Testing to see how this goes

Lets see if this shows up.

How bots mess up clickthrough stats and can be used for evil

Jump down to the “After the Technical” section if you don’t want to have an greater understanding of the technical side of how URL lookup twitter bots and tracking traffic on the internet works.

In the first couple seconds of putting up a shortened URL on twitter I had all this bot activity come to my site.

The Ren Men and their new Auto Group

Okay, a while ago I happened on stumble upon a new video series that I really enjoyed called the The Ren Men Show.

I found them pretty early on when they had posted a video in response to a 4 Hour Work Week contest. Now you may be saying, “Richard, why the hell would you of all people be buying into all those get rich doing nothing type schemes?” Here’s the thing, while I don’t agree with a lot of what I call fluff in the 4hww, like all the life hacking gloating that I could care less to read, there are actually a lot of simple concepts that can really help to inspire you to think creatively about income and work in general.

Now a lot of people submitted videos to the contest and there were a lot of people who were the “selling e-books” scammer types but luckily I got 1 gem out of the group, the Ren Men. Now what makes them different?

Rahsaan has an Ugly Mug Awareness Day comes to a close

Rahsaan proves that he is the coolest dude I know by playing along and supporting the joke

Well this has been a pretty exciting 24 hours. This whole joke went way farther and had a much larger impact then I really expected. When I first typed up the post I had the limit set at 20 which I thought would have been high. But then I thought by saying 20 people wouldn’t do it because they thought it was too little.

In the end we ended up with 46 people (well twitter accounts) changing their avatar and raised $116 for the Banta Feeds Charity that helps local food pantries with food drives. This was a great example of how tight the NW Indiana region is and how well we can really come together to support a good cause (well, I’d say more to make fun of Rahsaan.) There were a few rules changes/additions during the process but everything went really smooth overall. There were also a lot of questions asked of the what/why/who variety that I’m going to try and address right now.

There was a ton that I pick up about the whole “Social Media” thing that I want to share, but to not make this post 20 pages long I’ll write that one up as a separate one after this.

So here are the answers you seek.

VIVA LA REVOLUTION!!!!!!

Poor @saan1911, it's not his fault #RashaanHasOneUglyMug

Okay so I’m feeling frisky today. I want to get a ton of people using the @saan1911 Bag Face as their Avatar. And guess what? I’m going to put my money where my mouth is (well actually other people’s mouths.)

For every person who sets there avatar to the the Bag Face for a 24 hours (none of this set for 2 minutes crap) I will donate $1 to Banta Feeds Food Drives (up to $60)

A list for Brian

Last night at the #nwitweetup I got talking with Brian from The Grossbauer Group about some PHP development related things and was having trouble remembering the names of a couple things so basically just throwing together a list of those things for him. If anyone else finds it of value thats cool too.

My partner in Mu Studios is a Cylon

So at after the most recent #nwitweetup a few of us decided to have the #aftertweetup up at BW3’s in Valpo. We were sitting at a table where I had my back to the front entrance of the bar. All of a sudden I catch someone walking in out of the corner of my eye, and I thought what the hell is Wade (@wadeshull) doing here.

Partner in Mu Studios – Wade Shull

Wade is my partner in Mu Studios and has been my friend since we lived on the same floor of Harrison Hall down at Purdue. I stood up in his wedding and he stood up in mine. He’s basically the Silent Bob to my Jay and is my “hetero life-mate.”

But then it hit me, this guy wasn’t white. I just found the “Black Wade.” I called my wife to come down and check this out because I was just floored by how similar this guy looked to my buddy Wade. He also held himself similar to him. It was just crazy to see this. My wife thought I was just crazy or being silly but after she got down there she saw that I was right.

So here are some pictures she took of him (stupidly I forgot to ask for his name so I could refer to my friend as the White WHOMEVER.)

DNS/Twitter post at NWICreative.org

Forgot to mention that I had done another article over at NWICreative.org.

This one was on the recent attack on Twitter that got a lot of press but turned out to be not must. Overall I just wanted to talk about how DNS could be a much bigger issue that people never even thought about. Also since we none of us are major tech giants, it’s most likely that getting it fixed will take a lot longer then what it took them.

Why I love Slicehost even more

Okay, recently I added a “We run on” to the sidebar that points out that we run on Slicehost. I was getting ready to write an article about how much I have loved running on them and recently started my second slice for a secondary MySQL and memcached server. While performance is a bit slow at times (I’m on the smallest slice) compared to the full server we had at Layered Tech (I would also recommend them, we only left because of the price), it’s more then plenty for most of what we are doing. We cut our cost from $105 (was $70 before a major price increase) to $25 a month and this now included automatic backups.

People use social media to talk to each other? That’s amazing!

So finally got a chance today to check out what’s going on with the Twitter peeps and seems I missed a giant debate on what hashtag people in Northwest Indiana should use, #nwi or #nwindiana. Most people seem to use #nwindiana that I have noticed but didn’t really care much.

This morning then an article was posted on Valpo Life about how we should all standardize to one (their choice was #nwi) so that it’s easier to track everything and shorter overall. Lots of people put in their 2 cents and overall. I think the end of the conversation comes when the Times (who own nwi.com and @nwi) brought up that it could be confusing to peeps who think it’s related to them. After that people began to throw in the towel and it seems like #nwindiana won.

Now with all that out of the way, lets get to why I’m even talking about this.