figby.com

I’ve launched yet another new Web site: The Gadgets Page will be publishing articles and reviews about consumer electronic gadgets, computers, and peripherals. My SlashNot co-conspirator, Matthew Strebe, has written about half of the content for this site.

The Gadgets page runs on the same MySQL and PHP back-end CMS as Website Workshop. Like that site, it mainly exists because I enjoy technical writing and need more outlets since writing books doesn’t pay as well as it used to. It will hopefully make a bit of money from Google ads and affiliate links.

Under the Iron has a lengthy interview with MetaFilter’s Matt Haughey. When I look for inspiration from people who do the same thing as I do–running a bunch of sites, some popular and some not, largely by myself–Matt is always one of the first names that comes up.

His comment on motivation resonated strongly with me: "I don’t know what motivates me, but whenever it hits I can crank out the product." That’s how I work too, although money is more of a motivation for me at times since my sites are what pays the bills.

He also describes his "desire to create" and how that makes activities like console video games seem pointless. I’m the same way, I feel like everything I do should have an end product. (Despite that, for some reason, I do delve into about one video game a year. This year is Homeworld 2.)

For years I’ve used a Windows program called NetLoad to post updated files to my Web sites. It’s an automatic FTP client that does a pretty good job of uploading only the files that have changed. This sounds like a simple task, but I have never found any program as convenient. It’s shareware and I gladly paid for it.

Unfortunately, NetLoad is off the market. Its site has been replaced by this notice that NetLoad is no longer available, and that the source code and customer list is for sale for the absurd sum of $25,000.

So… I’m looking for a new tool to deploy files to my servers. In the meantime, Google found the NetLoad download page, now unlinked, so I can at least get it working on my new PC.

I just switched to a new computer. In the past I’ve usually put together my own PCs, so a new machine meant waiting for parts to show up from ten different places and then fighting with them for weeks until everything works.

This time I didn’t feel like messing with hardware, so I just walked into a store and bought an HP Pavilion a350n. This is a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 and has roughly the same components I would have chosen myself. As PCs are becoming more of a commodity, it would have been difficult to beat the price by building my own.

There’s nothing like buying a computer, plugging it in, and being able to use it right away. I’ve been very impressed with this machine so far, although there have been a few minor issues. I’ll be writing more about some of those issues here, as well as some of the good things.

I was recently thinking of starting a blog search engine and aggregator. Then I ran across Ari Paparo’s big list of blog search engines. Maybe there are already enough.

I just added this site to ten or so of the search engines, so if you’re a new visitor who came from one of them, welcome!