Much credit goes to wensing and Stormpulse for the inspiration.
This site uses the Ruby static site generator Middleman and is hosted on Amazon S3.
Ruby scripts pull data from (currently) 8 different government agencies from around the world. This data is then stored in YAML format so that it can be used by Middleman. The site is then rebuilt and uploaded to S3.
If you're using name.com's DNS, then they've basically got a wildcard subdomain that points to a spammy domain-parked page.
So, say you have valid records for .yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com. Those two hosts will resolve as you would expect them, but *.yourdomain.com will resolve to a spam page.
Wow, that's pretty evil. I definitely won't be using name.com (I've been happy with Dreamhost as a registrar for years anyway, but would be interested in trying someone else in the future). Thanks for the heads up.
I have a few bots of my own that do weather based alerts (by state). They don't @reply anyone; they just do normal tweets.
What's so frustrating for me is how often I get slapped for spamming yet these quite-obvious @mention spam bots continue to prosper (I can never get a response out of twitter as to why I keep getting blocked; they just remove the block without actually responding to anything I asked).
I get probably 10-20 @reply spam a day on my more active account and it all follows the same pattern:
* account is nothing but @replies with just a link
This has been going on for probably a month and I've reported every single account that's spammed me.
If twitter can't figure out how to auto-block this obvious spam, it doesn't give me much hope that they'll figure out how to take care of spam in general.
I've just fixed the broken links - the image links are based on the valid start time that the SPC puts on the outlook, which is supposed to be 20:00 (UTC) for this outlook, but they put the start time on there as 20:40, so the links were pointing to files that didn't exist.
The caveats to this advice are that this worked for me a couple of years ago (so I'm not sure if the same community exists there now) and that my thing was much more about fat loss.
Still, I was shocked at how quickly I felt like I had been embraced by a community, especially since I had only started out with the intention of using Tumblr as a free place to host a diary (I was quite ignorant of the community features at the time).
Another caveat is that Tumblr tends to favor short form content rather than longer blog posts. However, this could actually be seen as a positive since it's a lot easier to do shorter, more frequent updates.
Aside from that, finding forums where people are talking about these issues and then getting actively involved could be one of the best ways to indirectly build an audience.
A few thoughts on your website:
* I'd either make your blog the main page or automatically pull in at least the latest blog onto your main page. Otherwise, I get the impression that the site was last updated in 2009.
* I'd write a one paragraph summary of who you are and what you're trying to accomplish, the "elevator pitch" if you will. I feel that a lot of what is on your current main page would be more appropriate on a longer form "About" page. I'd put the elevator pitch front and center so that new visitors can know exactly why they should care and keep browsing your site.
* I'd consider coming up with a short timeline - as a new visitor, I might be interested in quickly knowing things like how far along you are in your journey. Like were you just diagnosed? Have you just recently decided to turn your life around or have you been working on this for awhile? As a new visitor, it helps me more quickly identify with your story and what I can expect to get from you.
To sum up, I think there's an audience out there for this. Plenty of people are going to be interested in the everyday perspective of someone who's down in the trenches battling an illness.
So if keeping the site going makes you happy, don't give up!
I'd either make your blog the main page or automatically pull in at least the latest blog onto your main page. Otherwise, I get the impression that the site was last updated in 2009.
I have considered making the blog the main site and the main site an "archive", because the information there is mostly pretty outdated but makes for a good intro/overview. It would involve a lot of work and I'm not sure how to tackle some of the technical issues.
Any idea how I could easily make the blog more visible?
I'd write a one paragraph summary of who you are and what you're trying to accomplish, the "elevator pitch" if you will. I feel that a lot of what is on your current main page would be more appropriate on a longer form "About" page. I'd put the elevator pitch front and center so that new visitors can know exactly why they should care and keep browsing your site.
I actually started working on redoing the main page. This past year has been very hard in terms of my physical healing process. It's been enormously eventful (like I have had way too many Saturdays where I threw up all day). There are plans to redo the main page, there really are. But I really don't want to put the focus on me (re your comment about explaining "who I am"). I have struggled a lot with the fact that information on the site is so personal -- not because I care about sharing such info (I spent years in therapy for sexual abuse endured as a child and both my therapists were ministers -- I'm perfectly comfortable blathering on about crap that makes other people desperately want to tape my mouth shut) but because of the negative fall-out that occurs and that it takes the spotlight off the information per se, which is where I want it to be. So I wrestle a lot with that and I very much want to work on making the site more about "this is good info and helped me" and less about "me, me, me", which just causes all kinds of problems in all kinds of ways.
I'd consider coming up with a short timeline - as a new visitor, I might be interested in quickly knowing things like how far along you are in your journey. Like were you just diagnosed? Have you just recently decided to turn your life around or have you been working on this for awhile? As a new visitor, it helps me more quickly identify with your story and what I can expect to get from you.
Thanks. I did start a time-line. I never finished it or published it.
So if keeping the site going makes you happy, don't give up!
Oh, it doesn't really make me happy. I would much rather be in the entertainment space. But you can't separate this dramatic piece of my life experience from who I am and I don't think it's possible for me to entirely walk away from it. I think if I shut down the site and made a fortune doing something else entirely, then years down the road reporters would hound me for info on how I got well. I would rather just leave the site up and say "here's that info -- now back on topic, it's so not that interesting, thanks". As I noted elsewhere, the site grew out of an off-the-cuff remark I made on an email list I belonged to and the strong reactions people had to the information I casually commented on as a normal part of my everyday existence (a list, btw, that had nothing to do with health issues at all).
I found out after far too much time, that a huge part of my personal success with a programming language is whether or not I "click" with its syntax. So my previous attempts at learning javascript failed miserably because I just never got over the syntax.
So you might take a look and see if its syntax appeals to you. The big downside is that it assumes a prior knowledge of JS, so you'll still need other resources to really learn what's possible with JS/CS.
And my even more niche advice is that, for me, what really built up my momentum was to rewrite someone else's JS site in coffeescript. It's definitely a roundabout way of learning, but I basically got to learn coffeescript and javascript at the same time as I pored over this other person's code line by line as I rewrote it.
I don't know how common my syntax "hang-up" is, but if you do start looking at other languages, I would advise that you seek out sample programs so you can get familiar with what the syntax looks like. And then pick the language that makes the most sense to you even without any programming knowledge.
> I don't begrudge them this income stream from people who buy domains but don't do anything with them for awhile. What's the harm?
There are 2 main issues I have with this:
1. It's not "unused domains" that get this treatment. It's any domain that uses their DNS. I had several active sites and was shocked to find that blahblahblah.mydomain.com pointed to one of their spam pages.
2. If you went to spammysubdomain.realcompany.com and found a spam page, who would you think was responsible for it, realcompany.com or realcompany.com's registrar? I'm guessing almost everyone would think that the company themselves did it. By name.com doing this for active domains, they risk damaging the domain holder's reputation, for anyone who happens to stumble on to one of the spammy subdomains.
This site uses the Ruby static site generator Middleman and is hosted on Amazon S3.
Ruby scripts pull data from (currently) 8 different government agencies from around the world. This data is then stored in YAML format so that it can be used by Middleman. The site is then rebuilt and uploaded to S3.