General + Site improvement + Business

Twitter

Wayne — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:21:41 -0400

I find Twitter to be utterly inane, worse than social networking. However, a growing number of people are relying upon Twitter for site updates. Used this way, it could be considered an ignorant man's RSS. To this end, TuscanyCircle now has a way to interface to your Twitter account. When you create a new post (not comments), your Twitter account can be updated to include your post's title and URL.

Just edit your account settings here on TuscanyCircle, and you'll see the Twitter configuration options. Yes, this means the Twitter interface is user-specific. Your own Twitter account is updated with your blog posts. (~~There is no TuscanyCircle-wide tweeting.~~ See here.)

By the way, the "Share" button below posts already supports Twitter if you like to tweet your favorite posts.

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New category for persecution

Wayne — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 10:26:10 -0400

I just added a new category to be used in posts: Persecution. This category applies when the topic is the persecution of believers, of the church, or of the true faith. This is not about persecution in general, mind you, but of how true disciples of the Lord are prejudged, hunted, killed, prosecuted, or otherwise injured by God-haters. Such evil sources of persecution may include governments, other [wrong] religions or sects, individuals, and even stupid atheists (pardon the redundancy).

The creation of this new category reflects what I believe to be a significant devolution of our culture that decidedly puts Christians last. No longer are we a majority (by any reasonable measure). We're certainly not protected like all the other classes of people who are seemingly entitled to persecute us. We are fair game for all, even while we're denied the same privilege. We're insulted (in my case, by my own parents!). We're treated as intellectual inferiors (despite copious evidence to the contrary). We are indeed victims of evil.

Note, though, that this is not a celebration of our victimhood. We will not turn ourselves into a protected class (like blacks, Muslims, and sexual deviants). We will not pervert our values to protect ourselves. We will celebrate our Lord Jesus Christ at all times, including times of persecution. We will sing for joy even in times of trouble, for we know what lies in store for us. We may mourn the loss of our nation, our culture, and even our churches (the incorporated form) and we may still strive for political improvement (albeit futilely), but we will rejoice in יהוה (the LORD) forever!

When you blog about the persecution of the Lord's own, consider throwing in one or more of these elements:
- we're on God's side, making us right, and by His blood, righteous;
- we still revel in the Lord's grace and mercy, even in our trials;
- even persecutors may repent of their evil and enjoy everlasting life (e.g., Paul).

This can be a time of doubt and defeat, unless you keep your eyes on the King! Keep the faith, and even our public recognition of persecution of the faithful can be used to build up faith, our own and others'. As long as we have the ability to share righteousness online—Lord tarrying, such rights will not last—edify one another in our common Defense against evil.

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Abuse

Wayne — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 09:58:43 -0400

TuscanyCircle endures its share of would-be spammers, mostly automated. Hundreds and even thousands are stopped daily by layers of security I have in place. The real problem isn't the spambots, but the moronic crack-pots who have some imaginary bone to pick. These are real people—barely, intellectually speaking—and not bots. Many are stopped because they don't provide a valid email address (required, but not shown, even for anonymous comments). Others simply have their comments deleted. A few I will let through once, as their idiocy speaks for itself. When such idiocy becomes a pattern, though, it becomes abuse and will not be tolerated one iota here.

I'm sure you saw the latest moron to have his comments deleted, because he chose to abuse TuscanyCircle rather than further a discussion, search for truth, or appeal to reason. His email address has also been banned, along with his entire ISP (the latter may be freed in time). I also have several other tools at my disposal to deal with abusers of TuscanyCircle (e.g., various levels of locking down the site). Would-be abusers should take note of just how much information can be gleaned from an IP address, an email address, and server logs. You are revealing more about yourself than you'd like to, if you're going to be an abuser. I am all too happy to defend this site and those who post here legitimately against the likes of you. If abuse gets out of hand, I have no problem defending my property rights face to face. Would-be abusers, consider yourself warned.

As for the rest of you, the legitimate participants, I hope my efforts to keep TuscanyCircle free of noise makes it a more valuable site to you. One of the tools you have at your disposal is the ability to flag content that qualifies as abusive. I'm not big into censoring, per se, so don't bother flagging stuff you find merely offensive (get over it). I've loosely defined abuse above, and if you believe posts are abusive, feel free to flag 'em. I'll review flagged content and take the necessary actions. On the other hand, if you'd like the chance to rail against stupid abusers (pardon the redundancy), let me know, and you can join in the fun of tearing them to shreds.

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Roofer

Wayne — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 10:16:55 -0400

I highly recommend Top Hat Roofing. I know the owner, David, and his family, and they're good people. He is very conscientious, a hard worker, and he'll make it as painless a process as possible. Check him out, have him take a look at your roof, and he'll tell you if the recent storms have earned you a new roof, potentially at no cost to you.

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Discount Tire

Wayne — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 10:12:59 -0400

I have had wonderful experiences and great prices at Discount Tire (http://www.discounttire.com) in Lilburn. They were respectful, helpful, very quick, and they even took back a set of tires that I just didn't like, replacing them with another set—no questions and no extra charges! I plan to return for all my tire needs, and I recommend them without reservation.

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Bad Bots

Wayne — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:44:54 -0400

I added a trap on TuscanyCircle for bots (e.g., spambots) that don't respect robots.txt. Yahoo's Slurp (a webcrawler used by the Yahoo search engine) hit the trap within five minutes! Apparently, Yahoo is very abusive to websites. They have numerous bots, under many user agent names, crawling the same sites redundantly, eating up valuable bandwidth. Yahoo servers should be sharing the once-crawled info among themselves, but they don't.

Many webmasters have allowed their automated traps, such as the one I just installed, to go ahead and block Yahoo. Why? Yahoo's bots hit the webmasters' sites up to 4 times more often than Google's bots, yet the traffic directed from Yahoo is about a tenth that of Google's. That makes Google about 40 times more effective/efficient than Yahoo.

I am also taking this tact. If Yahoo's abusive bots don't respect robots.txt, then they will be automatically blocked. My own logs indicate only a tiny amount of traffic sent from Yahoo—far too little to justify wasting any of my valuable effort. I won't miss them. Of course, if this means their site-search becomes less valuable, too, I'll just remove them from the list of engines (right-hand menu, just below the local site search).

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Weathers Corp., GBC

Wayne — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 08:46:49 -0400

Weathers Corp., besides being leftist, has taken to spamming—in violation of federal law, for whatever that's worth today—to promote their new GBC (Gwinnett Broadcasting something-or-other). Consider this a friendly warning.

In case it's removed from their site, here's the Advisory Board for GBC (a regular "who's who" of inbred, corrupt good ol' boys):

Bruce Baldwin
Gwinnett Braves

R.L. “Butch” Conway
Gwinnett County Sheriff

Douglas Cotter
Dawson Fine Wine & Spirits
Cotter Properties

Rep. Melvin Everson
Georgia State Representative

Bill Gentry
Wild Bills Atlanta

Wayne Hill
Nashill Associates

Adrienne Hollis
Gwinnett Medical Center

Keven Lake
National Real Estate Data

Caryn McGarity
Gwinnett Convention & Visitors Bureau

Emory Morsberger
The Morsberger Group

Bert Nasuti
Gwinnett County Commissioner

John Oxendine
Georgia State Fire & Insurance Commissioner

Mark Rountree
Landmark Communications

Anthony Rodriguez
Aurora Theater

Sen. David Shafer
Georgia State Senator

Alex Silva
SBX Technologies

Tammy Shumate
Brand Mortgage
Grayson City Council

Judy Waters
Community Foundation for Northeast Georgia

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YouTube violates rights

Wayne — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 17:15:40 -0400

Praise In Motion has legal rights (at a pretty penny) to use songs in its performances, on its DVDs, etc. Recently, PIM began using its performance videos and homemade videos as training aids via YouTube. They were marked private, available only to PIM dancers, and they were well within PIM's purchased rights. YouTube, however, unilaterally and without notice deleted the audio tracks off several videos and removed even the video (and accompanying audio) from others. The only mechanism available to "challenge" this unannounced violation was automated and flawed. Appropriate information was provided to YouTube about PIM's legal rights to the songs, but these were seemingly ignored.

Whatever mechanism YouTube is using to protect dubious copyrights is highly flawed and utterly fails to account for contractual, legal rights. Execution appears capricious at best, malicious at worst. (One is forced to wonder if there is a religious prejudice in YouTube's staff.) With the potential for YouTube to destroy videos unilaterally, without notice, and without effective recourse, YouTube proves itself an all but useless service, easily replaced by alternatives, including home-grown ones.

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Dry Bones comic

Wayne — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:52:42 -0500

I hope you'll check out the new Dry Bones added to the TuscanyCircle's Links block (on the right). I've read Dry Bones for quite a while, but it's been so poignant and true, I thought it worthy to recommend to all to read. Enjoy!

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Sirius XM: BAD!

Wayne — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 13:53:32 -0500

In a depressed economy, XM Satellite Radio stupidly thinks that raising rates will make them more money. (Even a high school understanding of basic economics disproves this idiotic theory.) Needless to say, we dumped 'em. Cancellation is a painful, difficult process, too. Here are many recent complaints about XM. Beware.

Want decent radio? Search the thousands of [free] online radio stations. You're sure to find a few dozen or hundred to your liking. It may take a bit more time to collect your favorites, but it'll be worth the effort.

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