Publishing

The Joy of MySQL

While deleting some comment spam in the Drudge Retort database, I just had to use the following MySQL query: delete from feedback where author like '%sperm%'; ... (read more)

2005/09/30

Your Deadline Or Your Life

Computer book author Dave Prochnow rode out Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi and risked his family's life so he could FedEx a manuscript: Getting to the highway involved doing things that you would never ever do with kids in a car -- driving off the road, driving through people's yards, and driving over power lines. Yes, we had to drive over power lines. Luckily at least one of them was dead -- that was the one that just touched our roof antenna. Gulp. Generalizing wildly from his personal ... (read more)

2005/09/26

Displaying XML Data with PHP

I recently finished writing Sams Teach Yourself Programming with Java in 24 Hours, the fourth edition of an introductory book for Java programmers, which comes out in around two weeks. I've been given wide editorial license with the book, so it contains unusual projects like Lottorobics, a lottery simulation applet that demonstrates why "Win the Lotto" is a terrible retirement plan. The new edition adds chapters on XML and XML-RPC that use XOM and Apache XML-RPC, two great open source class ... (read more)

2005/09/21

The Andrew Breitbart Report

After leaving the Huffington Post, Andrew Breitbart has been getting huge traffic on his weeks-old news portal, Breitbart.Com. The Drudge Report links to his copies of AP and Reuters news stories, making his site more popular than Slashdot overnight. Developing ... WorldNewsDaily calls Breitbart a former employee of the Drudge Report, but my impression is that he's currently working as Matt Drudge's double super-secret coauthor. Drudge has been coy about Breitbart's work for years, probably ... (read more)

2005/09/08

Pimping Your Pagerank for Profit

The tech blogger Phil Ringnalda is taking heat over criticizing O'Reilly about some questionable link ads on the company's web sites. Tim O'Reilly posted a thoughtful response that shows he's not entirely comfortable with selling ads that trade on a site's Google pagerank, rather than visitor eyeballs. This is a good discussion for web publishers to be having, because the practice of pimping pagerank is becoming more pervasive. I've received numerous offers to put such links on SportsFilter, a ... (read more)

2005/08/24

Getting a Read on My Readers

People who have read Workbench for a while are probably wondering whether this has become a political weblog. My site has always emphasized what I'm working on at the moment, and I'm currently developing the LAMP web application that runs the Drudge Retort and serving as an unofficial geek advisor to the Alan Colmes Radio Show. As a consequence, I've been eating, breathing, and sleeping politics for weeks. I may be taking it too far; I dreamed about Michelle Malkin last night, and all we did ... (read more)

2005/08/12

Wikipedia's a Sticky Wicket

The neutrality and factual accuracy of this article on Wikipedia are disputed. The Los Angeles Times gave up its wikitorial experiment after three days. Someone got their goat by adding one of the web's most infamous gross-out photos to the site. Jeff Jarvis defends the honor of wikis, blaming the Times: They didn't get that wikis are a collaborative medium where, even when people disagree, they try to find common ground, knowing there can be only one outcome, or else the wiki will, by its ... (read more)

2005/06/21

President Clinton on Alan Colmes Tonight

I picked a good time to become new best friends with Alan Colmes. He scored an interview with President Clinton that airs this evening on his syndicated radio show, which broadcasts live from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. Eastern. I've borrowed Matt Drudge's siren, because I have some advance details about the interview. From excerpts that I wheedled out of a Fox News publicist, they discuss Hillary Clinton's political ambitions, his lingering sentiments about impeachment, and whether he would accept the ... (read more)

2005/06/17

Keeping Computer Books Up-to-Date

Charles Wright in the Sydney Morning Herald: With the number of blogs increasing at a phenomenal rate, more people than ever will find themselves dealing with the market-leading Movable Type. The Movable Type 3 Bible, from Wiley, gives you a thorough grounding in the complexities of a blogging platform that, on the surface, looks relatively easy to master but repays the effort required to learn about its more powerful features. Increasingly, these books are rendered somewhat out of date with ... (read more)

2005/06/17

Googlemilk: And Then They All Blamed Me

Alex Pareene, who describes googlemilking as "thinking of a great setup, and letting the internets provide the punchline," offers this contribution to the game: "and then they all blamed me." The phrase reveals scapegoated sex club workers, abuse survivors, drug addicts, and a Canadian who blogs about flatulence: i guess all this talk of gas has had its effect on me. last night i had two dreams and in each one i 'let one go' while i was around other people and they all blamed me and i denied ... (read more)

2005/06/17

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