Posts Tagged ‘web’
26
Mar
Posted by Douglas in Social Networks, Technology, Websites. Tagged: facebook, Internet, social, social networks, web, Websites. Leave a Comment
I’ve finally done it. I suspended my Facebook account. I’m going to take a break for awhile. Don’t worry, Facebook is still sending me e-mail occasionally so I can still keep in touch somewhat. From their website:
Note: Even after you deactivate, your friends can still invite you to events, tag you in photos, or ask you to join groups. If you opt out, you will NOT receive these email invitations and notifications from your friends.
I thought their account deactivation page was very clever. I’ll share it below:
Don’t go, everyone will miss you!
I’ll still see some stuff via e-mail. I’m not sure how long this will stick but I’ve set myself a goal of 30-45 days. We’ll see where it goes from there. If you would like to keep in touch with me until then you can find me on DouglasWard.net, on Google+ or on Twitter. See you soon!
I did it! I’ll be back later!
24
Mar
Posted by Douglas in Social Networks, Technology, Websites. Tagged: download, facebook, Internet, social networks, web, Websites. 1 Comment
Facebook has a feature allowing the download of your complete profile. This includes photos, status updates and most of the rest of the information that was uploaded to their website. Since I’ve decided to take a break I thought I would go ahead and download my archive. Just in case I decide to not reactivate my profile I would like to already have my files downloaded.
Start by heading over to Account Settings and clicking on the link to download a copy of your Facebook data.
You can download your entire Facebook Profile!
Click the Start My Archive button to start the process. This is when you start waiting for the archive to process. If you have years of history on Facebook (like I do) then it might take awhile.
Click the button to start the archive process.
No big decisions can happen without being asked twice if you really want to do it.
Every major question needs to be asked twice, right?
Now we wait for the archive to process. Facebook will send you an email with a download link once the file is ready.
…And now we wait.
Facebook also has an option for downloading an expanded archive. This archive contains a lot of the internal system information that Facebook tracks behind the scenes. It includes login times, who you are friends with, etc. This archive processes a lot more quickly but doesn’t contain any of your pictures, status updates or any other personal information.
The expanded archive includes more technical data than just your posts and photos.
Same prompt as before when you click the button to start creating the archive.
The screen that you see while waiting is nearly the same as well.
…And now we wait, again!
That’s about all it takes to get your files (in theory). My archive failed twice. After spending a good deal of time trying to figure it out I gave up. I’ll take another swing at this later and see how it goes. I hope it works better for you!
22
Mar
Posted by Douglas in Social Networks, Technology, Websites. Tagged: facebook, social, social networks, Technology, web, Websites. Leave a Comment
I spend way too much time on Facebook. It’s been bothering me for awhile now but I’ve ignored it. At last count I have 242 friends in that service. With all of the groups that I subscribe to, my likes (and my friend’s likes) and various other interactions there is a lot of background noise on that site. I spend a great deal of time filtering through that noise.
Some of my friends post genuinely funny, witty and relevant content. I love interacting with them and finding out what is going on with them and their families. I also enjoy keeping up with my own family. Facebook keeps me in closer touch with them than I ever was before they started using it. It is a very valuable tool for interacting with the people that I am journeying through this life with.
The rest of the system is a giant noise generation machine. People post the same memes and joke photos repeatedly. Blocking game notifications is a lot like playing whack-a-mole. My likes and my friend’s likes keep cluttering my news feeds with advertisements. I won’t even comment on presidential elections, the gun control debate, how much I love Jesus, support the troops or any other major news story of the day. My news feed settings seem to change from time to time, burying content from the folks that I interact with regularly underneath a digital waterfall. It’s true that everyone is entitled to their own opinion. If you take that one opinion and multiply it by 242 and the sound can be deafening.
I don’t mean this to be a complaint against Facebook. I’ve been using it since it was first released to the public. I still enjoy using it. I just remember when I didn’t need to spend a lot of time every day keeping up with all of that content. I’m burned out. I need a break.
It would seem that the easy solution would be to cut into my friends list. We all have a bunch of folks that we added on a whim, or because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Maybe they were much better friends in the past than they are now. People change. People move on. Paths diverge and people head off in opposite directions. No hard feelings, right? It turns out there are hard feelings after all. Somewhere along the way people started tying their personal identities into their Facebook profiles. Some people (myself included) don’t mind if they get removed from other’s friends lists. It’s nothing personal. After all, it’s just a website, right? Others take it personally. The first time I had to deal with personal fallout from my friends list was an eye-opening experience. Fast forward to today and I’m getting tired of worrying about it. I could hide them from my news feed. I could even limit what they can see. That’s not the point though. It’s my profile, not theirs. When I start feeling like I can’t remove people because of how they will take it then I’ve lost control of my information. I find that to be unsettling.
The fact that I’m tired is also troubling. It means that this social network has become way too heavily integrated in my daily life. I’ve been going back and forth with this decision for a long time now. I’ve finally made up my mind. I’m going to take a break. I’ll write about that process as I work through it. Will it stick? Will I be able to handle the silence? Time will tell. I’ll write more on this decision later. For now though, it feels good to have finally made up my mind. Instead of reading Facebook today I think I’ll read a book!
14
Mar
Posted by Douglas in Internet, Social Networks, Websites. Tagged: google, blogs, Internet, web, google reader, rss, feeds, syndication. 2 Comments
The Old Reader
I think I may have found a good replacement for Google Reader. After reviewing a few different options today I have settled on The Old Reader. This site looks and feels a lot like Google Reader did. It offers nearly the same functionality at the same price (free). This service also comes with a Chrome extension. The articles don’t seem to refresh as quickly as Google Reader but I can be patient.
Wait your turn!
It looks like it will take awhile to set it up. There’s quite a queue of people waiting to have their subscription lists imported. It’s a good thing I can wait until July 1st. I like this service so far. You should give it a serious look if you are set adrift from Google Reader like I am.
12
Aug
Posted by Douglas in Internet, Security, Websites. Tagged: chrome, google, Security, ssl, web, Websites. 2 Comments
Leave it to Google to come up with interesting new things. I downloaded the latest version of Chrome and noticed that several things have changed. You can now synchronize extensions and preferences across browsers. The best part though is the new graphic for SSL certificates:
Beware the security devils!
This is the graphic that you now see when you are visiting a website with a valid certificate that is loading page elements that are not encrypted. It’s not a terrible thing security wise but nevertheless, beware the red skull of security! Even though I know it is going to generate support calls I still love it. Well done Google!
2
Aug
Posted by Douglas in Internet, Websites. Tagged: email, outage, roadrunner, timewarner, web. Leave a Comment
Don't expect any help from the Roadrunner.
The Roadrunner delivery issue at work has been resolved. I waited all weekend to see if our e-mail would deliver. Roadrunner’s block on our IP address was never removed. I sent an e-mail address to postmaster@rr.com with no luck. There isn’t even an autoreply configured for that account. All of the other major ISP’s resumed service with us after a few hours on Friday afternoon. Once I was desperate enough I had to eventually change the IP address of our outbound mail delivery. Thanks for nothing Roadrunner, I fixed it myself.
15
Jul
Posted by Douglas in Internet. Tagged: browsing, google, https, Internet, protocol, Security, web. Leave a Comment
As I was navigating the internet today at work I noticed a new Google feature that seems rather interesting:
Safe Searching!
Google has released the beta version of their https encrypted search website. Google probably didn’t encrypt their searches from the beginning due to the increased overhead of the https protocol. After several test searches I cannot tell a difference between the http equivalent. Now we can all search whatever we want in the coffee shop without much worry of wireless sniffers watching our every move. Very impressive!
10
Jun
Posted by Douglas in Church, Internet, Security, Social Networks. Tagged: facebook, gmail, google, malware, myspace, redirect, Security, web. 1 Comment
While managing the network infrastructure at our Annual Conference I have run across a weird redirect issue. All of the computers in the News Room running Windows XP, Vista and 7 started redirecting to MySpace pages. In the beginning it was redirecting to an actual profile. After an hour or so the website started returning 404 errors (as if they had removed the profile). We first noticed the issue yesterday but dismissed it as a glitch. This morning the issue has arisen in full force. I can’t find much online about the problem but here is what we have done that seems to clear it up for us. I believe that this issue is spreading through the social networks but I cannot confirm it yet. Since we are running nearly all of our news coverage through those websites we are sitting ducks. The latest antivirus definition files from multiple vendors doesn’t seem to help either. Please be sure to comment if you have any additional info.
Affected browsers: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. All are running the latest patches as of this writing.
Steps to remediate for Windows XP users:
- Start – Run
- Run the program “cmd” for the command line
- Enter “ipconfig /flushdns” and hit Enter
- Restart the browser
Steps to remediate for Windows Vista/7 users:
- Start – All Programs – Accessories
- Right click on command prompt and select Run As Administrator
- Enter “ipconfig /flushdns” and hit Enter
- Restart the browser
I have seen some small issues with Ubuntu and Mac laptops. We resolved those by dumping the browser cache, restarting the network connections and restarting the browser. I will post an update as I learn more.
Update: June 10th @ 5:24 PM
I’ve done a good bit of googling and found out that the issue is most likely linked to our brand spanking new Linksys WRT320N wireless router (relevant threads can be found here and here). Apparently that entire family of routers has trouble with DNS requests. I didn’t see a sticker on the box when I bought it that said something along the lines of “I suck at DNS.” Who knew? I updated the firmware at our dinner break. We’ll see how it goes from here.
13
Jan
Posted by Douglas in Internet, Politics. Tagged: china, freedom, google, Internet, Politics, Security, web. Leave a Comment
Google is taking a courageous stand against China. Good for them!
We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”
These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
9
Nov
Posted by Douglas in Internet, Websites. Tagged: geocities, Internet, page, web, yahoo. 1 Comment
I remember setting up my first Geocities webpage back when I was in college. In 1995 anyone who could make their own webpage was some kind of technical wizard. I spent a lot of time hand coding html files with a text editor. Creating a website is a completely different process now.
This is the week that Geocities went dark forever. There is no backup or spare copy. It’s simply gone. With it goes a big portion of the history of the internet. That is a true shame. Lucky for us some people saved at least some of it for historical purposes.
When Yahoo! switched off the servers for GeoCities, the Web posting service, on Oct. 27, some 7 million of the Internet’s first websites went dark forever. The bulk of these were people’s personal home pages, which were pulled offline with no backup and no permanent record of those users’ frenetic early forays online.
Now a ragtag effort by several groups of budding computer historians is feverishly — and angrily — trying to bring as much as they can back online.
…
ArchiveTeam is still sorting through the data, but Scott estimates that he was able to save more than a million accounts, which translates to more than 2 terabytes of data (about 20 average computer hard drives). And he wasn’t alone — Scott says that four or five others were working to save GeoCities. One of these people, Jacques Mattheij, managed to get nearly 2 million accounts, operating just eight machines out of the Netherlands.
I’m surprised there wasn’t some deal struck with Archive.org or some other institution. At least someone is doing something. Kudos to the Archive Team!
