anything listed there that I’ve done that could prompt me to be suspended. Did someone hack into my account and do bad things? I haven’t seen any evidence of that, especially considering that all of my blogs are still intact. What is going on?
Well, I’d just love to send an e-mail to WordPress.com’s support to find out what the heck is going on around here, but check out their lovely support page which says that “Support is currently closed.” Now forgive me folks, but almost every website keeps a website contact form open 24/7 (as opposed to having limited hours for, say, telephone support). Is there anything wrong with keeping a contact form available, and then when support “opens up” on Monday, you can go through the queue of support requests that have been piling up through the weekend?
Apparently not. But do you know how inconvenient Monday-Friday, 9 AM-5 PM is for me? I have a little, minor activity I do every Monday-Friday called school which makes it really difficult for me to have to try to send in a support request during your limited hours. And I can only imagine what it must be like for people in other areas of the globe to try to get support, if they can only fill out the form during a working hours in the Pacific time zone. There’s 168 hours in the week, and WordPress.com only lets you TYPE in the contact support box during 40 of them–that’s less than 1/4 of the week!
So here’s my current situation. My account on WordPress.com has been mysteriously suspended. I can’t find out why it has been suspended for a few days at the least. And now I’m unable to post important, time-sensitive information on one of my WordPress.com blogs, which is going to be very bad news for something that I’m trying to get organized within my school this week. So, what does that mean that I’m doing about it? What any good WordPress blogger would do if he was cut off from any other means of action. Blog and rant about it! Which I’ve just done.
Please WordPress.com people, why is my account suspended, and could you please allow people to leave a message in your contact support box 24/7?
Have you ever wanted to be able to have one central place on the internet that would allow you to keep track of all of the comments and conversations that you have on blogs and Web 2.0 sites? If you’re saying that that idea has never even crossed your mind, then you’ve had the same first reaction that I had to the Web 2.0 site coComment. However, coComment is just that. This site seeks to be a place which can track and share conversations that you have on blogs, sites like Digg and Flickr, and even on sites with absolutely no type of comment form whatsoever. It’s a very intriguing idea, which I decided to check out. Continue reading »
Lorelle VanFossen, blogger extraordinaire, celebrated the 2nd anniversary of WordPress.com and her blog by inviting many guest bloggers to post various articles about blogging during the month of August. (The upcoming month of September will feature many non-stop WordPress/blogging tips.) She invited me to write a few articles, and I must say I really enjoyed writing them. The first one was Ways to Build and Retain Your Podcast Audience, posted almost two weeks ago, and the second one was Blogging and Social Networking as a Teenager, which was just posted this morning. I highly recommend that you check out these articles, which I am very proud of!
On the last day of school, I made a long blog post which sort of included a rant on how the last school year was quite a bit of a stressful one. Well, my freshman year was stressful too, although in a different way. But the other half of that post was to do what a number of others were doing and blog some of my summer plans. In a way, I sort of put myself down for quite a bit of stuff, as there were a number of things that I didn’t even do, but then again, I did a number of things that weren’t even listed. When most people asked me what I did this summer, my common response would be, “I did a bunch of little things.” What are some of the little things I did this summer? Well, first, let me review the goals that I listed for myself at the end of the day on May 31st… Continue reading »
Well, if you know me, you know that I enter various stuff at the San Mateo County Fair every year, and if I recall correctly, this is my 10th year to enter. However, this is the first time where I actually found out what I won before I went to go see it for myself, but sure enough, the San Jose Mercury News apparently reported on one of the brand new divisions this year: Website Design. There were three award-winning entries in the new division, two of which were mine. At least someone else did enter, when I had called the County Fair office a month ago to ask for entry details for websites, I got a “That’s the first time that question has been asked!” response, which got me worried that I would be the only one entering.
Anyway, congratulations to Taylor Hansford who does the website for Pacifica 4-H (it’s the county fair, after all!) and won 1st place. My own Webmacster87.info won the red ribbon, and the 17th District PTA Website, which I maintain and entered under the class “Website for a Business or Organization”, took third.
Thanks, by the way, goes to Larry and Anthony who sent me the link and asked me “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” I haven’t been to the fair yet, so honestly, I had no idea that I’d won until they sent me the link.
There are some things slightly ironic about the San Jose Mercury News article. For one thing, San Jose isn’t part of San Mateo County, but I’ll let that slide since our fair is open to all the neighboring counties as well. However, they said that “Neither boys were available for interviews.” Besides that being bad grammar, I wasn’t even at the fair today, so of course I wasn’t “available” for an interview! The article also claims that they were looking for me and the other kid in the livestock section. I can’t speak for Taylor, but I’m not part of 4-H and don’t spend very much time in the livestock section. I might spend 5-10 minutes in there during the fair to look, but I don’t exactly hang around there waiting to be interviewed, if you know what I mean. Now, I did get a phone call today from the fair saying that the San Mateo County Times wanted to interview me, albeit about my being a judge for a contest in the Culinary Arts division, but they have setup a time to meet me there at 4:30 PM on Monday. So, San Jose Mercury News, if you’d like to say hi to me, I’ll be there on Monday willing to answer questions.
Anyway, I am glad that my websites received the recognition from the judges (hopefully they didn’t try to view this website in Internet Explorer, which doesn’t work that well), and I’m glad to have helped the San Mateo County Fair get their technology entries going. Who knows? Maybe next year they’ll have a division for best podcast. Stay tuned next week when I’ll post a full list of everything I entered this year and how well I did!
The article also claims that they were looking for me and the other kid in the livestock section. I can’t speak for Taylor, but I’m not part of 4-H and don’t spend very much time in the livestock section. I might spend 5-10 minutes in there during the fair to look, but I don’t exactly hang around there waiting to be interviewed, if you know what I mean. 
Now, I did get a phone call today from the fair saying that the San Mateo County Times wanted to interview me, albeit about my being a judge for a contest in the Culinary Arts division, but they have setup a time to meet me there at 4:30 PM on Monday. So, San Jose Mercury News, if you’d like to say hi to me, I’ll be there on Monday willing to answer questions. 
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