Movin' on up..

Well, things are getting ready to change (isn't it the I Ching that says "the only thing constant is change"?). It looks like we're moving to an apartment as we have sold our home. It's a rather happy occasion, though not one that's devoid of complications. It looks like we're going to have to change internet providers since our current ISP doesn't service the area we're moving to. Hopefully, the transition will be smooth, and the interruptions will be brief. My email provider is thankfully not tied to my ISP, so you'll still be able to reach me here if you need anything.

Also, while we're starting the moving process, I've had to pack up most of my music gear. I have 1 lonely 6 string acoustic guitar which I haven't gotten much of a chance to play lately. This has been a little frustrating, artistically, but it's got me thinking. I don't seem to get much chance to write in this lovely blog page, so why don't I channel a little energy to it? So, here's my thought: I'm hoping to write a series (I've no idea how long) on "Unnoticed or Underappreciated Artists". I'm not sure of the tite of the series, I'll hopefully come up with sometihng a little catchier than that. The idea of this series will be, I'll write about a different artist(s) in each column that I feel was overlooked by a vast majority of people. These will be totally my opinions, and I make no claim to be any type of expert on any of these people, but suffice to say, they all had a part in shaping me as a musician, as a music listener, and as a person altogether (in some cases).

Now, a LOT of these will be guitarists, as I'm primarily a guitarist myself. Also, a lot of my early influences will be from the Metal genre (think 1980's and 1990's Metal mostly). Knowing me, I'll likely be all over the place on this, but I've been delving into old CDs and mp3's lately and listening to pieces of music that just blew me away the first time I heard them, and I'm finding that a lot of them still hold up quite well. So, I figured I'd share some of my favorite artists and pieces in the hopes that you find them interesting and maybe inspiring as well. I love when someone turns me on to an artist I'd never heard of before and I then can just immerse myself in that new stuff, so hopefully I'll be able to do that for you. Hopefully, I'll be a little more dilligent about posting and this will turn out to be an interesting venture into the first "serialized" version of my blog. Hey, if I end up writing for Rolling Stone , you'll be able to say you used to read me when....

I know, I know, I suck for not posting...

Don't take that condescending tone with me. You know, it's not like I don't feel badly about it, so you don't have to rub it in. Don't you realize that every time I update ANYTHING on the Mikeiscool Site , that I don't see the blog page nagging at me? I feel its pain. I know it feels neglected. But it's not as if I'm neglecting it on purpose. I mean, it's been a pretty busy couple of months. First of all, Lily had her first birthday (and a fabulous time was had by all). Also, I took (and passed) another class in BOMI (Building Owner's and Manager's Institute....work stuff). I also managed to get a Mikeiscool MySpace Page up and going (granted it needs some serious polish, and I'm using it primarily to refer people to this site.

But, there is one other thing I must confess. I've been cheating on my blog with another, newer blog . I know....I feel terrible about it. I totally didn't plan it. I discovered it on this site . It started with me making my own On The Lot Page , and one thing led to another, and well, you know the rest. I didn't intend on it happening, and I was thinking of my blog page here the whole time. I know that doesn't make it any better, I made a mistake. I mean, I'm just trying to find a way to drive some more, serious attention to this site, and I guess I got carried away. I'll try not to do it again, but, well, now I've opened pandora's box. I'm fighting the urge to blog on the Mikeiscool MySpace page and hope that I can be strong. We'll see.

I think I've got it

In keeping with the theme of always striving to improve, I think I have yet another milestone in the legacy of the Mikeiscool Website . After some hacking into the HTML templates of Thingamablog , and learning on the fly while I made some modifications to the CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) provided by this guy , I think I have finally attained a cohesive and consistent website. While this might not mean a hill of beans to you, to a computer geek like me, I'm pretty darned proud of myself. I've always like learning new things, particularly where computers are involved. In fact, years ago, I did study computer programming and even considered working in the IT field. Hell, I was even one of those wild-eyed enthusiasts who jumped on the "Certification" Craze in the late 90's early 00's and was going for my CIW . Unfortunately for me, before I could finish, the "school" I was attending (which shall remain nameless because they don't deserve 1 shred of any credit/mention) went bankrupt and I was left with a large student loan and only 1 of the 3 certifications!! Suffice to say, I was a little miffed.

Anyway, I got over it, and you know what....I'm glad I did. I'd really hate to have to be sweating whether my job was about to be outsourced to India or Brazil right now. Nothing against any of you that do, but I don't think I'd enjoy working in IT. I love working with computers, I love learning how they work, learning new languages and operating systems, but at my own pace and on my own schedule. Plus, when it's my stuff, I can do whatever I want.....rather than be stuck in a cube explaining to people how to install printer drivers etc etc.

This website began as an experiment as I was learning some of the finer points of Fedora Core which is a "flavor" of Linux . As I was teaching myself how to set up a webserver, I started to realize the value in it for me as a musician and composer. While at first, I just stuck a few pages of text on my webserver to see if I could see it on my local network, I started to realize how much further I could take it. I registered my domain name, and then had to refresh my memory on proper DNS structure so I could point the "internets" to my server, I had to punch holes through a few firewalls I had set up on my boxes and routers, I had to configure my routers to direct all appropriate "internet" traffic to my server...and voila....I had my boring looking website available to the world (not that anyone would have wanted to see it).

Then I decided I would make my site a resource for developing more contacts for licensing my music . I had to re-learn the finer points of web design (which I won't go into here but you can read about in past entries), and maintain my site. Now that I've achieved a "semi" professional website, I will feel even more confident directing people, producers, filmmakers, etc to my site in order to find out more about me. I had previously taken the attitude of "well, they're coming to the site to hear the music" but I began to realize that no one wants to look at a horrible website, and that was what I had. I hope now that people find the site useable, attractive, and easy on the eyes (kinda like me.......no just kidding.....I had to). Anyway, if any of you have read most/all of the entries relating to the development and improvement of this site over the last year, I hope you've seen it improve steadily. Stay tuned as always for more updates and ramblings, and as always, check out the Music Page for the latest and greatest creations.

WHEW!!

Man, my brain, eyes, and fingers hurt! No, I didn't just kick my own ass like this guy , I just finished overhauling the Official Mikeiscool Website.  It's been a long time coming, and I must say that I'm pretty happy with the results. After a LOT of work, I confess, I'm not really feeling like typing too much today, but I wanted to at least stick a post up, ensure it went across the servers ok, and that the new Cascading Style Sheet from this guy plays nicely with Thingamablog . Overall, it looks like it does, although both the Mikeiscoool Blog Page and the Mikeiscool News Section render slightly differently than the other pages. But, they look good enough for me to feel that the bulk of the work for this project is over. Surprisingly, a big part of the solution was abandoning Dreamweaver for NVU.  For those of you needing to create/edit/update a website, please check it out, I recommend it highly.

Anyway, Lily's in the other room in her swing, and she's sounding like she's going to need something to eat very shortly. I must sign off, but I thank you for stopping by. Let me know what you think of the new design, and please let me know if you find any dead/broken links, I could use the help troubleshooting.

Why not index the index?

You know, I can't figure out this Search Engine stuff. I guess what I mean is THE search engine Google . I'm still trying to "optimize" my site so that I have a decent rank when searched for things like "COMPOSER" or "SONGWRITER" or "MUSIC", but it's really a bitch. I've submitted a sitemap but I'm frustrated. When I check my server logs, I see that Google is crawling my site at least once a day, which is GREAT. But, the GoogleBot is acting insane. For some reason, it's crawling everything except my Index Page . That's right, for some unknown reason, the GoogleBot just hates the URL http://www.mikeiscool.net/index.html . It'll crawl every Shockwave object, every JPEG , hell, even old archives of the Mikeiscool Blog . The good news is, GoogleBot seems to like my RSS feed and my blog homepage. Soooooo, I'm going to place a few links to the Mikeiscool Homepage and hope that the GoogleBot will follow the damned links!!!! 

I wouldn't ordinarily care so much, but the GoogleBot hasn't crawled my homepage since 10/17/2006, despite being on my server everyday. I've made some pretty significant changes to my entire site (particularly my homepage ) to try to get a better ranking with various keywords that are relevant. The bitch of it is, if GoogleBot won't crawl me (ok, won't crawl my index page ) then I'm afraid that it's not seeing the "top" file, and thus, won't be able to make the appropriate changes to it's mysterious "algorithm". If this is the case, I'll never know if my changes are affecting my sites ranking. I've used every keyword density tool available to see that I should see HUGE changes, but if GoogleBot doesn't see my my homepage , I fear it'll never see the changes. Here's to hoping this helps.

Part Composer, Part Computer Geek

I tell you, times are hard these days. It's a shame that I can't spend more time tweaking and experimenting with my site. All I really want to do is get some decent, relevant traffic to my site so that I can (a) hook up with a few more people to license music to and (b) generate a little income via AdSense and such. I guess I feel a little frustrated that I can't figure it out, but I"m not letting it get me down. If I'm one thing, I'm persistent. I prefer the word tenacious since it refers to a couple of other genius musicians [hope you're reading this Kage and Jables ;-) ].

I do honestly love writing music. I'm proud to be a member of ASCAP . I love being able to create music. I just am frustrated at my current inability to do it more, and the difficulty I'm having trying to figure ways to make a little money at it. Oh sure, I could do the whole gigging thing, but I did that for YEARS and YEARS, and to be honest, it's not worth the heaadache for me. Plus, I don't care who you talk to, there is n't as much money in playing live as people would have you believe. Oh sure, if you have Clear Channel and Sony  backing you, I bet you can get asses in seats. But for those just playing around town, well, let's just say I don't know 1 who has bought a house/car/boat with just the earnings off of playing live. Moreover, I don't know 1 that's totally supporting him/herself (let alone a family) off of income derived solely from playing live.

I'd love to start selling a few ringtones, perhaps to Cingular or Verizon or T-Mobile or Alltel , but I'm finding the whole ringtone industry is a pretty complicated mess too. I guess I'm attracted to the ringtone thing because I'm always writing chunks and pieces of music that don't always develop into entire songs, but that are nonetheless still quite catchy and cool so I think they'd make good ringtones. Plus, if I can sell something really cheaply (like $0.25) I'd probably stand a better chance of someone giving me a shot and buying one of my ringtones. If they don't like it after a while, who cares, it was only a quarter. But, at that price point, I'd stand a better chance of selling a lot of them, and maybe making a little money. I dunno, I'm gonna keep exploring and "marinating" on new ideas. Somewhere along the way, I'm gonna figure something out. If I do, it will be fun to come back and read this stuff and remember my thought processes that eventually led up to whaetever it is that I end up doing. Until later...

Is composer a high demand keyword?

I've been continuing my saga of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) lately, and am trying to figure out why Google still has trouble seeing my site when searched for "North Carolina Composer" or "composers in North Carolina". If you search for "Charlotte, NC Composer" I'm usually in the top 10. If you search for "mikeiscool", I'm #1. But, I'm wondering how much that'll help. I'm reading up on things, and am realizing that despite my having added this blog page, I might need to make an effort to start updating in more frequently, so that the search engines crawl my site more often, and so that I eventually end up with more pages linking to me.

In addition to wanting to increase my site traffic so that I might make some more contacts through which to licence my music , I'd like a little more traffic so that maybe I can benefit from some "Click Through" income. Any of you familiar with Google's Adsense program can probably appreciate this. I'm not expecting to make this guy's type of money (I wouldn't mind it), but it would be nice to supplement the old income. Anyway, you're probably going to see more frequent and possibly less lengthy posts here at Mikeiscool Productions so that I can experiment with how it does/doesn't affect my search engine placement. I'll probably go out of my way to mention Composer, and Songwriter in overly descriptive terms every once in a while as I try to figure out this maze of SEO. Hopefully, it'll still make for reasonably interesting reading.

OK, that's better

This will probably not be a long one, as I don't have a lot of time (gee, I say that a lot don't I). Anyway, if you're reading this, then you've no doubt noticed that I changed the styleshet for my blog page AGAIN! In fact, I changed the stylesheet for my whole site. I was working on a friend's website and helping him to get his pages in order. As I found myself making recommendations to him regarding navigation panes, color schemes, etc, I realized that I desparately needed to revisit my own site. I had meant to do so quite some time ago, I admit, as my site was basically a "hodge-podge" of pages I'd thrown together while experimenting with The Gimp and overall website design. Each page was decent looking, but the whole site just had no flow at all. There are still a couple of pages that are under construction, and Lily's Page still looks pretty different, but I'm deciding as to whether or not I'll host her page totally separately, perhaps as a whole different site, I haven't decided.

Anyway, I'll try to leave the design of the site alone now that it it truly a little more consistent.  Thanks for dropping by.

A spur of the moment rant

I'd like to take this opportunity to whine, bitch, complain, and warn all of you. There is a seller on Ebay that you should avoid. I know, there is risk associated with buying stuff on Ebay, but by this blog entry, I'm out to prove that there is also risk associated with ripping off trustworthy buyers thinking that volume of sales can make up for crappy treatment of customers.

I unfortunately don't have the time to go into the ins and outs of Ebay  for those "uninitiated", but for any of you who do plan to buy from them any time soon (or any time later for that matter), please avoid a seller named Colordrives. I "won" an auction for a sound card from them back in early August. After a few weeks, they sent me a sound card that didn't work. In fact it blue screened my Windows XP Pro Box during the install (3 times actually). After several attempts to contact Colordrives they finally responded that I needed to ship it back to them. This sucked because I had already paid over $10 to have it shipped to me (knowing full well they were marking up the shipping charge, a common Ebay seller tactic). I relented and shipped it back to them at my expense. For those of you keeping track, I had now paid for the item, paid for it to be shipped to me (plus a 250% markup on shipping costs) and paid to ship it back to them despite it being THEIR fault that they sent me a bum Sound Card.

After about 3 weeks, I started to get a little annoyed that there had been no communication or a new sound card so I started emailing Colordrives to check on the status of my replacement Sound Card. No response. Radio Silence. I persisted, and they eventually responded asking for the tracking number for the item I had sent back to them. I provided the tracking number. Nothing. No response. I kept hounding them. I gave up sending them emails and opened an Ebay dispute claim. In response to the Ebay claim (in which I said I had never received my sound card for which I had paid), these jerks had the nerve to respond citing the ORIGINAL shipment date/information. What smart-asses!! True enough, you DID send me a sound card, you just forgot that it was a NON-FUNCTIONING sound card, and that I had PAID to ship it back to you. I'm sure they're probably shipping this same card back to some other poor soul right now, and he'll probably pay to send it back to them, so they can sell it to someone else, and the cylce can continue.

Anyway, that's enough bitching. It's been a VERY long weekend (which I may elaborate on further down the road, I haven't decided). I'll end with, AVOID SELLER COLORDRIVES WHEN SHOPPING ON EBAY!!!

A little more consistent

Yes, yes, I know. I just don't write often enough. I'm sure there are loads of you out there hanging on my every word, checking your feeds daily waiting for the next entry and that I'm failing you miserably. I plan to keep plugging away at it, and hopefully I'll get on a creative "schedule" of sorts and be able to expound more frequently. Those of you "artist types" out there can relate, I'm sure. It's tough to be creative when you have a tight schedule. Not only do you find it hard to find time to be creative at all, but once you do get the time, it's like trying to create on demand (which for those of you who don't know, is kind of like trying to move something with your mind....you might concentrate and focus really hard, but it ain't happenin').

Anyway, this is gonna be a short one as I've got some plans tonight. I just wanted to drop a line and hopefully push my new CSS over to the server. I know those of you fellow geeks out there loved the SlashDot feel of the Mikeiscool Blog but it just didn't flow with the rest of the page. I dunno, you'd click on the link and BAM, that white background was blinding. It just didn't feel right to me. Soooo, staying in the geek vein, I went with this new, lovely Matrix style. Hopefully, both you and I will like it. Until next time.....

Wow, when did search engine ranking get so complex?

As some of you know, I've been developing mikeiscool for quite some time now. In addition to all the challenges of good website design, server maintenance, and updating content, I'm now dealing with the issue of Search Engine Ranking/Placement. I hadn't ever heard the acronym SEO prior to this new endeavor. I now know that it stands for Search Engine Optimization. Apparently, the IT industry is doing again what it does best, which is take a small area of the computer world and make it unbelieveably complicated so as to create a whole niche industry sector.

I guess I just find it amusing that IT folks have made entire job descriptions out of essentially: what meta-tags to use, keyword density, referring links, banner ads, etc. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting for a second that getting ranked in a search engine is easy, in fact, I'm having a hell of a time. I just think it's kind of funny that it's being touted as SEO (which sounds so close to CEO, I can almost smell the starched shirt) and being made out to be this new cutting edge, frontier like facet of the IT/Web industry.

I'm still hoping by having some dynamic content (i.e. this blog ) will help my appearances on search engines. So far, it's helped a little. I get a few more hits from so called "Blog Search" sites that report the name of my blog. I'm still learning this stuff you know, so I'm not sure if there's a buzz-word for them yet (you know, like "blorch" or something). I'm getting a few hits if you search for "mikeiscool" but that doesn't exactly help me rech people who are looking for "composer", "songwriter", "soundscape artist", etc etc.

I'll keep trying. Anyway, back to the grind.

This pesky RSS buisiness

Well, since I'm documenting my own learning curve, I figured I'd bring you into the loop on my latest thoughts relating to all things Mikeiscool . As some of you may know, I've only recently taken the plunge into adding an actual functioning blog to my site. In addition to learning more than I expected to learn about blog software/hosting/design, I'm now studying the tip of the RSS iceburg.

For those uninitiated, RSS is an acronymn that stands for a number of things, depending on who you ask, but "Really Simple Syndication" seems to be a popular choice. Bascially, an RSS feed/channel is a way of letting the various search engines out on the internet that your blog is out there, and gives a brief summary of its contents and most recent submissions. It never occurred to me that there would be a special method of referencing specifically a blog versus the usual methods of getting your website listed on a search engine. I'm quickly realizing the potential value of having added a blog to this page. I didn't know that a dynamic page (like a blog) along with some well placed RSS feeds could drive more traffic to a site.

You must understand, I'm a musician first (see also "starving artist") and the primary reason I even began making a website was so that I could have at least a "semi-pro" website to send people to if they were interested in licensing some music from me. I write songs and compose soundscapes constantly, and have many that area available for licensing. Once I got my page up, I began the arduous journey of trying to get it listed on the search engines. Well, like most things in life, I found that "for a fee" I could have that done for me. But as a "starving artist" and a new dad, I am not able to spend money to get to the top of Google . Plus, I don't need to be at the top, but if someone searches for "music composer" or something, I'd at least like to be mentioned somewhere in their results.

Well, now I'm realizing that if I have a marginally interesting and topical blog, if I can properly submit my RSS feeds, I might stand an even better chance of being able to be found if someone in the world searches for "mikeiscool" or "mikeiscool productions" etc etc. (By the way, I picked this domain name as a toungue-in-cheek attempt to find a domain name that wasn't already taken. I thought it'd be funny to see if it was taken, so when I saw it was free, I grabbed it). While I concur that the design of RSS files is "really simple", this business of submitting them is not. This is most likely due to the fact that there are so many people out there trying to rig the system so they can spam the hell out of anyone they want, that the process of RSS submision had to be made into the epic saga that is has been.

The other interesting portion of this working experiment should be seeing what (if anything) changes to my site traffic, and if my antique of a webserver can handle it. You wouldn't believe the hardware (term used loosely) I'm using to host my page. Perhaps I'll familiarize you with my own Hal 9000 in a future blog. Well thanks for tuning in. I'm off to give Lily her bottle.

Mikeiscool is Fully Operational

Well, after much sweat, a few tears, and fortunately no blood, I've managed to get my little corner of cyberspace in presentable shape. I'm happy to announce that in addition to several decent looking web pages, I now have a functioning email system, as well as this enormously entertaining and insightful blog that you're reading (that's right, dammit, you're VERY entertained). Originally (as some of you may have read), I was trying to run my own email server locally, but found that my ISP won't allow that. So I chose RegisterFly to host it for me. It occurred to me, after realizing I had little choice but to go with a "hosted" solution, that this would actually provide me a way of accessing my mail when I'm away from home. I was shooting for this with some of my email server install attempts, but had pretty much abandoned it as one of the potential causes of trouble before I realized the problem was my ISP.

So, when I started looking into the whole blog thing, I was considering going with a "hosted" option as well. I didn't really like that, mind you. I don't know why, maybe it's the geek in me, but I just don't care for the idea of my stuff sitting on someone else's server. It's not like I'm trading corporate secrets or have the Colonel's secret 11 herbs and spices list stashed somewhere, but I just like to be in full control of my site and I feel that I'm somewhat limited in that when it's hosted somewhere else. I guess I also feel the potential of some company arbitrarily changing what they charge for their "hosted" services, and if all my cyber-eggs are in their binary-basket, well I'm gonna have to pony up the dough. Anyway, I found Blogger which appeared to be free and would let me access it from anywhere. However, I couldn't make it cooperate with my FTP client (and no, I still don't know why, but it's definitely a Blogger problem, ProFTP rules!). So, as I've mentioned earlier, I found Thingamablog , and I love it. The issue became, well if it lives on my server, how do I post to it when I'm not at my server? The solution? LogMeIn ! Now I can just connect to one of my network computers, compose my blog, and use the FTP function that's built into Thingamablog  to push it over to my server. It may sound convoluted to you, but it works for me.

Anyway, I'm glad to be up and running. Check out all of Mikeiscool , especially the Music Page . If any of you reading this are in need of any music for commercial use, please feel free to contact me at mike@mikeiscool.net and I'll get back in touch with you. I compose music of many different varieties and styles. My stuff's been on The Sopranos so, hey man, I've got a little "street cred". Thanks for visiting, and drop me a line if you dig the tunes.

While I'm on the Subject of Hassles

Since I'm obviously pent up, and am in need of venting, let me tell you a little about the saga of mikeiscool email! If you thought reading about my adventures in blog-ville were tedious, you ain't seen nothing yet.

I'd say, conservatively, I've been trying (in vain) to get an email server set up on my domain here at mikeiscool  for at least 3 months. I had managed to get my DNS settings set up properly, which took several attempts and multiple checks via these guys to ensure I was right. I started with Sendmail and Postfix since it seems that most people like that combination of SMTP-POP servers. Well, I couldn't get it to work at all. I couldn't send or receive any mail. I read somewhere that Sendmail sometimes didn't like sharing with Postfix (something about competing for listening on port 25) so I uninstalled it. That left me with Postfix only, and I set up my email client to accept delivered mail via local "Spool" delivery. Still nothing. I then read that my ISP (bellsouth) blocks outgoing port 25 to prevent spammers from getting internet accounts and just using the crap out of them to clog the world's email boxes. I could understand that, so I found a workaround using "RelayHost" in Postfix. I set up Postfix to send outgoing messages from my box through Bellsouth's SMTP server, and it worked I could send messages from mikeiscool and they'd get delivered (even outside my LAN, wooohooooo!).

At this point, I was sure it was only a matter of time, since obviously, the only problem would have been that, right? Wrong. Try as I might, I couldn't get Postfix to receive any mail. I'd send stuff to myself from my bellsouth email, yahoo email, my work email, even from mikeiscool  email to itself, and I couldn't receive anything. Now, all the documentation and conversation you see on Postfix will tell you that it's simple and easy to configure and that the directions are a piece of cake and you'd have to be a moron not to be able to figure it out. Well, similarly to the wild world of blogs (actually, much much worse) I have a different interpretation. I think the so called "HowTo's" and "FAQ's" are written by uber-geeks for uber-geeks. I'm sorry, but there's nothing easy/simple/quick about :

I mean, what the hell is that? This is but one of a myriad configuration parameters' instructions that are considered "clear". Whatever!!

So, I continued my search for open source, free MTA's (mail transfer agents) and stumbled across Hula . I gotta say, this sucker's pretty slick. It's got a nice GUI to administer it as well as a similarly nice GUI for the webmail interface. I was able to get it up and going on my server pretty quickly. I was able to punch holes in my firewalls to let me access both the administrative portal and the webmail portal from out on the net, but alas, I still couldn't get this sucker to receive mail. In fact, I lost the ability to send mail on it too, but I probably could've figured out how to enter the RelayHost function in it as well, but I started with receiving mail as my focus, and I wasn't gonna let up until I figured it out.

I tried everything. I installed different versions of it (9 to be exact) since with Linux, sometimes the older the build, the more compatible it'll be (particularly when your hardware is an antique like my server). Some of them wouldn't even start, but several did with the same frustrating results. I was able to get it running and access the portals, but no mail. Dammit, what was the deal? I stuck my whole server outside my firewall, naked in a DMZ, exposed to all the big bad viruses of the world thinking it was a firewall issue, but nope, nothing. I thought it was my DNS settings at my registrar, but nope, they were good too. I could ping my mail server, and I'd just get messages saying it couldn't find a service running on that address/port. I spent every luch hour from work and an hour or so each night after work (and sometimes the weekends) trying to get this sucker running and still nothing. I was getting so frustrated. I started googling for phrases like "i hate postfix" "email sucks" "mta's that are easy" anything. Then I started seeing posts on various geek boards about similar problems with all the clients I'd tried. I started to realize it wasn't just me. Then I read a post (and I wish I could remember who/where but I don't) saying that their ISP blocked INCOMING port 25 as well as OUTGOING. I started looking into it and, sure enough, so does my ISP, bellsouth.

This makes no sense to me at all. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, your email is essentially sent from machine to machine across the internet on a "port" called 25. It's the default port for SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). A port is essentially, an extension of your IP address that tells the internet traffic exactly how to connect to your computer's NIC card. Now, bellsouth blocking outbound port 25, I get. I hear ya. I understand you don't want every idiot with a computer sending out ads for Viagra, I understand that, I can live with it, especially since you let us VALID, PAYING users relay through your SMTP server. But what I don't get, is why the heck they'd block incoming port 25. Why do they care if I'm RECEIVING mail at my IP address? What business is it of theirs? Why isn't it allowed that I can LISTEN on port 25 and receive emails directed at my domain? I just simply don't understand the logic.

Well, if I looked into it, I'm sure (for a fee) they'd "unlock" port 25 for me, but screw that. So I started looking for email "hosting" companies. I started looking for DNS redirect services that could take a request for port 25 at my domain and redirect it to another port (say 26) and I'd just change my server settings. But, to be honest, after literally months of screwing around trying to get it to work, I was over it. So I found a company called RegisterFly . I'm now trying to get my email set up through them so that if someone sends an email to me at mikeiscool I'll actually get it. We're still going around and around trying to understand each other. As it stands now, I supposedly have an email box set up with them, but they're being really unclear on how exactly I'm supposed to set up my MX record on my DNS. I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that they register/host domains and their related DNS info as well and they'd like me to switch to them, but I've already payed for a year at my current registrar 123registrations .

Hopefully, I'll have this sucker wrapped up soon and will have a (somewhat) fully functional website complete with email sending/receiving capabilities. I don't know if any of you out there have ever toyed with the idea of hosting your own website/email, but I'll tell you it's not for the faint of heart, and requires some serious patience and persistence. Good luck if you're diving in. I guess that's all on the wild world of emails for now.

The long battle for decent blogging tools.

Ok, I'm the first guy to admit that I'm a computer geek. I have a pretty good background in the field, as well as several years of schooling. I'm the sole maintainer/builder of my site, have some basic programming skills, and am generally just a technically adept guy particularly where computers and all things related to them are involved.

So, when I decided that my website might benefit from some dynamic content, I figured a blog page might be nice. I started looking into what it takes to actually build and maintain a blog, and I gotta tell ya, it is entirely too complicated. Bear in mind, I'm pretty adept at computers/internetworking/web design, so when I'm saying that it's too compicated, I mean just that. I feel badly for anyone who's a beginner trying to start one of these. My biggest beef is, there is no simple way to start a blog that isn't "hosted". That is, if you don't mind your blog sitting on someone else's server and thus subject to their size/content/formatting rules, no problem. If, however, you have your own server/domain and you want your blog to reside on it, buckle up for a long drive.

The most obvious choice (I thought) would be Blogger . Their package is supposed to be able to publish your blog to your own FTP server. Well, I tried it, numerous different ways, and I could never get it to publish to my server. Yes I had my firewall ports open for PASV FTP, yes I had my FTP client configured properly, yes I had the "Publish" settings on Blogger's site configured properly....it just flat out wouldn't work. I'd get time-out errors. My FTP logs would show that a session was opened via Blogger, but nothing would transfer. I could FTP in to my box from anywhere on the net via Firefox but for some reason, Blogger just wouldn't do it.

So, I started looking around for other clients/hosts that allowed for so called "remote hosting". Let me tell you, it's slim pickings. There were several clients out there, most of which had to run as, essentially, another server on my Linux box. Now, I admit, despite being a computer geek, I am still learning the finer points of Linux. I'll speak about my experiences/thoughts on Linux in another entry (especially for those of you who aren't familiar with it, but it rules!!) Anyway, I wasn't quite sure how to install deploy some of the other requirements that came along with some of the "Open Source" Linux clients (i.e. MySQL, Python, PERL, etc). So I started looking for Windows clients (I know you other geeks out there are blasting me for even mentioning Windows, but despite my love of Linux, I still need Windows for a few applications, particularly pro-audio stuff).

I tried several of these Windows packages, and most had ridiculous costs associated with them. Sure they were pretty, robust, and had many more features than I needed, but all I wanted was a way to ramble and post.....DONE. Finally I found Thingamablog . I LOVE IT. It's small, it's simple, it lives on my Windows box, it plays very nicely with my FTP client, it's fast, it has nice templates with it (like the lovely SlashDot template you see here....yes I did that intentionally....I told you I was a computer geek). In short, it is exactly what I was looking for. It's sad that it took so long to find. I literally had to look for a few weeks to find it. So if anyone out there is in a similar situation, give them a shot, I really recommend them.

Well, that's enough for now. Lily's gonna need a bottle soon, and I don't want her to get cranky.