Super Ginormous

Month: April 2007

  • Witchhunt

    Did Don Imus deserve to get fired? We all stay stupid things from time to time, and Imus has made more than his fair share. I won’t excuse him for the comments he made… but did it really deserve this much attention?  He apologized for his remarks. End of story, right? Would Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton apologize if they made racially charged statements towards someone of another skin color? They haven’t yet.

    I never listened to Imus, but I can’t help but feel a little sorry for him. He’s lost everything over this. This feels like a witchhunt to me.

  • Browse the Archives

    I added an Archives page to the site last night. You can now easily view posts on cdharrison.com by Month or by Category/Subject. A few of the earlier posts you’ll find in the archives appeared as part of a column I had in the Augusta State University student newspaper, The Bell Ringer.

  • Bring Baseball Downtown

    If approved, Augusta could be getting a new baseball stadium. Why am I even mentioning this here? The new stadium would only be a hop, skip and a jump from the downtown Augusta offices of PowerServe.

    I love the idea of bringing the Augusta GreenJackets downtown. I’d be more likely to attend a game The big question now is: how much is it going to cost?

    Ballpark figures

    Mayor Deke Copenhaver and the Ripken Baseball family are convinced that if they build a riverfront baseball stadium downtown, nothing but good things will come for the city of Augusta. On Tuesday, Mr. Copenhaver and Bill Ripken announced that a Downtown Stadium Exploratory Committee will study the feasibility of a ballpark on the Savannah River between 11th and 13th streets.

    $20 million – The stadium’s estimated cost, which likely would be paid for through a public-private partnership. Augusta commissioners would have to call for a referendum to issue bonds, and “ultimately, the people will decide,” likely through a referendum, Mr. Copenhaver said.

    “We’re happy to let the people decide, because we think this is a project that will be supported by everyone,” Mr. Copenhaver said.

    6,000 – Number of people the proposed park would seat. Currently, the Class A GreenJackets play in 12-year-old Lake Olmstead Stadium. It is the third-smallest park in the 16-team South Atlantic League, with a capacity of 4,322.

    The current stadium could see increased use by area colleges and use from interested charities such as the Salvation Army’s Kroc Center and the Cal Ripken Sr. Foundation.

    4,000 – Available parking spaces within a 12-minute walk from the site on Reynolds Street, according to Mr. Copenhaver.

    17 – Exploratory committee members. The panel will visit Durham and Greensboro, N.C., and Greenville, S.C.

    The study could be finished by August.

    $20 million seems like a lot of money, but it could help with the revitalization of the downtown area. I question the mayor’s assessment of parking. If we didn’t lease parking spots from a local property owner, we’d have a hard time finding places to park near our offices. Regardless, I hope it goes through…

  • RSS Fair Use?

    If you publish an RSS feed, does it give others the right to repurpose your content as they see fit?

    I have been noticing frequent trackbacks from a couple of sites when I’ve tagged articles with a keyword of “adsense”. On the surface, this isn’t a big deal. When I checked the sites out, however, I realized they were nothing more than Content Scraping Spam Blogs. I sent a note asking for one particular site to stop scraping my content and the guy had the audacity to send this to me:

    “Dude, I am not scraping your content, I’m linking to your site with a small quote. Most people are happy to have free links to their site. If you don’t want anyone else to link to your site then why are you syndicating it with a feed?  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_syndication

    Take down your feed or at least put a notice that no one else can use it.”

    What are your thoughts on this? If I have a publicly available feed, does it give others the right to re-syndicate that content without the author’s permission?

  • Conduct

    So the idea of a blogger code of conduct is being tossed around… My first thought after reading it was “You’re kidding me, right? This is the Internet and trolls aren’t going away anytime soon.” Greg Storey’s response to it is the best I’ve seen so far…

    You’re on my site and these are my thoughts. I do not moderate comments, except in the event where someone has posted spam, obscene messages, hate speech, etc. that has somehow made it through Spam Karma, Bad Behavior and Akismet. If a comment is posted that I find objectionable, I will delete the comment and take steps to make sure you can’t comment here again. I’m not going to write something inflammatory about other bloggers, coworkers, clients, etc. on my site because it’s common sense not to do so. I am responsible for what I write online, and I know that.

    I don’t think a Blogger’s Code of Conduct is a terrible and/or outlandish idea, but it’s completely unnecessary.

    What do you think about the Blogger’s Code of Conduct? Is it necessary? Will you subscribe to its policies on your site?

  • Ending AdSense

    Last month, I decided to place Google AdSense ads onto single entries on the site. 1.5 weeks later I’m ending the AdSense Experiment. In practice, AdSense is a good idea, but for a small site like this it’s unnecessary and adds nothing to my site. I learned a few things during the experiment:

    1. Ads aren’t always relevent. As a matter of fact, I’ve found that most of the ads that appeared on this site were very irrelevant and border-line offensive. Ads asking “Are You Gay?” don’t have anything to do with anything on this site.
    2. I don’t get enough traffic to warrant sufficient click-throughs. One or two clicks here and there doesn’t equate to much. Over time, it might add up, but at what cost?

    Why even bother with this sort of stuff? Well, this site’s always been a place where I could experiment. Whether it’s trying to get better at HTML, PHP and/or CSS; search engine optimization; site monetization; etc… I’ve tried to use this site to learn ways to add value to customers I service at my day job. After all, why suggest anything to a client if you haven’t tried something and succeeded at it yourself? You should never be content with what you know in this field. If you are, you’re going to get left behind.

  • Switch

    The one thing that has really surprised since moving this site to it’s new home is just how well WordPress works in the environment it was intended for.

    I had been running the site on a Windows 2000 Server under IIS 5 with PHP4 installed. For the most part, the site was usable, but little things either didn’t work at all or stopped working after a while. Stuff like notifications, paging, auto-creating thumbnails, etc. stopped working. In order to get cleaner URLs, I had to resort to PHP.ini and ISAPI filter hacks. It worked, but not like one would hope and/or expect.

    Now, everything just works. I should have made this switch a while ago.

  • Success

    If you’re seeing this post, you’re seeing the site on the new MediaTemple server.

  • Migration

    I’m in the process of moving my site and a few others under my control to their new home, over at MediaTemple. I’m not sure how long it will take for the DNS changes to propagate. Your patience is appreciated.

  • Naked Day

    Nope, you’re not seeing things: Today is April 5th and that means it’s NAKED DAY! The stylesheet has been disabled on this site in support of the 2nd Annual CSS Naked Day. (This is the first year that I’ve participated in the event. Last year had 763 official participants!) The idea behind NAKED DAY is to promote Web Standards. Plain and simple. This includes proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, a good hierarchy structure, and of course, a good ‘ol play on words. To learn more more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.