I've been on FC 11 for over a week now. The more I get to know it, the more I love it.

Give the people what they want, right? If your client wants a flash website with lots of moving parts, give them that.

Um, kind of, but if you're a professional and your client is a professional, you have a duty to give them all the information they need to make an informed decision about what they really want. If you're designing a site for a nightclub or children's television program, you might want music and lots of animation. Otherwise, it's usually dumb.

It's here! The ultimate splog

If you want to know how to splog, check out my new splog, dedicated to getting people to buy stuff.

If you're seriously looking for advice on how to build a blog for profit, here it is in three simple steps:

1. The first thing you need to be able to do to splog successfully is find excellent products to promote. Cruddy products don't sell, and even when they do sell they generate lots of troublesome refund requests.
Go full-nerd and read on...

My Path to the Nirvana of Fedora Core 11

I never thought that I would see an operating system like this in my lifetime. Well, OK, I did think that I would see one, but I thought its development would take until 2015.

I have been a fan of Red Hat since the mid-'90s when my friend set up a web server and let me play around with it. Back then it was all command line stuff, and Linux was, for the most part, strictly for servers and programming. The first time I opened an X11 (Linux GUI) session, I was like, "Well, I guess Microsoft has nothing to worry about." It was buggy. It was slow. It looked like crap. Still, Red Hat Linux rocked the web server so well that I became a fan.

In 2001 I had a great business idea that, like so many of my great business ideas, withered on the vine even after I had spent a lot of hours working on it. It was a case of not committing fully, really. My life at the time was full of other events and obligations.

File under: Don't make the same mistakes I made... or maybe not

One of the reasons I more or less abandoned chucklinart.com over the past year is that I was focused on another site, Survive Unemployment! A little over a year ago, you see, I became totally unemployed. Finding a job seemed impossible so I started trying to make money in a million ways. I thought I would try my hand at the internet publishing business, among other things, and I had a great idea.

If you've been following, you know that I'm on a mission to bring this blog back from the dead with regard to its Page Rank. Incoming links have grown steadily through a "nice guy" strategy of linking out and hoping the favor is returned. It's too early to draw any firm conclusions on that, but so far it seems to work. According to Google Webmaster Tools, links to this site increased from 18 to their current 159. An impressive 71 new links were generated to the main page.

Based on what I see in my own searches and in the search referrers to my sites, it seems that Google's transition to the new algorithm is not going so well. Searches seem far less relevant. It even reminds me of the old days of AltaVista when it was sort of a crapshoot. Google's indexing of the entire online world is massively complex. Could the complexity of it be getting out of hand, or has the search giant overstepped? I'm betting on the latter. I think they got too fancy with the new algorithm and it messed everything up. That's just a theory.

If you have been following this thing, you have probably been hanging on the edge of your seat. These quixotic quests are great story fodder, aren't they? No matter what happens, the audience gets a good show. If the hero fails, we can laugh at him for being such a fool or lament his tragedy without actually having to experience it firsthand. If the hero succeeds, it gives us hope that we too might someday conquer the insurmountable obstacles in our own lives.

Just wanted to share this experience to save headaches for any Drupal admins finding it difficult to update the Category module

If you have been getting strange behavior from Category, you are not alone. It's extremely powerful and robust and, as such, prone to easy breaking. It's one of those paradoxes of computer programming -- the more the program can do, the more intricate the code, the more buggy.

Anyway, if a search brought you here because you're banging your head against the wall trying to update this module, try this: