Posted on: August 7th, 2010 by Famous Phil
This is more an update than anything else. I have finally taken the time to prune some of the comments in the past year on FamousPhil. In the future, I will be only approving links that either are track backs or contain non SEO titles. I have never minded allowing comments, but the spam volume that I’ve begun seeing is just too unreasonable to continue handling without changing my policies. In the past, I’ve approved comments that contain text that pertains to the post, but I just can’t continue on that course 
In the next week or so, I will also be disabling user registrations, along with pruning the user database (except to the guest posters who were asked to make an account). That too has gotten out of hand!
As always, if you want to make a guest post and get a real link back with seo key words, feel free to contact me I generally don’t mind the content as long as it has something useful in it that won’t harm my readers.
Tags: policy update, spam
Posted in My Site
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Posted on: January 20th, 2010 by Famous Phil
Hi, and welcome to the new FamousPhil website! It isn’t actually all that new, but it is a major revision of my website. This has been coming now for at least the past 5 months because I completely hated the colors that I chose for the overall site theme. I can’t believe that I thought mixing all sorts of colors would even remotely look good. Anyways, I fixed it and I feel that the site looks better.
So what exactly changed?
I changed the color scheme a little bit and this is what you will likely notice the quickest. I decided to go with a traditional blue theme using the same blue that I selected before, but this time with a color guide. For anyone in need of finding colors that go well together, I strongly recommend: http://colorschemedesigner.com/. That site helped me a lot!
In addition, FamousPhil now validates to XHTML Strict 1.0, it used to validate to XHTML Transitional 1.0. This is basically technical language saying that FamousPhil is guaranteed to look the same on all compliant browsers that can display this website. This was very difficult to achieve considering the old website base uses many elements of XHTML transitional that don’t exist in strict. Regardless of the difficulty, I managed to get everything updated and working well You may ask why I didn’t choose HTML 5 (I know one person who did), and my reasoning is, its standards aren’t fully established yet and aren’t mainstream enough for my personal preferences.
Finally, the major component that I really wanted to fix for a long time has happened. On my end, FamousPhil now has a real content management system. I wrote a theme for WordPress (thanks to John) and I now use WordPress as my content management system. Doing this has made my life much easier since changing the site has gone from manually editing source code to “drag and drop”. Hopefully I can continue to make my sites easier to manage so I can perhaps find more free time in the future
Thats all for now. I still need to do some blogging on some important issues, but that will come someday in the near future
Tags: color scheme, design, famousphil, validation, xhtml
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Posted on: January 1st, 2010 by Famous Phil
At the time of beginning this post… it is 12:01am Eastern Time, January 1, 2010. My first words are: Happy New Year! and Happy new decade! Hopefully this decade will bring a lot more fortune than the last one I just want to quickly look back on the last 10 years of my life and the funniest videos of the year that I’ve found.
Ten years ago from today, I did not know much about a computer. I can assure you that I did not know how to turn one on, and I only had a slight clue about what the internet was. At the time, I had high hopes of becoming an electrical engineer and I loved playing around with circuits. I was also much younger and had a lot to learn (obviously). I also wasn’t entirely sure about what all the Y2K stuff was all about, so it didn’t really affect me. Finally, a last tiny tidbit… I have spent *every* new year of my life in my own bedroom here at home. I might be a few feet off from the same position each year, but I’ve basically in the same spot. This is only the third year of my life that I’ve been up to witness the new year come in.
So, how does it feel? I doesn’t feel any different… its just another day. For some people, its an iconic day I suppose, being a new year and all, but for me, nothing has really changed. I will continue to live and will continue to do what I do every day. The only difference is, I will have to get over the annoyance of not remembering to write 2010 on any documents I create for at least the next few weeks (probably about a month or two in reality).
2009 brought me 8 hard drive failures in various machines that I’ve worked on, 2 being my own. It also brought some bad fortune with the passing of my grandmother. On the brighter side, it brought Windows 7, Microsoft Exchange, XM Radio, 2 new Laptop computers, a new server, and the magic of Verizon wireless high speed internet here at home. It also brought me a wonderful job at my college and lots of new knowledge about computers. Overall, 2009 for me was a decent year, especially considering the killing I made on Ebay selling Michael Jackson dolls (I sold quite a few within the first day after his death). Of all the stuff that 2009 brought, perhaps the biggest was a new and improved FamousPhil.com. Within the next few weeks, FamousPhil.com will change slightly again to become more smooth in color transitions
In 2009, I watched a lot of amazing video. I think its time to share some of the more memorable youtube links of the best videos I saw in 2010! I’m also going to leave this blog post here. I hope that your 2009 was as enjoyable as mine and that your 2010 brings good tidings Enjoy!
Ancient Modem that still works (seen on Yahoo for several weeks back in June, 2009)
World’s Fastest Speed Reader reading the original Health Care Bill – Cavuto (Fox News)
Glen Beck – Turtles on TV (You may have to get half way through this partially edited clip)
Next up is from a movie that was hilarious (Monsters vs. Aliens). I also liked High School Musical 3.
I discovered something about geiko!
And finally, the video that combines it all together perfectly!
To another great year! Thanks for stopping in!
Tags: 2009, 2010, Happy New Year, New Year, video
Posted in My Site, Personal, Student Life, Technology
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Posted on: June 20th, 2009 by Famous Phil
First I guess I should apologize for not posting anything in the past week here! I really hate it when I have to ignore my own blog for more important admin business elsewhere. The good thing is, I always manage to learn a lot of new stuff that I can easily share
Over the past week, I got a new server to host Microsoft Exchange which is a powerful email server from Microsoft. Before you go all crazy on Microsoft (I know I typically do), Exchange is one of the few excellent products they make. I am actually very hard pressed to find anything that compares to it that is open source and can easily run on Linux which 99% of my hosting business up until now has ran off from. Man, I never thought that I would say that 
Tags: 1and1, 3dgwebhosting, active directory, Admin Reference, administration, Elite data hosting, email, exchange, exchange 2003, Exchange 2007, fsckvps, mailxchange, Microsoft, Microsoft Exchange, mobile, outlook, outlook web access, owa, server 2003, vaserv, vps, windows
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Mobile Technology, My Site
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Posted on: May 26th, 2009 by Famous Phil
As you probably have noticed, I have changed a few aspects of the site yet again Most of these changes came from commments and suggestions via email and comments. Overall, the roughness of the images and the size has been corrected. Remember, I’m not that good at photoshop, so although there are errors, I’m going to kind of push off fixing them until I become better at photoshop.
Of the corrections, the most notable is the contact envelope now points to a contact page. I also have integrated the calendar to the famousphil.com theme. The blog has also been shortened with read more tags. Hopefully this makes my site more reader / user friendly
Finally, the main addition to FamousPhil is the Philki. This is an attempt to make FamousPhil.com more modern and involve user interaction. I’ve added mediawiki and will allow everyone to describe me. I probably won’t do much moderating (if at all). I think its a great, humourous addition to FamousPhil and I encourage you to “define me”.
I’ve also gotten a few emails from other people wanting to promote their sites through posts (similar to the promotion I did for asciibin). I have no problem in doing this for other sites if they don’t seem like spam and look really useful for readers of my site. I also don’t mind adding partners to my partners widget if the site in question has great potential
Thats enough for this post. I will probably be blogging about our pool experience this year tomrrow or the day after and why pool regulations from the government are really starting to get out of hand.
Tags: philki, smooth images, updates, user friendly, wiki
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Posted on: April 25th, 2009 by Famous Phil
The other night, I was working on installing a new RSS feed reader that is similar to Google Reader. I first found out about Google Reader from a friend (Chris) here at my University over a lunch. I then looked at it and discovered that it is much better than going to each and every blog site and reading the posts on each blog directly. This reader basically gathers all of the full text blogs and puts them in an email interface format, making it extremely easy and painless to read a bunch of RSS feeds while on the go (for me, on my windows mobile smart phone on the bus going to class or during dinner when I’m too lazy to get up and return to my room).
Anyways, I am not a real fan of using everything Google when I have an alternative that runs in ssh and doesn’t require an additional login (or saved password). I found 2 alternatives that run in ssh, one is snownews and the other is newsbeuter. Both of these programs are extremely simple and do exactly what google reader does, but they run in the SSH window like Pine or Pico does (Pine is an ssh email client, and pico is an ssh text editor). Snownews is not really good at reading rss feeds because it looks at the description tag of RSS 2.0 feeds which only puts a brief outline of the feed on the screen. Newsbeuter is much better and places the full content of a post on your screen like Google Reader does.
So, what does newsbeuter look like?
Here is the Main Screen, a main listing from a single rss feed, and a single blog post from an rss feed:
Newsbeuter is a great program, I’m willing to put up with no images, videos, and sometimes some gargled text to save time. As you probably know, I use public keys for ssh and and to get to this reader from my pine email takes a matter of seconds and no mouse movement. I’m slowly working on getting my instant mesengers to ssh, however we will see if that ever materializes.
So now onto my rant about partial vs full text feeds.
When I was configuring newsbeuter, my main concern was, “would it read a full feed that is in the rss file, or would it just show the description cropped by [...] like snownews did”. Because I compiled this on my server from source, I didn’t want to waste effort installing dependancies (a compiling problem) if it wouldn’t work in the end.
Luckily, it did read full rss feeds, except for John’s blog. I asked John what was different about his blog, and he told me he turned off full text rss feeds. His reasoning is, rss feeds make it very easy for someone else to post dynamic changing content on their own websites. While I totally understand this concern, I really wonder if it will kill off readership to his site, which I know he might eventually want to make money off from some day. I know for sure that I want famousphil.com to eventually make money for itself although I’m still debating how to put ads on it without hurting the design (which will be changing in a month or two again to make it easier to read).
I have looked at several blogs debating rull text vs partial text feeds (they aren’t hard to find), including the following:
- http://econsultancy.com/blog/018-rss-strategy-full-text-vs-partial-text-round-2
- http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/004717.html. Although this site says the problem was fixed, I think it grabs my true feelings about partial feeds
- http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cartoon_partial_text_rss_feeds.php “So nowadays those sites only get my attention when the teaser looks absolutely irresistible — and that’s a bar that’s high and rising.” Thats how I feel (although I have yet to move many of my favorite feeds into newsbeuter.
For me, I will probably keep his blog on my feed list and look at his teasers. I will probably not actually read any more than his teasers though (mostly because I don’t have time to go look at these other sites that feel too smart to post a full feed). I don’t use other people’s content for my blogs normally without citing then adding significant material onto their blogs, therefore, I don’t consider myself a blog theif either. I do however visit other sites if I feel like leaving a comment
Finally, with wordpress, if you use a “more” tag, this material will not show up on your blog feed. I will likely begin using this a bit (only after my site becomes eye friendly) because I do have long blogs and sometimes that material is an aid, but not necessary to know everything about my blog. If people want to read the aiding material, then they can then visit my site.
As for this blog, always expect a full feed, if there isn’t one, I will do everything I can to help. Comments are appreciated as always If you host with me, feel free to use these programs I mentioned as they are installed on the main server 
Tags: blog, content, description, feed, full, newsbeuter, partial, pico, pine, rss, snownews, ssh
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration, Mobile Technology, My Site, Personal, Technology
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