Explorer.exe in Windows Vista starts to go wonky on my system after awhile and when you hover over opened items in the task bar they don’t go away when the cursor moves as it should. This has an ugly box in the middle of work. The only fix that I’ve found for this issue is to end the process and restart using Task Manager (thanks howtogeek)

STEP 1. Load task manager, find explorer.exe, right click and choose “end process”
STEP 2. go to File->New Task (Run…) and type in

explorer

This will restart the explorer.exe and the window previews will disappear properly when you move the cursor away. Is anybody aware of a better fix than killing and restarting explorer.exe?

BTW, simply unchecking and rechecking the “Show window preview (thumbnails)” didn’t work (pictured below).

Since I find these window previews more useless than useful, I set the taskbar to autohide and unchecked window I restarted for the nth time this morning. Would rather have back that 5% of screen space unless hovering over.

Ever want or need to see the most recent version of a website? Maybe the DNS has changed and now you are still seeing the old version location cached while all your friends are seeing the new version. How do you flush those stale DNS records from your system?

That’s the command to remember: flushdns

Setting up Adsense for Domains on a few of our domains this week and had the need to flush the DNS on my Windows machine so I could see the domain ads that were showing. Kept hitting the search engine to find sites to remind me of the proper shell commands to use. It’s not like it’s super complicated to remember, but I try not to memorize commands I rarely use. Almost have it memorized now though and to help along the process I decided to make it a blog post here as well. What should these type of blog posts be called? Self-reminders? Whatever, let’s get to the flushing.

Step by step instructions for flushing the DNS cache in Windows

STEP 1. Go to START in the lower left corner and type:

STEP 2. right click on the cmd.exe under the Programs bar and in Windows Vista choose "Run as Administrator"

STEP 3. in the cmd.exe shell window type the following:

STEP 4. Reload the website you want to see the most recent version DNS retrieved. Wash, rinse, repeat as necessary.

Getting stopped by a police officer is never fun. Getting stopped out of state by a state trooper over five hours from home for a bogus reason is even worse. This is the story of what happened to my wife and I over our anniversary trip to Lincoln City beach in September this year.

Disclaimer: I am not an attorney and nothing written in this post should be construed as a substitute for real legal advice from a trained professional. I’m simply sharing the story of what happened to me on an informational basis because it was a new experience for me and perhaps might be helpful for others who are curious how the process works.

Oregon state troopers ticketing for following too close

First fellow motorists please be warned that if you are traveling through the state of Oregon, understand that the state troopers can and will stop you and issue a citation for following too closely. The recommended safe distance for speeds over 30 MPH is 4 seconds. The Oregon state driver’s manual indicates that this distance is required to prevent an accident from occurring.

And yes, Oregon state troopers will ticket you even if you are not in an accident. Their statutes do not provide that an accident must occur. The officer can and will videotape you from some clandestine location and stop you if he deems that you are following the car in front of you too closely. You will not get the opportunity to see this video evidence unless you plead not guilty and face the officer in front of a traffic circuit court judge.

This ticketing is more heavy-handed than Washington state where we haven’t seen following too close citations issued not in conjunction with a motor vehicle accidents. I understand from talking to others that they do happen, but I’ve yet to know anybody personally or professionally who has gotten one. Most common is when a rear-end collision occurs.

When the trooper pulls you over

So my wife and I are traveling to the beach along Hwy 18 in Oregon traveling a sloping hill in the late afternoon. It was still daylight and the roads were dry along a mostly one lane stretch of road. We had turned on our lights as had many other motorists. I’m embedding a map below of the approximate location in case other readers are traveling this same area. Does anybody know how to search for milepost locations in any of the mapping services? I don’t see this as an option in Google Maps. This would be a very handy feature to add. The location in question is Hwy 18 close to milepost 10.

View Larger Map

I would be extremely cautious in this area as the troopers are targeting motorists that they feel are following too close in this area. This is the most selected chosen GPS route coming North from Seattle or Portland to Lincoln City, Oregon

Having gotten a speeding ticket in the past out of state (not in Oregon, in Jackpot, Nevada) I was careful to ensure we traveling under the posted speed limit of 55, but since our car didn’t have cruise control didn’t know the exact speed at any given moment. I recall us dragging on some of the more speedier traffic and letting these folks pass in the stretches of passing lanes, but we did pass a couple cars here and there that were at an even more leisurely pace.

Around milepost 10 suddenly in the rearview mirror we see those familiar red and blue flashing lights in the distance behind. I slowed down, moving to the shoulder in a safe location. My wife and I looked at each other puzzled why the trooper pulled in behind us. I told my wife we weren’t speeding.

We had no idea why we were being stopped.

Talking to the state trooper

The trooper came to the passenger side window and informed us right away that we were being video and audio taped. He proceeded to tell us that he was enforcing motorists following too closely and that he observed following the car in front of us less than one second apart. He continued on to say that the recommended safe distance is 4 seconds. He asked us how fast we were traveling and my answer was: "55 … 50, I don’t know."

He then informed me at that speed we needed a minimum space of 120 feet to stop in time from the car in front of us. As he’s explaining this to us I’m seeing tons of trains of cars passing on both sides with cars much closer than 120 feet. I pointed this out to the trooper. He didn’t seem very interested in what most motorists passing by were doing. He took my license and insurance information and went back to his patrol car. 

While he was gone my wife and I shared more puzzled gazes. In November 2003 she was hit as a pedestrian in the crosswalk. Many doctors visits and a surgery later, she is very skittish as a passenger in cars if we are too close to the car in front of us. Being mindful and respectful of her fears, I try to put extra distance between the vehicles in front. Many times what happens is other cars will pass and move into the space between us, creating a dangerous distance. Her reaction to traveling too closely is like she wants to push on passenger side brakes that don’t exist.

But she didn’t do that at any point along this highway or even trip. She didn’t give me any non-vocal gestures that we were ever too close to any car, including the car the trooper said we were less than one second away from.

The trooper returned and handed back my license. I fully expected to get a warning and some words of caution about keeping a safe distance, but instead he informed me that he "reviewed the videotape and the evidence is clear that you were following too closely."

And then he said he was going to issue me a ticket.

My first reaction wasn’t anger, but even more confusion. I showed him more cars, trucks and motorcycles passing us in groups with plenty of other cars closer than 120 feet. He remarked that he could write these citations all day long. We want back and forth in a somewhat argumentative fashion, but nothing ever got too heated.

He then asked if I had any questions.

"How much is the ticket?"

He shifted on his heels, "I don’t know, the judge sets that." He then handed us the ticket and it was folded into the shape and size of a long cigarette. "But the judge will probably reduce the ticket for you since you have no record."

After that he was gone before we could unroll/unfold the ticket and show him in his own writing where he had written in the price of the ticket.

Following too close ticket options: guilty, no contest or not guilty

The ticket for following too close was $242. Like most traffic tickets in other states, your options are three: plead guilty or no contest and hope the judge reduces the ticket. Which the judge may do if your record is otherwise clean. Or the third option: plead not guilty and fight the ticket.

As we left the scene my wife and I talked about the ticket and what option to choose. While the gut reaction for a traffic ticket 5+ hours away might be to pay the ticket and move on, there were two reasons I didn’t want to do that:

1. I felt that I was innocent.
2. I didn’t want this ticket on my driving record.

So I pled not guilty.

Being prepared for that day in court

Like most readers (hopefully) I am not that familiar with the traffic court system. In my nearly 25 years of driving I’ve only had two tickets, both of which were for speeding. One was out of state in Jackpot, Nevada and since I was clearly breaking the law, I just paid it and moved along. The other was questionable on the way coming home one night and thought about fighting it — even blogged about possibly fighting it here — and decided to just pay that as well.

But this ticket felt like the weakest of the three. I felt like the worst case scenario would be that we got the ticket reduced but maybe we could prevail in court. I wanted to test the Oregon state traffic court. And hey, along the way I’d learn about how the traffic court system worked — or didn’t work — for me.

Before going to court, my wife and I did some research. We looked up the driver’s manual at the Oregon Dept of Motor Vehicles (DMV) website and printed the page (31) that the trooper referenced. We didn’t look up the ordinance 811.485 but that would have been a good idea. At the very least I tried to do the following before coming to traffic court:

1. Not show up empty-handed. I wanted to have some sort of drawing, map, pictures of the location, video, anything that would help support the exact conditions of when/where the infraction took place. If one was fortunate to have a videocam or digital camera or heck even a camera phone, taking pictures at the scene as close to when it happens can’t hurt. You know the state is going to have video evidence, so I wanted to bring my own.
2. Planned to bring any witness(es). You can put this witness on the stand and ask questions. Run through what questions you intend to ask this witness. I didn’t do this because I didn’t realize things would work this way. We’d talked enough about what happened that I was confident when she testified under oath that the truthful answers she provided, whatever they would be, would be helpful to my case. So this is one that I wish I had done.

   It occurred to me that if a witness has any related experience, either professional or personal experience that might be relevant to your case, figure out how you can bring this line of questioning into the current case. In my wife’s case, the accident in 2003 was pivotal to my defense and I had to find a way to bring that into the current case without it being thrown out for being irrelevant.

3. Remember that the burden of proof is on the state. You do not have to use any of the evidence brought along or call upon witnesses of the event. I kept my exhibits to myself until the time needed to use them in the case. They asked at the beginning of the trial if any exhibits would be used and while I had one, I didn’t share it at that time. More on why I did that later.
4. Dress professionally. I might have been overdressed in some people’s view wearing a shirt and tie, but I believe appearance works on a subconscious level. The judge is supposed to be impartial but little things like appearance do work on some (most? all?) people, even if it has no clear impact on the final judgement of the case. I’m not sure if this helped or hurt my case being the most professionally dressed defendant in the room, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

How traffic court works - our day in court

Our court time was at 3:30pm and there were five other cases posted along the wall. We arrived a good hour early and I read the cases on the wall both because I was curious who else would be in the courtroom with Kara and I and because I wanted to know when we would be up. Of the five other cases three of them were also for following too close infractions. We were listed last on the docket. I was happy about this positioning and feel like this is the best possible scenario for inexperienced defendants like me. I would be able to see how court process worked for others.

We filed into the courtroom at 3:30pm and waited. 3:35 and a lady from the court told us that they were waiting for another case and the trooper. They would wait a maximum of 10 minutes. I had heard that if the police officer doesn’t show up your case is thrown out. As 3:40 drew closer, the anticipation that he wouldn’t show was great.

3:37. A guy behind us joked about us fixating on the clock. It was true. I don’t think anybody in the room was hoping the officer would show.

At 3:39 the door opened and the trooper walked in, fully dressed for duty.  He had some paperwork in hand and three VHS videotapes. Yes, it’s true, the Oregon State Patrol are still using VHS tapes! 

The court trial process worked like this:

1. Before the judge hears your case you are allowed time to review the evidence the other side will be presenting. In my case this was the videotape. When I reviewed it, I didn’t realize there was an audio portion which would become a key sticking point later in the testimony. In the beginning of the tape, you could clearly see the car in front of us pass and almost two seconds later by the VHS tape counter, you see me pass by the officer. He then proceeds to follow and pass the car behind us and pull us over. I thought this was all there was, but there is more. There was the audio of when he went to the window of the car and talked to us. My voice inside the car was muffled but somewhat audible. 
2. You and the officer are sworn in. You must raise your right hand to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth under penalty of perjury.
3. The police officer presents the state’s case against you first, outlining how he feels you broke the law. He will present any evidence he has, possibly including but not limited to audio and video evidence, pictures and the like. He may even draw pictures on a white board for the court. He did in two of the five cases we saw, including ours.
4. At any time during the officer’s testimony you can object to any statement or presentation. You must provide reasons for your objection. In the first following too close case we witnessed, the defendant didn’t object to anything the officer said. I think this was a mistake on his part. While he shouldn’t have objected on baseless merits, some things seemed to this layman like they were just way too speculative or something he could have disagreed with letting the court put into testimony. As I found myself disagreeing with what the officer presented — and it wasn’t even my following too close case — I made a note and hoped I might be able to use in my case. As it turned out, you can’t use testimony from another case made by the officer. Bummer.
5. You are allowed the opportunity to cross examine the officer. Once the officer has finished presenting his case against you then you get the opportunity to ask him questions about his testimony. I did this.
6. Next you state your full legal name for the record and present your defense. Why didn’t you break the law? Why do you feel that you are innocent? This is also the stage where you will introduce your witness(es), if you have any.
7. The officer can object to any/all/part of your testimony.
8. The officer can then cross examine you and any witness(es).
9. Since the burden of proof is on the state, the officer gets the final opportunity to rebut any of your defense testimony and/or witnesses.
10. You can object to the state’s rebuttal. I did.
11. The judge will then render a verdict. It only goes one of two ways: guilty or not guilty. I suppose there is a dismissal option you could ask for before the trial begins, but unless you have strong evidence that the case is completely meritless, you probably won’t have much luck there.
12. If you are found guilty by the court you will be asked when you can pay the ticket. Either you must pay now in full or can schedule when to make the payment.
13. If you are found not guilty then you’ll sign something and walk away without paying any fee or having the ticket on your record.

Witnessing the cases before mine

In the first following too close trial the defendant brought up that the ordinance does not give an exact number of seconds. I thought this was a very clever defense. He pointed out that it was "suggested" and could be open to interpretation. I made notes. The defendant was weak though on cross examination and didn’t seem to object to things it seemed he might be able to object to. Also it was night in his case unlike mine.

The judge ruled against him reducing the ticket by $60 to $182.

Next up was a guy who was caught speeding on a Harley going 84 MPH in a 55. He had some weird defense about having to speed up to be safe. There was this intricate powerpoint printout he offered as an exhibit along with a long statement he read. He rambled at points and made the room uncomfortable. Besides being not very respectful to the trooper, he even interrupted the judge a few times. The case ended badly with him saying: "just tell me what I need to pay." He served as a good example how not to present my case.

Next up was the second following too close case that had to be moved to another courtroom because the judge knew the defendant. This bummed me out because I was hoping to glean some more information from how others were defending their cases.

The court sandwiched in a DUI please where the defendant pled guilty to DUI and got the reckless driving charge thrown out.

Last up was me. Minutes before 5pm, I asked if we were up against the clock and the judge, a woman in her 40s by my estimation politely replied, "nope, we have plenty of time."

The moment of truth: the state’s case against me

The trooper presented his case against me by first playing the VHS videotape in extreme slow motion. He explained how he used the markers to determine how many feet apart our car was from the car in front. He said he estimated that while traveling at speed of 55 –

I objected. No where was it established by me or him that I was traveling 55 MPH.  He then proceeded to play the videotape further where the audio started and I objected again.

"Your honor, I didn’t know there was any audio."

The clerk next to the judge confirmed that I wasn’t aware that there was audio on the tape. She left to her chambers while I had a chance to review the audio portion of the tape. This was important because I could be heard answering the trooper’s question about how fast I was going by saying: "55 … 50, I don’t know really."

I made notes of this and the trooper got the judge to return to the courtroom. She asked me if I objected to the tape being played with the audio portion. I said, no.

The trooper continued to use the higher end of my statement — the 55 MPH — to determine that I was only 70 feet from the car in front of me. He referenced the fact that the Oregon state driving manual requires "3-4 seconds" distance between. I didn’t object, but made a note for cross on this.

Unlike the first following too close case, he didn’t get into how he looked for "a pattern of continued breaking of the law" by following along to see if I braked. I was hoping he would, because there was no pattern. He came right after me.

He completed his testimony by saying that despite there being "almost optimal" conditions: road was dry, daylight, that he didn’t feel in his professional opinion that I was following at a safe distance and that was why he issued the citation.

In my cross examination, I asked him how familiar he was with the Oregon State Driver’s Manual that he had referenced multiple times in his testimony. He replied that he felt very familiar. I then offered into evidence page 31 of the DMV manual.

He objected saying that this page was from "the old manual, not the new manual." I told the judge that it was taken directly from the DMV website and would be happy to boot up my computer with internet and present that into evidence. He withdrew his objection and allowed it into evidence.

I pointed out that the manual doesn’t state "3-4 seconds" it states "2-4 seconds" and that it was a suggested guideline. He replied that the new manual says ‘3-4′ seconds. I repeated that the statute — which I’d learned in the prior case — was a suggested distance and asked him to confirm that. He said it was.

I then asked him to explain why he thought I was traveling less than a second distance from the car in front of me when the timestamp in the video clearly shows more than a second had elapsed. He said by his estimation I was.

I had no further cross examination questions. It was time for my testimony. The first thing I did was dispute the trooper’s statement to me versus the video evidence he introduced. In the video one of the very first things he did was tell me that we were traveling less than a second behind the car in front when the video showed this to be inaccurate.

Next, I called my witness, my wife, to the stand. She got to sit in the witness chair to the right of the judge. I asked her if we were in a hurry to get to the beach. No.

"When we were stopped were we both confused and if so, why?"

"Yes," she replied and then explained neither of us knew what we did wrong or why we were stopped.

I asked her if in the past driving with me had she been in situations where cars were too close to us, whether they swerved in front from another lane or that I needed to brake to be safe.  She affirmed she’d been a passenger in situations like that.

"At any time during this trip — including at/around the scene portrayed in the videotape — do you recall a situation where you felt that we were traveling too closely to the car in front?"

"No."

I then went for the background.

"In 2003, you were –"

"Objection," the trooper replied, "Irrelevant."

"Your honor, I need to explain that my wife was in an accident in 2003 and has had a condition since then as a passenger where she’s fearful of cars that are too close in front."

The trooper objected again saying that had nothing to do with this case. The judge agreed to allow the testimony. The trooper was noticeably disturbed.

I continued: "In 2003 you were hit by a car and what sort of reaction to you have to being too close to cars in front of you?

Kara explained that she tenses up and gets very uncomfortable. From the driver’s seat in my peripheral vision this is very noticeable. It’s like having a traffic light inside your car. A big, bright yellow warning light. I slow down — always.

"So on this trip, I ask you again, did you at any time feel any anxiety or concern that we were traveling at too close a distance to the car in front."

"No."

"Did you feel unsafe at any point in this trip, including the moment portrayed in this video?"

"No."

"Do you feel that bearing the road conditions that if this car in front would have slammed on its brakes I would have been able to stop in time, safely?"

"Yes."

"At the conclusion of the stop, what were the circumstances of the officer handing us the ticket?"

"He asked if there were any questions and you asked how much the ticket cost. He said he didn’t know, that was up to the judge and then handed us this wadded–"

"Objection," the trooper jumped in, "what does this have to do with…?"

The judge replied, leaning closer, "Wait, I want to hear this."

Kara continued to explain that the trooper had handed us the ticket folded and rolled almost like a cigarette and that by the time we unfolded and looked at it that the ticket amount of $242 was there to see.

The trooper objected again.

"Your honor, we couldn’t confirm that the information on the ticket was accurate or ask any specific questions about the ticket because he gave us the ticket in this condition and left right away. Clearly he gave us misinformation and also our mailing address is not correct on the ticket. We were not able to give him the correct information, nor was he interested in waiting around for us to help him make sure the information was accurate. This drew suspicion from us that other elements of this stop may be in doubt."

The trooper cross examined Kara, asking if she’s ever had a driver’s license. She replied no. He asked if she ever had taken a driver’s exam.

In a follow-up statement rebutting the cross, I stated that having a driver’s license does not mean you have any additional ability to assess danger from the passenger’s side of the vehicle.  I then closed my testimony saying that I felt overall that I had been traveling at a safe enough distance to stop with the conditions before me and that I’d never been involved in an accident in nearly 25 years of driving.

The trooper went to the whiteboard in his final rebuttal of my testimony and proceeded to explain how I needed to be 120 feet distance from the car in front of me and that "being generous" I was 80 feet away. He then said that given the time involved I would not have been able to stop without avoiding danger.

I objected during his testimony when he wrote 70 and 80 feet saying he didn’t know that for certain. He couldn’t know exactly how many feet I was from the car in front of me without knowing the speed. He didn’t know the speed, I didn’t know the speed, so we were guessing. It was a guess based on a law which is gray to begin with: suggested following distance is just that: suggested. It’s not an absolute. It depends.

The trooper rebutted by saying that unless I was a drag racer how I could stop in time safely he didn’t know. And then like that, almost an hour later, the case was over.

My Perry Mason moment had ended. The judge then asked me if there was anything else I wanted to add. I said no, I think that’s sufficient.

The verdict

If you skipped down here, you missed all the good stuff, scroll back and up and read through the court case, blow by blow. Really. After the trial, I felt pretty good about how I conducted myself. Felt like good points were made and if there was any chance of being found not guilty I’d done about as best as could be expected to making that finding happen.  I don’t think the ticket was fair, I think for traveling this far to begin with the ticket should have been reduced (I expected it to be reduced and would be very disappointed if it was not)

The judge leaned forward pensively. "This is one of those cases where things could go either way. I’m going to do some additional video watching on this." I was nervous that there would not be a finding on the case but didn’t think that could happen. Could it be possible that something was presented that made a judge think? What was it? Could there be another court date? No.

My heart started thudding against my chest. Say it, I thought. Just say it.

"I’m going to find you not guilty."

One of the changes in the process of being made is how, when and where advertisements are shown on this blog. In the past everybody saw ads in the sidebar, but this isn’t as effective any more.

Last week I made some changes, some which were pretty radical that have greatly improved the ad clickthru ratio ($) here. One thing that was important to me when altering the way ads are being shown was not to impact the experience for regular readers/visitors. In fact, the changes being made today should make it even cleaner for regular readers and/or subscribers.

Banner ads used to show in the top header section and those were removed months ago as I felt they weren’t appropriate here for regular readers any more. I’m probably going to be adding these back for non regular readers in the near future.

In certain conditions — again primarily for non-regular readers/visitors — even more aggressive, targeted advertising will be shown. I don’t want regular readers and/or those registered and logged in to see most, if not all, of these advertisements going forward. At least that’s the plan. If I screw something up, please tell me about it in the comments below.

The view I have of this blog with a small few exceptions shows me no advertisements and I thought it would be nice to treat regular readers to the same clean output. Single post pages for me look like this:

Notice along the right and above no ads show. The empty sidebar is going to be used for some other things which I’ll be mentioning in the future.

Would you pitch your friends all the time, really?

I don’t think regular readers of this blog are clicking ads anyway, so why bother showing you them? I’d rather show ads to people who will be more likely to click and possibly buy from them. If I’m wrong and some of you are clicking these ads, then let me know that as well below.

Worth noting that I’m talking about the stuff in the sidebars mostly, not the occasional affiliate links that I’m marking as rel=nofollow in the post body. Everybody, including me, sees those and nothing there is changing. I believe these links are helpful and part of the content, not an annoyance.

The WordPress plugin Who Shows Ads enables adding very simple to extremely complex rulesets for when, where and how to show advertisements — or any other type of code — on your WP-powered blog. The screenshot at the top of this post shows a very simple ruleset one could employ. These rules are drag and drop for non programmers. PHP programmers can go as wild as you want with when and where to show advertisement using custom functions.

The simple drag and drop rules will satisfy most bloggers. The ruleset shown above would show visitors who click in from search engine queries only, but not visitors who are regular reader or logged in. The following ruleset would not show ads to regular readers or those logged in:

Consider this testing very experimental at this point, so please be patient if you still see ads even though you are logged in and/or a regular reader. 

It would help me if you’d let me know in the comments below if you are logged in and/or visit this blog regularly and still seeing ads in the sidebar on single post pages. The idea is you shouldn’t see them regularly. You might see one here and there on certain pages and under certain conditions, which could be by design, but you shouldn’t see them all the time any more.

Come from the search engine and don’t want to see any more ads?

If you came from the search engine to this post and you are seeing ads in multiple places across the site, the way to make those go away is simple and doesn’t require using a separate ad blocker. Just register for the blog and/or visit here regularly every week.

Note: readers who take time to register for the site and stay logged in don’t need to visit the site regularly to have the ads not show.

The main idea behind this is to reward regular readers/visitors and subscribers with cleaner presented pages. As stated earlier I don’t think those of you that fit this criteria are clicking the ads anyway so the point in showing them to you is silly from both a financial and practical standpoint.

I do have some ideas for this site to make money for those of you regulars who would like to help out and will be introducing those soon. In the meantime, if you like reading this blog and want to help out, then tell your friends to subscribe and become regular readers and/or trackback in with something from your blog. Links are always appreciated and will help drive more search engine traffic here.

What about first time readers? What will that experience be like?

I’m still mindful that if the first visit experience is awful, this blog won’t keep growing new readers/subscribers. My plan is to add some text near these ads targeting first time readers and explaining to them that they can achieve a near ad-free experience at this blog by simply registering and logging in and/or visiting a few times every week. Do you have other suggestions?

If you are here reading for the first time, thank you for stopping by. I hope you’ll stay awhile. There are plenty of good discussions in the archives. Just run a search from the search box above on a favorite topic of yours. With almost 5,000 posts here to date, there’s bound to be something of interest.

Thank you for reading MakeYouGoHmm.

While in the process of updating archive posts and fixing dead/expired/changed links reported by the broken link checker, I needed something that would quickly insert the timestamp of my changes without me having to type it into the forms. I chose the Firefox plugin Timestamp which allows user defined formats.

If you are perusing the archive posts and seeing these newly added footnotes, you might note that I’m also coding the dead links by domain name. This is so that I can query the database in the future and see what domains are the worst offenders of expiring/changing their links.

There are Wordpress plugins out there that will display who has left the most comments at your WordPress powered blog, but what if you want to query this directly from the MySQL database? Here are the queries required to do that.

Show top 10 commenters at your blog with URL and email address

Note that Lestat and ^Lestat are the same person. This query comes in handy to see users that have changed their names to leave different comments. Sterling has done this too, adding "chip" between his name in 16 comments, giving him a grand total of 619 comments.

As of this morning’s query this blog has 13,162 approved comments. You can find this number inside the WordPress admin dashboard area, but if you want to query it, use the following:

For reference:

1 = comment approved
0 = comment pending
spam = comment marked as spam

A past Hmm post shows the query necessary to delete spam comments from a WordPress database.

How many comments have I made as of this writing? 1,976 (15%). I’d be curious from a percentage basis seeing how that compares to other bloggers. Feel free to provide your own percentage stats in the comments or trackback.

I’m going to make an extra effort to get these top commenters on future Hmmcast Live shows. Since they aren’t textually shy, maybe the same will apply to audio versions.

Show top 10 commenters for year at your blog

What if you wanted to find out who the top commenters were by year? Here’s the query to do that:

Just replace 2008 with the year you want to check.  I ran this for years 2003-2007 as well as 2008 to date. If you’d like to see how many comments were made by year, use the following query:

It’s interesting to note the numbers of comments received by year as this blog has grown.

2003 - total comments made: 93

2004 - total comments made: 561 (+503%)

2005 - total comments made: 2405 (+329%)

2006 - total comments made: 4,940 (+105%)

2007 - total comments made: 3,642 (-26%)

2008 - total comments made through November 14, 2008: 1,517

Notes:

• the peak for most comments received in the year to this blog was in 2006 and has fallen off noticeably since. I’m sure there are many bloggers who would love to have over 100 comments left a month so believe me I’m not complaining. But for the curious, why has this happened? Are blogs dying as some are suggesting? Or is commenting on blogs themselves dying? I don’t think so. Sure, traffic is down a bit here for the year, but not to the degree of the number of comments dropping off.
• There are tons of places these days to comment externally like Twitter, FriendFeed. I predict this trend of leaving comments elsewhere will level off somewhat and we’ll see return to commenting at blogs directly. Perhaps this won’t rebound in 2009, but I don’t see things deteriorating much further.
• There remain good reasons to leave comments at blogs, particularly for bloggers wanting other bloggers to follow blog comments to signature URLs. I’m sure there are a good number of readers who don’t use these microblogging tools, nor care to.
• In the post dated July 23, 2007 I noted that commenting activity had "increased dramatically" over the last year — statistically, at least from a calendar year basis this appears inaccurate. I’m not sure from reading that post what queries I was using to come to that conclusion, but the numbers above don’t lie.

How is commenting activity going at your blog?

Questions for bloggers: have you seen a similar drop-off? What kinds of things are you doing to invite more comments left on your blog?

Questions for non-bloggers: why aren’t you leaving as many comments on blogs as in year’s past? Or are you leaving more? More directly, what would make you more likely to leave more comments on this blog?

 My second spook of the day. This was actually written and intended to be published yesterday, but I never got around to pushing the button (oops), so there’s a trick or treat on Halloween. What am I talking about? Having to break our days without credit cards streak two days shy of 500. Before you start bashing me for being weak and giving into the credit devil during economic meltdown times, here’s the logic behind why it was done.

But first let me point out a couple important points:

1. I’m not being paid to write this post or promote Best Buy.
2. I’m not in the Best Buy affiliate program or being compensated by Best Buy in any way. Have never been in their affiliate program. As long as they are associated with Commission Junction it’s unlikely I’ll sign up.
3. I don’t even own Best Buy stock (BBY), but will admit to thinking about buying some lately. There are some good stock deals out there, as long as you think the market is at and/or near the bottom. Who knows on that one.
4. I am just a Best Buy customer taking full advantage of the many deals they offer. Think of me like a coupon clipper on steroids.

Getting the true best, best buy

Some of you might remember me writing recently about being upgraded to the Best Buy Premier Silver Reward Zone. A requirement of staying in this club is spending at least $2,500 a year at Best Buy or bestbuy.com or, as I learned, their online mall. While I’m not going to rehash that post, you can go read it if you want the details of the program, a couple things stuck out at me:

Premier Silver members earn 1.25 points per $1 USD spent while Best Buy Reward Zone Mastercard with Premier Silver members earn 2.50 points per $1USD.

So by getting and using their credit card I’d earn double the points (and 1.5x more than I was earning before earning the Premier Silver membership) So for the $2,500 spent here is how the program awards points for purchases made at Best Buy and bestbuy.com:

Regular Best Buy Reward Zone program
$5 for every $250 spent
$2,500 spent = $50 in reward certificates

= net: $2,450

Best Buy Premier Silver Reward Zone program
1.25 points per $1 spent
$2,500 x 1.25 = 3,125 points / 250 = $62.50 in reward certificates

= net: $2,437.50

Best Buy Reward Zone Mastercard (BBRZM) with Premier Silver
2.50 points per $1 spent (at Best Buy and bestbuy.com)
$2,500 x 2.50 = 5,000 points / 250 = $100.00 in reward certificates

= net: $2,400 (4% savings)

So by getting and using their credit card and staying in their Premier Silver program I’d receive an additional 4% over whatever price I was paying. Since Best Buy already matches the price of any other retail store, this is a way to use a credit card to save money.

That comes with one important caveat.

Paying no finance charges

So after applying and being approved, they sent me the card and immediately I registered online and linked to a bank account to make sure the balance is paid every month before finance charges are ever applied. There is a 25 day grace period where if you pay the balance, you pay no finance charges.

Last night I used the credit card at Best Buy for the first time. I wanted to thank the guy at the door for saving me an additional 4%. That more than covers the gas to go back and forth from the store.

More points in the online mall

It gets even better.

Credit card owners can get 1 point for every $2 spent not at Best Buy on the credit card, including at the online mall. Considering at their online mall there are deals to earn up to 20 points for every $1 USD spent and points can start adding up fast. 

I mentioned in my last post an online mall deal they have to get 250 points for spending $50. When we went to the beach recently we booked a room for $53 through one of the online mall merchants. This merchant awarded 3 points per $1USD spent. With the promotional 250 points, this earned us 390 points. If I’d used (and since I didn’t have the credit card yet, I couldn’t) the BBRZM for the transaction I’d have received an additional 26 points (1 point for every $2 spent).

More points in game club and racing club

Probably my biggest purchases, collectively, throughout the year at Best Buy are games. Upon digging into the My Reward Zone website, I learned they have an additional Reward Zone Gamers Club which awards $10 for every $150 spent on videogames on top of your normal rewards.

So let’s go back to the $2,500 spent over a year and say I spent that all on videogames at Best Buy or bestbuy.com and used the BBRZM, here is what the point total would look like:

2.50 points per $1 spent (at Best Buy and bestbuy.com)
$2,500 x 2.50 = 5,000 points / 250 = $100.00 in reward certificates
+ $2,500 / $150 = 16 x $10 certs = $160.00 in reward certificates

= net: $2,240 (10.4% savings)

Now we’re getting into some serious savings. But it doesn’t stop there, they also have a Racing Club which awards points for (member link only):

As a Reward Zone® program Racing Club Member, you’ll get bonus points when the Best Buy™ Racing team finishes in the top 10, exclusive content and sweepstakes opportunities. I

Even though I’m not a big racing fan, joining this program for free is a no brainer. If the Best Buy driver Elliot Sadler places in the top 10 here is the details:

1st place: quadruple points (4x) for each qualifying purchase the week following Elliot’s race and when using BBRZM: 5x!
2nd thru 5th place: triple points (3x) - when using BBRZM: 4x!
6th thru 10th place: double points (2x) - when using BBRZM: 3x!

Elliot only has three more races this season (see Sadler race results), but he’s placed in the top 10 a total of 8 out of 28 races shown on the race recap page (Best Buy doesn’t show results for 10/19 Martinsville Speeday where he placed 41st or 10/26 Atlanta Speedway where he placed 25th). His best finishes to date have been 4th place (7/27/08 Indianopolis Motor Speeday) and 5th place (6/29/08 New Hampshire International Speedway), so that would have been 4x points for using the BBRZM the week following both those finishes.

Overall in 2008 thus far there would have been eight additional weeks to earn bonus points for those in the program based on Elliot’s race results. No idea if they’ll be continuing this promotion next year, but this sounds like additional bonus points for simply timing your purchase around Elliot’s top 10 places.

Don’t even have to be a big racing fan to like this deal.

Using credit cards isn’t a bad thing

Reading back through my post on why we ditched credit cards altogether, I wouldn’t change a word. We wanted to do something radical with our finances and I think 498 days later we’ve achieved that goal. Getting this credit card wasn’t about getting credit at all. I think our motive is strong.

Our goal to add more to our retirement hasn’t panned out with the way we hoped the way the market has performed over this time. In fact, retirement outlook has gotten much worse. Not because of credit card debt since we didn’t have any, but because our retirement accounts have lost a lot of value.

Not looking for sympathy votes as I know a lot of people have it worse than us. I’m hopeful that these portfolios will turn around when the economy gets better. Also, planning on getting in on the stock market at/near a bottom and be part of the group that makes money when/if it bounces back.

But back to credit cards. Something that occurred to me over these last 498 days is that they do have a lot of value when used for specific purposes. A few times I’ve thought about breaking this streak for the reason explained herein.

We certainly don’t need to do this Best Buy Reward Zone card, but hopefully the logic in the numbers above pans out. If we are going to spend the money anyway and as long as we do not pay any finance charges (sorry for the double emphasis, but it bears repeating) it is a smart decision to use the BBRZM for purchases at Best Buy and their website.

It’s also important to point to one section written 498 days ago:

Historically, we haven’t been very good about keeping zero balances on our credit cards. It’s not like we charge everything, but we are paying interest charges on these purchases which is money that could be saved instead of going into the credit card coffer

Since the BBRZM is the only credit card we have, I don’t think we’ll have any problems with this going forward. I realize this could be inviting the devil back into our lives, but believe the rationale behind this decision is sound.

I’m trying to encourage my wife to check the online mall now for as many online purchases as possible. This way we can increase the discounts. Not every store we shop at is included and it wouldn’t be practical to do every purchase through them, but we can make many purchases through them.

The only breakdown I can see in this logic is that we carry some kind of balance and pay finance charges. Then it becomes an additional expense/liability, not a bonus/perk. Your turn. Was this a bad idea? Do you see some flaw(s)?

Five years on the web is like 30 human years. Who knows how many sites and services that exist today will be no more in 2013, but my guess would be many. Perhaps most. If you listen to Paul Boutin who is either linkbaiting to the extreme or being brutally honest you shouldn’t even bother starting a blog today.

For those who need another reason to be skeptical of having your blog hosted by any third party — especially a big company like AOL — follow along with the story of AOL Journals which started out in July 2003 as only available to AOL paid subscribers. Some two years later in May 2005 they opened up AOL Journals to non-subscribers.

And on October 31, 2008 AOL Journals will be shut down permanently:

We want the transition to go as smoothly as possible for you, so you’ll have two choices. You can either save your information manually and find another place to blog on your own, or let us handle the migration for you and automatically transfer your Journal to a different blogging service.

Remember, this is the same AOL who bought Weblogs, Inc and owns the popular gadget blog Engadget. The same AOL Engadget that was named the Official Blog Partner of the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2009.

We can blame AOL Journal’s demise on the fact that it wasn’t very good or that they didn’t seem to care about making it different or updating it often enough or insert another excuse. Or we can just face facts: AOL Journals days were numbered from the start because:

Third party blog hosting is fundamentally flawed

I didn’t always think that way.

In fact, I’m part of a group who used a promising third party blog hosting site for a project. What happened to this hosting? No longer offering the service a couple years later. Our blog has continued only because we moved it to our own domain and hosting before the site went down (as AOL is telling its Journal members to do now).

I would strongly encourage all my blogging friends — whether you are going against Boutin’s advice or have one already cooking — at the very least get on your own domain. Fine if you want to be third party hosted, but at least control the fate of your permalinks.

And how about some archive permalink love?

It would be nice, just once, to see one of these services promise to leave up their blogging archives and not allow any new posts rather than force all those permalinks to go dead.  Maybe that’s asking too much? As a blogger linking to anything from AOL why should we trust they won’t do this with some other site in the future?

The answer is we shouldn’t. We can’t.

Those who have been blogging since 2003 can now say they outlived AOL’s blog hosting efforts. How long before we see somebody like Six Apart with TypePad meeting a similar fate? And [gasp] what about WordPress.com?

A comment thinking 38 years into the future with blogging by Hmm reader April hits the mark:

I haven’t the slightest clue what it will be like in say 10 years time let alone 38.

Self-hosting on a unique domain may not guarantee longevity, but it will instantly tell the rest of the aging internet population that you are planning on sticking around longer.

Here’s some irony to close on. This Wired article from February 2002 points to a blogger who created a a blog for listing dead weblogs. A noble goal that his comments seem eerily prophetic:

"I don’t want to be elitist," Linabury added, "but all these people out there with popular weblogs, they’ve been doing it longer and they stick to their guns."

Kudos for Wired sticking to their guns by keeping the permalink power on, but today the link to Linabury’s blog mentioned in the article is 404. No explanation to what happened to the blog or idea. A Google search for the blog’s title leads to a bunch of porno blogs. Hey, at least we can depend on porn still being here in five years.

For those twitterers wondering which followers are leaving them and when, Qwitter will follow any twitter account and email when a follower leaves, along with the last message (er, tweet) that was made. Each email contains an unsubscribe link so you can stop the flow when it’s no longer desired. Basic service, but effective for those who believe strongly in and/or demand reciprocity.

Receive one of these emails then off to Twitter to unfollow the person who unfollowed you.

I care more about interactive twittering than reciprocity — after all, it’s a conversation and discussion tool, isn’t it? — but without the latter the former is more difficult using Twitter. If they aren’t following you then the hope is they are ego tracking their names but not everybody does. Have seen people complain that it’s lame to only follow those who follow you, and I might agree with that sentiment if that’s all there was to it, but given the nature of successful communication in Twitter, it kind of demands a two party signal. With tools like Qwitter, at least you’ll know when somebody leaves and breaks the chain.

Additionally, it could provide a timely opportunity to drop the unfollower (quitter or ‘qwitter’ seems too strong) a line and ask them, why? What is it something said? Our interests don’t align? Just cutting down the flow?

Hat tip to Luca who points out Qwitter is by Eoghan McCabe, an irish entrepreneur.

If you are following me on Twitter and I’m not following you — and as long as you are a person and not a bot or website twitter account — feel free to let me know in the comments or via trackback. There are people that I’m not following and have been lazy about keeping current. I would like to keep our discussions two-way, especially with those who also find this important.

For bloggers that use WordPress, especially if you’ve been blogging more than a year, here’s a plugin you might find helpful: broken link checker. Whenever you’re logged into the WordPress Admin area, this handy plugin will spider all the links inside posts in your blog and report back which links are broken.

Linkrot is a huge problem with most websites but blogs are among the worst.

Problems linkrot creates

For those reading who don’t know what linkrot is: this is what happens when a link is made to a page that is no longer available. Sites go offline, pages get changed or deleted all the time but when a blog post relies on a link as the principle context, this creates broken archive posts. Who cares? New readers who arrive at these posts via search and existing readers going back through the archives. Why have archives if many of the archive posts are broken.

I’ve long wondered what is the best way was to deal with linkrot. As a reader, I don’t want to read some post that makes no sense without the link. I feel cheated in a way. When blog posts like these return highly in search results the feeling is worsened. Am I obligated to clean this up? I think so. What do you think?

The broken link checker strikes thru these broken links in the post view and offers several options to be able to deal with the issue. In the WP admin area visit Manage->broken links to see the total list of broken links.

Linkrot in the backyard

How big a problem was this at this blog?

Out of 4,844 posts made over the last 5+ years and the thousands of links a rather disappointing 16.3% of them are dead as of this writing. That’s not something that made me go hmm, it made me cringe. I knew the problem was there and have written about linkrot here before, but was hoping there were a lot less dead links.

How big is the problem at your blog?

What other bloggers are doing about dead links

I asked what other bloggers three questions doing on Twitter:

1. How are you handling dead links?
2. How often do you scan your blog for dead links?
3. Do you edit old posts?

These questions were aggregated to FriendFeed. Click the image to go to the original twitter message (which hopefully won’t become linkrot someday in the future):

My reply for @irishstu - never check for linkrot? Don’t you think that makes it harder for readers to follow when the link is important to the context? His response:

What should be plan for dealing with linkrot?

My thinking is to go through and remove the links that are permanently broken (site is down) and/or replace with a Google cache link or WayBackMachine link when possible. This way readers would be able to understand the context of the original posts. I don’t want to delete any of these posts, even if the meaning is gone without the often all important external link, because that would just create dead links for somebody else on the web that may have linked to the post.

But what happens to posts where there was little more than the link? Should I editorialize these posts and describe what used to be there?

Going to throw this out to readers and other bloggers and evaluate recommendations from others. Meanwhile, if you see a link flagged as dead by the plugin, it should have a line through it.