NBN to sing, dance – Minchin
Apr 30, 2009 Australia, Enviroment, Internet, Telco
According to The Australian, shadow communications minister Nick Minchin has been quoted as saying: “Senator Conroy is claiming this all singing, all dancing NBN is also going to save the planet.” I’m taking his quote out of context, but it goes to show how petty and soundbite-driven politics can be at times.
The article I am linking to (well, until it link-rots away) actually raises some of the advantages the proposed NBN could bring to the country. I think once the network is built people will come up with all sorts of amazing high-bandwidth applications to use on it. Many of these will reduce the need to travel, bringing convenience and environmental benefits for most of us, but could be of huge importance for people with mobility challenges.
Cleaning up the link rot
Apr 26, 2009 Internet, Media & Advertising
In this blog I often make reference to current events in the news and include a link to the source of the story. Sadly it seems that many of these news stories have a very short shelf life on the publisher’s website and have vanished leaving nothing but a 404 error in their place. I found a useful plugin to help with the link rot problem which has revealed around 80% of my broken links point to newspaper publisher’s websites.
Recently the print media have been complaining that Google is stealing their content (one example if many such articles), however they are never able to cite any specific examples of this behavior by Google. Personally I think they are just scared and confused about new technologies like RSS and Google News. It seems to me the print media are missing a huge opportunity to place their archives online and collect advertising revenue. Some of these newspapers have archives that go back hundreds of years. Imagine how much of a valuable resources these would be to people conducting research of our recent history? This open approach to use of the newspaper archives would certainly earn the publishers more revenue than they get from serving up 404 errors.
Time to get some hosting
Apr 7, 2009 Misc
For the last 4 or so years this site has been hosted at home over my DSL line. In that time period I’ve been through several ISPs and physical addresses and numerous versions of WordPress.
Recently my provider had an outage that dragged on for well over 24 hours and resulted in me churning my DSL service to a new ISP. It took a while to update the routing following the move so this site was down for the better part of a week. I think it is finally time to move this site over to dedicated hosting where it is less prone to these sorts of problems.
I have some issues with most my current hosting provider not allowing me to have SRV records in my zonefile (needed for jabberd) but moving the web side of things over shouldn’t be much of an issue. I’m also going to take the opportunity to go back through the old posts and clean out ones with link rot.
Here are my current response time stats from the Google webmaster console:
Let’s see how they look after the move.