Truth is, I've been really busy with lots of other stuff. I also have other outlets for writing that are soaking up a lot of my writing energy. Check them out:

• Developer.com Articles on Android Widgets (written with my wife, Lauren Darcey):
• Creating an Android Widget
• Handling User Interaction in a Widget
• Handling Lengthy Operations in a Widget
• Working with Android Calendar Entries
• Writing on our Android blog
• Guest Blogging with my wife at Network World
• Writing a new Android Book, Sam's Teach Yourself Android Application Development in 24 hours, also with Lauren Darcey

We finished one book (buy it here!) and are starting another.

We have an amazing vegetable garden going. The June rains helped keep things watered with lots of visitors around. They also slowed down the growth, since we didn't get as much sun as normal.

We're heads down with software consulting, heads up with our own software projects, and some other small writing. Hopefully there will be more to report soon on those last two. ;)

In the middle of all of this, we're trying to get out more. Working from home is great: you don't have to leave to go to work, you don't waste time commuting, and you can do more. It also means you're at the same location every day. We've begun geocaching as a way to get out to fairly random locations we haven't been to. That's been fun, though continuing to find the time for it isn't easy. At least, with this, we can find our way out. :)

It's clear, though, that one thing hasn't happened: blogging. I share items on Google Reader, post quick thoughts on twitter, and share more personal things on facebook. Big thoughts, though, are just getting lost in the mix. Sorry.

(Image is of me at Mt Washington on an amazingly clear day. (c) 2009 by Lauren Darcey.)

In any case, I hope the changes are for the better. Most things seem to display fine in most of the beta browsers. There may be a glitch or two some browsers when using zoom or other features. Hopefully there isn�t anything too bad. In any case, for more of the boring details, read on��

I got tired of the calendar showing. It seemed to serve no good purpose. Well, it did continually remind me that I no longer post nearly everyday. Aside from that, I didn�t see any good reason to keep it. The HTML for it was rather large, too. So, it�s gone.

I also got tired of the monthly archive links. However, I didn�t want to get rid of archive links entirely. So, I added an �archives�� link along with a link in to that page to the monthly archives. The archives page is long, but it has a link to every single post. Maybe someone will find that useful. It�s now just two words on the front page.

I replaced a Newsgator feed-to-html service with the same sort of service from Feedburner. In doing this, I also added my own feed to Feedburner. In doing this, I noticed that some of the subscribe links were old. Instead of dealing with them again, I replaced them all with a single button from AddThis! They claim to be the largest button provider for such things. I found them through some rather large media site, so there may be something to it. In any case, they can deal with the problem while I can simplify the look on my site.

I replaced most of the social stuff with a single friendfeed widget. It covers just about everything I want to try to aggregate and looks OK. I wish it would wrap the comments that I make, though. I finally got the flickr Flash badge to work. That required stripping out most of it�s Javascript and writing out the HTML that Javascript was writing directly. Strange how they were doing it.

I moved the Google search box up and recreated it using new Google code. This simplified it�s look and made the HTML much, much smaller. I also replaced the Google code for the ad units, too, which are now smaller HTML.

Finally, using Feedburner means that you can now get email updates for posts I make. This sends an email digest out everyday that I�ve made posts. It�s not supposed to send more than one out a day. I should be getting an email with this post, so I�ll get to find out what it looks like.

This isn�t the end of the changes. I often tweak small things here and there. I have more ideas, but for today this should be enough. Enjoy. (Oh, that �About Me�� page has also been updated��)

We�re thrilled to let the entire Movable Type community know about TypePad AntiSpam. It�s our new, totally free comment spam blocking service for your Movable Type blog, available as a beta test version right now, that you can enable by installing a simple, free plugin.

Powered by Movable Type�s sister service TypePad, this new AntiSpam power works for all Movable Type blogs version 3.3 or later, as well as WordPress, and connects directly to the smart Junk Folder system built in to MT. By learning and adapting over time, TypePad AntiSpam just keeps getting smarter. And because TypePad AntiSpam is Open Source, just like Movable Type itself, expert users can even run their own antispam services and tweak to their heart�s content.

I'm quite glad it supports MT 3.3. It's quite curious, though, that it works with WordPress. One could see that as yet another move on their part to grab WordPress folks by seeing how good their stuff is.  But the better way to look at it is that the better spam blocking gets across all blogs the more likely we are to see a reduction in spam attempts because the cost of entry will continue to rise.  That's a Good Thing. I'll be installing this. Why, you might ask?

As it turns out, I didn't want to lose all my previous comments when I installed Disqus. So, the posts that had comments are still using the old comment system.  That's just enough to still get a LOT of spam on my blog that I have to sort through. 

In addition, I've got some other blogs that could benefit from it.  Like Laurie's.  She'll appreciate this a lot if it really works.

But will this work? What do you think?

However, I don't think upgrading to MT4 will help 100% considering the motivation of the spammers.  Even sorting through a few hundred isn't something I really want to do.  So, I've been evaluating Disqus for the comments. Using Disqus will provide a number of benefits. However, it also comes with a couple of negatives. First, the negatives (that's just the way I am).

As a blog owner, I want control over the comments. Using Disqus, I have full control over the comments but they aren't in my database. According, the a FAQ, though, with the MovableType plugin, the contents will be rendered via the API from the server side, so I don't have to worry about search results or anything like that.

If Disqus goes away, or even just goes down, so would my comments. For my blog, that's not critical but it would be quite annoying.  They've recently had such an outage and have responded to it quite well, in my opinion. Still, It's a risk.

Disqus also requires a form of login. Well, even if it doesn't require a login, I want to require a login, so this negative would apply regardless of using Disqus or not.  In any case, this will raise the bar for people commenting.  I've definitely gotten a reasonable share of real anonymous comments.  Do I really want those? Maybe not, but they have added to the conversations. Requiring, however, is the key to spam reductions and the key to increase the value of the comments. Disqus supports many systems so I'm confident that folks will have some place they can log in to, assuming they'll trust Disqus.

The positives for me, however, outweigh the negatives.

The biggest positive, of course, is the fact that switching to Disqus should virtually eliminate comment spam.  That means that I can probably turn off 100% moderation and let the comments flow in real-time.  I'm suspecting this will help attract even more comments.

Next, Disqus is often adding new features.  Most recently, they paired with Seesmic to provide video comments. That's pretty cool, if a bit goofy. I'm not sure how will video comments will do in the long run. They already have things like threaded comments, social sharing of comments, and many other things.

Finally, by using Disqus, I'm offloading nearly all of the load of comments (or even spam attempts) on to the Disqus servers. This should reduce the load on my own server and help it scale better (if I ever do get a popular post, for instance).

So, I'm starting to try to use Disqus on my site. Naturally, I've run in to some problems. It would appear that Disqus doesn't work on MovableType when dynamic templates are turned on. If I switch to static templates, the Disqus comment system draws correctly. If it's dynamic, that doesn't work unless there is already a Disqus comment present. So, I know it's close and most likely just a minor bug.

Still, the dynamic templates make publishing a new post much, much faster.  I don't have to worry about load under comment storms (usually caused by spammers on this site) when using static templates, though. So, I'm not sure if I wait for it to be fixed or switch over to static templates until it's working and watch the load on the system. Or, perhaps, upgrading to MT4 will fix the problem.

In any case, until I figure out which direction I'm going to take, comments may or may not work at all. :)

I have many, many drafts started and ready to go though.  So much stuff happening, both at work and at home. So much I just can't talk about.

I've been wanting to post about iPhone stuff, virtualization stuff, Apple stuff, Google stuff, car stuff, home stuff, and maybe even work stuff.  Just to scratch the surface.

So, why haven't I?

I'll respond with a simple question, "Where does the time go?"

I expect I'll start posting more soon, but no promises. 

(Oh, and if you've commented in the last couple of month I probably missed it in a flood of spam comments.  I gotta get updated to the latest MT. And soon.)

That's not to say things aren't going well.  They are.  Very well.  Now, you'd think that this would give me lots of good stuff to blog about.  It has.  It just hasn't left me with the time to blog about it. So, many things go by without comments. 

Speaking of comments, the comment spam has been enormous lately.  I've got the protection turned up pretty high, but a bunch still gets through.  If you try to leave a comment and it never appears, it may have gotten lost in the mix.  A direct email can fix that, for now.  I'm hoping that Movable Type 4 will actually do more to allow valid comments to get through.

QUALCOMM's BREW developer conference in San Diego was great, again.  The main BREWfest was on the Midway aircraft carrier, which was quite something.  Strangely, there wasn't as much talk about the imminent launch of the iPhone, as I had expected.  Sure, it did come up.  I had expected a few more comments about it's lack of true developer support, though (e.g. writing a web page for a phone isn't quite the same as native compilation for high performance 3D games).

What do I think of the Apple iPhone?  It'll probably make for a better WiFi gadget than it does a regular phone.  It's also pricey, about 50% above PDA phones where folks can load their own, natively running, applications.  It looks like it'll make a great iPod, though.  Indeed, I want one, but AT&T's coverage isn't good enough to leave Verizon behind -- and EVDO, for that matter.  I also hope Apple has plans for fast upgrades on the phone.  Even the current RAZR's are nothing like they were a couple of years ago. They have been pretty fast with the iPod, but it's not fast enough for the phone world.  I also think they made a mistake by doing such a long exclusive. It may ultimately help AT&T, but it can only hurt Apple by leaving out the majority of the market.  Unless, perhaps, the deal is exclusive only to the iPhone and not some other wireless phone that may come out on other carriers.  Who knows...

As an FYI, I'm still using just my LG VX9800.  It's still working out great.  The Sprint UpStage of the Sprint Ambassador program is working alright, but I'm still having issues.  I have to call the ambassador support line soon about that.

If you haven't tried out Netflix streaming, or only tried it out early on, I highly recommend it.  The video quality has improved substantially, and they keep launching new clients.  For TV shows, it has an episodic player so you can skip between episodes with ease.  Movies really do start playing quickly, too.  We connect a laptop up to our 40" Samsung 1080p TV via a VGA cable and play full screen.  We can't really tell it's not a DVD, although it's certainly no HD-DVD.

Well, now here I go living up to the ramblings part.  I doubt I'll be back up to daily posts right away, but who knows...  there is no service level agreement implied here. ;)

In the mt/php/lib directory, you'll find lots of PHP scripts for Smarty replacement tags.  The block.MTEntryNext.php file configures the arguments  to fetch_entries and assigns them to the $args variable as an array.  The value of lastn should not be set to 1.  That limits the entire set of entries to just the last 1, so the result is always the last one, which is always the most recent post. 

So, for the longest time, all of my individual entries have had a link to the main page, the previous article, and my most recent article.  Commenting this line out (with "//") has fixed this issue.  Hopefully Six Apart will have this resolved in the next version.

Since this was an issue in the Smart replacement tag, it only affect dynamic templates and not statically published templates.  And no, I didn't discover this on my own.  I don't have that much time on my hands. ;)  This forum posting at Six Apart's site helped out.

I decided to do a Google Sitemap, in the hopes that this would help.  However, I didn't really want to spend the time to create one by hand.  I looked around briefly and found an index template for MovableType that would work well for creating a sitemap that would link to all of the individual archives, category pages, and date archives.  This is exactly what I was looking for.

I gave Google a link to it via the Google Webmaster tools, rather than go about it through a ping.  That way I could see if Google thought it was a valid sitemap and see when it downloaded it, etc.  It's unclear what effect, if any, this will have since this blog is fairly well internally linked and Google has probably crawled it already.  However, this is also an experiment for my wife's site where she has found some pages that don't come up with any results at all (as in, terms only on one page don't come up in the Google sitesearch).

I also noticed that the Google toolbar had different PageRank results as some of the calculator sites out there.  That is, on at least one page of this site it showed a 4 pagerank while multiple online tools showed 0.  I'll have to watch for changes in either of them.

In the end, this may or may not help out either site.  I don't particularly care since it's the traffic numbers that matter more than the specific ranking numbers.  Besides, it's mostly just a personal blog where I get to ramble on like this to no one. 

Overall, I'm pretty impressed with how well this works.  I've yet to have any compatibility issues, even though most of the sites have multiple (virtual) blogs on them that have been around since 1.x or 2.x days.  I haven't had to touch the config files nor have the upgrades broken anything.  Sure, I don't always get the latest and greatest features because I use custom templates, but certain things like better spam filtering will happen regardless.

Now I'm off to see if this "FastCGI" stuff is worth the trouble, if it's any trouble to begin with.

-- Some Time Passes --

[5:20pm] Alright, so getting FastCGI working is a real PITA.  I think it's working now, though, but I've left the standard scripts around, too, so they'll work properly for anything pointing at them still.  I don't know if it's any faster, though.  And eventually I'll have to apply it to all of the blogs, if it holds up on mine.  In the end, it probably wasn't worth the trouble, though.

[6:52pm] I've reverted away from FastCGI.  Uploads weren't working.  Not sure I'll worry about switching back, either, but we'll see.

I had hoped to get more writing in about our honeymoon before getting back in to normal posts.  Unfortunately, that created a deadlock on both threads.  Until now, at least.

I got on to Windows Live Writer (still in beta, but many builds beyond what I had used last) and found that I had about four posts still sitting in draft about our travels -- and written during the travels.  So, check out the travel category to see them (if you want).

Things have been pretty hectic since we got back.  We returned to the house in the middle of construction (also known as a concrete slab downstairs).  I had to catch up on the happenings of over a month of work -- which included all of the stuff about the acquisition that had happened mere days after we left.

In the time since we got back, a ton has happened:

• Mostly finished the downstairs including flooring, lighting, painting, and other stuff (still some details to finish up). 
  • Expanded flooring to include bathroom, entryway, and kitchen (still to do)
  • Got carpets for the floor
  • Swapped living room with dining room -- we now have a larger dining room to make better room for our storage furniture and a smaller living room, with less seating.  Overally, though, it makes sense for our house.  And yes, it's permanent.  And yes, there is no TV downstairs.
• Hosted our first Thanksgiving with my dad, his wife, Laurie's brother, and my grandmother.
• Got and decorated our holiday tree with some friends in town
  • We got a redwood again.  We like them, except the setup part where they eat our hands and forearms.  I'm still picking out splinters and my arms were red and hurt for days.
• Got some new things (and just to pre-clarify: a lot of this stuff is thanks to our wedding, my birthday, stuff for our trip, and early Christmas gifts from ourselves and other people...  and it covers about four months... and provides a list of things to remind me on stuff I can talk about if I don't have anything to say... har har.)
  • I got a Gen 5.5 80GB black iPod on our first trip to Costco when back.  My white Gen 5 60GB iPod was full and they not only had the right size and price, but the right color, too.  I also got a clear plastic cover for it and a rubber cover that also holds the headphones.  Both together keep the inside looking new.
  • I got a 2006 Honda Accord Hybrid to make my commute cheaper and more comfortable.  And it's a car that can comfortably hold more than two people.  (You know, in case that occasion arrives.)  It improved milage by 88% over our two other cars and still has plenty of power. ;)
  • Laurie got a quad core machine with a 30" monitor to be able to work at 2560x1600 resolution (the current highest single monitor resolution readily available).  The Dell 30" monitor is absolutely amazing.  The quad core processor is also something of a treat.  However, with only a Nvidia 7950GX2 video card, graphics at full resolution are lacking with all but the best written 3D games. (For instance, Neverwinter Nights 2 just doesn't have a good enough engine for everything to be on at that resolution -- I have to run it at a lowly 2048x1280 for it all to work smoothly.)
  • We got a 2TB Terastation that we run with RAID5 for 1500GB of storage via gigabit ethernet that's reasonably safe.  The quad core machine runs dual 500GB disks in a RAID 0 for fast, but not so safe 1000GB of local working space.
  • Being the holiday season, we also got a number of smaller things, including:
    • New Spode
    • Curtains, carpets, table cloths, etc.
    • Microsoft's wheel for the XBox 360
    • Some new shortbread pans
  • Construction tools, including
    • Table saw
    • Mitre saw
    • Various other painting and flooring instruments that we didn't have

Anyway, before this becomes a silly list of stuff, it also goes without saying that there were a number of other new things even before we went on our vacation.  We had to get stuff for our vacation plus we received a bunch of stuff from our wedding.

We were jetlagged for at least two weeks after we got back.  It didn't help that if either one of us would wake up early (you know, like 1 or 2am) we'd both get up and not worry about going back to sleep.  That helped keep the jetlag around longer.

I hope it doesn't go as long before I blog again, but we're still quite busy so, naturally, I can't guarantee anything.  But I do hope to talk about some thoughts I've had lately as well as some of the new stuff that either works well or doesn't work so well. We shall see.

So, what have I done since I posted last and why haven't I posted at all for months? It's been well over three months now.

Well, not long after my last post we took a trip to Hawaii. It was my first time there and it was rather pleasant. It was actually colder than I expected. Not that it was cold, but it was scorching sunny -- it was often overcast or just comfortable. The water was a bit cooler than I had hoped for -- I still got cold in many areas.

After that, work got very busy for me. However, wedding prep and other things kept me away from blogging even when I wasn't at work.

We had decided to replace our carpet floors with hardwood before the wedding. One problem led to another and it's still not done, but we're doing all of the work rather than paying others to do it. This came about because of some problems with others, too. The reason we haven't finished it isn't because we can't go faster. It's mostly because we've been waiting on various things to happen. The latest is that we have to get our concrete floor levelled and we haven't been called back by people to get quotes on it. Two large cracks have createed a floor with 3 different planes to be levelled.

Now we're keeping busy doing house work (the goal is to make progress every day), planning for our honeymoon, and doing regular work.

On the gadget front, many things have taken place.

We returned the Averatec because they wouldn't help us get Windows back on it and the Linux driver support was pretty poor.

I finally got a replacement for the Jeep stereo (VRCD-300USB) from MegaSound -- the MegaSound VRCD-400USB (It's nicer looking, but so far isn't working much better -- but I haven't had time to really try to get it working).

We got an XBox 360. It's really quite great. ;)

We got a DS Lite and a DS. Compared to the PSP, the features aren't as good but the battery life and ease of picking them up and putting them down to play quickly is much better, IMO. I still like the PSP and still need to download the LocoRoco demo.

We got a Dell XPS M1210 for our upcoming trip. This is my favorite laptop, to date. It's small, but not too small. It's light (ok, it could be lighter -- but it is under 5 pounds). It's not so small it's skimping anything -- it has a dual core processor, can take up to 4GB of RAM, has a DVD burner, and has a real video card (64MB fixed and 192MB shared). It's the battery life that has me sold, though. In my typical use for it, I'm getting well over 5 hours and usually 6-7 hours of usage out of it. (My typical use? Browsing, email, Google Earth, and other non-development and non-gaming tasks with WiFi turned on. It is the T2300E, with a 5400rpm hard disk, too.) Basically, with the exeption of the screen resolution, it can be a full development machine if it wants to be. It won't be the best gaming machine, but it won't be bad either. The screen can be seen in full sunlight, too, which is very useful.

I'm sure there are plenty of other things I'm missing (that's why you're supposed to blog frequently and as things happen, right?) Some things I'll need to elaborate on, when I get the time.

Speaking of that, when will I blog next? I actually don't know -- all of the things keeping my away from the blog are still present -- and then we'll be on our honeymoon.

So, until next time -- whenever that is -- enjoy!

This can be accomplished in a couple of different ways. One way is to keep your blog among friends and get your friends to take part. This is very common among the people around me. Another way is to drive traffic to your site. The links at the end of the post are mostly about the latter.

I've found that the primary way to get traffic on my site is by writing content that people want to read or that is very current. Since I tend to follow gadget news, this often means writing something about a very current toy. Another way that works well is by good content on forums where a signature has a link to it. You can't just write, "check me out!" Well, you can, but it won't be taken as seriously as real content -- nor will it come up in searches.

One of the ways mentioned in these articles that I hadn't considered was by signing up with each of the RSS aggregators and making sure to subscribe you'll make sure those sites spider your site. You don't have to rely on pinging them or other people to subscribe. (The User Agent these aggregators use usually lists the number of subscribers in it, which is very useful.)

Many of the normal website design patterns and rules also apply. However, it's my opinion that a successful blog can get away with breaking some of the rules. After all, it's your blog and you can do what you want. You aren't necessarily targetting everyone, anyway. Ultimately, people like you will find it and come. Sure, it is potentially a much smaller population of people, but that's your decision to make not some web designers.

Naturally, you could advertise. But do you really want to advertise to bring traffic to your blog? In one post on a forum site, I drove over 500 visitors to my site. At 10 cents a visitor, that had $50 in value. And the traffic was likely all much more real than that from advertising. Of course, I'm sure some of the blogs out there spend thousands to advertise. It would take a lot of work to match those results with a single person making some forum posts.

One of the sites mentions Technorati as being a way to generate a lot of traffic. My results haven't shown it to be any better or worse off than other sites. But then, maybe I'm not using it correctly. ;)

In any case, some of these methods to increase traffic can be fun, too. So, enjoy!

HOW TO: Boost Your Blog Traffic at PaulStamatiou.com

Intelligent Bacon: 16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog. Tips for Terrific Telephone Interviews.

As it turns out, the problem is with the default category archive templates. They put every single post in a category in its entirety on a single page. Any time any post changes (comments, trackbacks, content, etc.) in the category the entire page needs to be rebuilt. This is not a big deal with categories that have 10 items in them. For ones with hundreds, this becomes a huge problem. (My own gadgets category has over 150 posts in it.)

So, the first solution is to make that page smaller and simpler. Examples of this are given at the first link above. This is also the method I have implemented now. Basically, instead of full text to all posts in a category I have the full text to the first 10 posts and an index of all posts in a category. (Note that monthly archives only have this problem on very active blogs. Posting 3-4 times a day would cause slow downs towards the end of the month.)

The second solution is to use smarty in conjunction with dynamic templates to create a fully paginated category archive. The second link above gives code details on how to do this. That site also seems to have implemented this on comments, which can also cause issues.

Another partial solution is to just switch the category archives to dynamic. This would speed up publishing, but may slow down the loads on the category archives. These archive pages are often near the top of my load list. Naturally, that's because they contain the full text to everything I've posted. So the first solution should actually direct people to the actual posts rather than an index with all of the posts.

In any case, hopefully posting comments and articles into the gadgets category will be faster now. ;)