Category Archives: Blogs

Blogs, Law, Weird Stuff

Philip Garrido’s Blog

8 Comments

So the fruitloop that kidnapped an 11 year old girl, held her captive in his backyard shed for 18 years while she bore 2 of his children has a blog.

//voicesrevealed.blogspot.com/

So here’s the deal… Google is really good at determining relevancy of a webpage and what a webpage is about. Maybe they should modify their algorithms a bit to detect crazy people automatically.

Quotes from his blog…

“…the Creator has given me the ability to speak in the tongue of angels in order to provide a wake-up call that will in time include the salvation of the entire world.”

“THE U.S. FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS NOT THE SOURCE OF MIND CONTROL

These areas are off limits and a danger to anyone believing they can experience this type of freedom. It belongs to God for the direct application of His Word.”

“THIS ALL BEGAN BY GOD REMOVING A PROBLEM FROM MY SHOULDERS THAT BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST BELIEVE IS NOT POSSIBLE TO REMOVE. SINCE THEN MY LIFE HAS SEEN MAJOR IMPROVEMENTS ALLOWING ME TO STAND HERE TODAY A FREE MAN.”

Animals, Blogs, Weird Stuff

Spider Bottlecap Nearly Killed Me

1 Comment

…so as I’m going through the {cough, cough} 2+ years of comments I never got around to moderating on this blog, I came across one that is freaking me out.

//www.shawnhogan.com/2006/11/vampire-bite.html#comment-33317

Dr. Finch seems to think I have some gnarley spider bite that needs immediate doctor attention and my life is in danger.

I think he missed this part about this post… lol

Quote

“Okay, okay… it was from me trying to open a beer bottle with my bare hands last night at poker.”

Thank God is all I have to say… if it were otherwise, I might be the first person to die from not moderating their blog comments fast enough.

Blogs, Server Admin

Maybe No Less Spam?

58 Comments

The comment spam on my blog here was getting to the point of just being silly… around 4,000 spam comments per day (breaks down to about one every 15 seconds 24/7).

I decided to try and do something about it so I don’t have to weed through them manually (the time consumption on this task is one of the biggest reasons I don’t post as often as I used to).

So let’s see how it works… if you see me posting more often, then you know it worked. 😉

Blogs, Tech Stuff

My Face Is So Popular It’s Red

13 Comments

I don’t recall how I came across this image, but I was rather surprised to see it randomly (considering it’s me)…

Some sort of heat map where people look at an image, and decide what’s the most interesting part of it by clicking somewhere on it…

So people thought my face was interesting I guess… either that or they knew their click would register a red dot and were just trying to cover my face up. 🙂

The original image was taken from this blog (over here).

Blogs

1,251 Reasons To Not Have A Blog

24 Comments

One reason I haven’t been writing on my blog is that I just haven’t had the free time to sit around and look for cool/interesting things all day (ahhh… the good old days when I had nothing to do… hah)

I’ve been trying to keep up with comment moderation on the blog (doing it once every few days), but check this screenshot out of what I just finished.

That was about an hour of my life wasted with comment spam moderation… fun!!! 🙂

Blogs

No, I’m Not Dead…

11 Comments

For everyone that has been asking me (or asking others to find out)… I didn’t die.

I also didn’t get thrown in jail…

…nor did I run off with some girl…

…I also didn’t get kidnapped…

(these were all theories I’ve heard so far)

The quick version is this… I went to Mammoth for 3 days, then I was sick for a couple days, then the Chargers lost, so I didn’t feel like writing. Now I feel like writing something, but I don’t really have anything to say… So for now, I’ll just tell people where I’ve been. It’s not that easy to think of something to write about *every* day you know. 🙂

Sorry for not writing on the blog in awhile (I know Bobby loves it when people say that.. heh)

Blogs

Keywords For My Blog

16 Comments

Shoemoney had an interesting post where he posts some of the analytic stats for his blog, so I decided to do a little of the same (I’m too lazy to take a bunch of screenshots and make them all fancy with shadows like he did, but here’s one for you…)

Thankfully, the #1 keyword (besides my name) is amputee porn. haha nice!

Also, the “goal 1” that is defined are Google AdSense clicks (tracked with the script I made to do it). Interesting to see the click through ratio variations depending on the entry keyword as well as how many pages of the blog someone views based on keyword (for example people searching for Shawn Hogan or Weird Stuff tended to browse around a lot).

The majority of my traffic comes from referrals not search engines (the #1 referral for the year was Digg.com), but search engine keywords are much funner to look at. 🙂

Blogs, MPAA

How The MPAA Launched My Blog

4 Comments

Someone pointed out something kind of funny/ironic… Since the MPAA decided to sue me, they have actually made my blog a few times more popular than their own site (mpaa.org). If you look look at the Alexa graph below, the green line is the old URL for this blog, the blue line is the new URL (when I switched over to my own domain) and the red line is the MPAA’s website.

The orange arrow coincides with the day I first heard about the lawsuit (and posted about it).

The odd thing is it actually looks like their site is getting less traffic over time (not a good direction to go). Maybe they would like to buy some advertising space on my blog for their anti-piracy propaganda? 🙂 Hey, you never know… it could happen!

Marketing Lesson #1

Figure out how to get the MPAA to sue you.

Blogs

New Domain

7 Comments

Well, I decided to switch my personal blog to it’s own domain (shawnhogan.com in case you didn’t notice), since the new address is easier to remember. So uhm… yeah. That’s the new URL. 🙂

Update

Okay, the old URLs properly redirect to the new ones, the photo gallery works and I updated all the old posts that referenced the old URLs (a little SQL magic there). But if anyone notices anything that doesn’t work, or any broken links, please let me know.

Blogs, Tech Stuff

Map Of Digg Traffic

44 Comments

At the beginning of last November, I had the idea to do an automatic geolocation system for blog/website owners called Geo Visitors.

This blog got quite a bit of traffic in the last 24 hours (because of a front-page digg). Anyway, check out what the maps look like for visitors to this blog in the last 24 hours… It’s crazy how much traffic digg can bring you in a short amount of time. Thankfully my quick little caching mechanism I did for WordPress last time I had something in digg, held up (last time WordPress was thrashing my servers because of the traffic).

The World

Europe

United States

New York area

If you want to check out the map in realtime (or use it for your own blog/site), click here.

Blogs, Server Admin

WordPress Is NOT Scaleable

17 Comments

The core of WordPress (this blog software) is pretty much a piece of crap as far as it’s “guts” are concerned (although I knew this already, I just didn’t care because my blog doesn’t get enough visitors to really make that fact matter much).

Anyway, I woke up this morning to my servers being thrashed (database server was hitting it’s max limit of 2,500 concurrent connections). Turns out it was because of a front-page Digg (the 3rd one for digitalpoint.com in the last 60 days, but the 1st one for my blog with the crappy WordPress backend). That didn’t hold up to the “digg effect” for very long.

I ended up cobbling together a caching mechanism for WordPress real quick that actually made everything okay, but what I really want to know is if anyone knows of any blog software out there that doesn’t have a crap backend? One that can hold up under load if need be. Sure would be nice if there is one out there already so I don’t have to do it myself.

This is the digg in case anyone is curious. It was dugg by the same person that got a front-page Digg for digitalpoint.com previously. Digg is powerful… a crazy amount of traffic at once. It’s also what spawned the server fundraiser going on now. I think TOPS30 needs to be stabbed.

Blogs

And Google Said, Let There Be Shawn.

3 Comments

This was taken from the Book of Google (chapter 1, verse 1-5)…

In the beginning Google created the web.

Now the web was formless and empty. Spam was on the surface of the results, and the spirit of Google was hovering over the face of the index.

And Google said, “Let there be Shawn”. And there was Shawn.

Google saw Shawn, and saw that Shawn was good. Google divided Shawn from the spam.

And Google called Shawn awesome, and the spam he called lame.

You know the rest… 🙂 Anyway, it looks like my blog is no longer banned in Google’s index (believe it or not, I actually have some useful posts/information once in awhile). I can only assume that Matt Cutts may have had something to do with it since he read (and commented) on this post last week (since it’s been banned for 15+ months and I’ve tried 3 or 4 re-inclusion requests without any success).

This is what my traffic (just from Google) looks like this month:

Blogs

“…Shove It Up My Weener Hole…”

3 Comments

I think Shawn (a different Shawn, not me) gets the award for the best comment on my blog for 2005…

“I will just shove it up my weener hole whenever I visit.”

It’s pretty funny when taken out of context… and just as funny when it’s in context (original comment).

As an award for Shawn, I will not post him in a bikini for all of 2006. Good job Shawn! Hopefully you win again next year, otherwise I’m posting it on January 1, 2007.

Blogs, Coding

Live Email Validation

2 Comments

Here’s a handy bit of PHP code that will take the email variable, lookup the mail server for the domain, log into the mail server and see if it will accept delivery for that address.[code=php](.*)/’, $_REQUEST[’email’], -1, PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE|PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
$email = array_pop ($split);
$split = explode (“@”, $email);
$domain = $split[1];

getmxrr ($domain, $a, $b);
if ($a) {
foreach ($a as $key => $val) {
$c[$b[$key]] = $val;
}
ksort ($c);
} else {
$c[0] = $domain;
}

$fp = fsockopen (array_shift($c), 25, $errno, $errstr, 30);
$return = fgets ($fp, 1024);
fputs ($fp, “helo none.com\r\n”);
$return = fgets ($fp, 1024);
fputs ($fp, “mail from: \r\n”);
$return = fgets ($fp, 1024);
fputs ($fp, “rcpt to:<" . $email . ">\r\n”);
$return = fgets ($fp, 1024);
fputs ($fp, “quit”);

fclose($fp);

if (substr($return, 0, 3) > 250) {
echo “Bad email”;
} else {
echo “Good email”;
}
?>[/code]Okay, okay… the truth is I just got done adapting the GeSHi syntax highlighter into a WordPress plug-in and wanted to make sure it worked, so I needed to post some code of some sort. 🙂

Update

Seems to work pretty well if I do say so myself…

Blogs, Coding

Dude, I’m Awesome!

10 Comments

Well… I decided to write my own PHP script to rip out the old comments (from when this was a Blogger blog), parse them, format them and insert them into the database for WordPress.

The cool part is it all worked on the first try. That’s pretty amazing if you ask me (and that’s why I’m awesome.. hehe). 🙂

So anyway, the 400+ comments that were made when this was a Blogger blog now show… And we can once again enjoy people telling me I have a small penis. 🙂

Blogs, Tech Stuff

Switched To WordPress

3 Comments

Not that anyone would really notice, but I’ve switched this blog from Blogger to WordPress (finally). It’s been something I wanted to do for a long time, but I hated all the templates for WordPress. So I finally got off my butt and made my own.

Comments were lost… not that you guys had anything important to say anyway, so no biggie there. 😉

Since it’s PHP and MySQL driven, it lets me have control over the underlying code. For example you can see what I’m listening to in iTunes and I made it show a random picture from my photo gallery on the sidebar.

Blogs

Another blog you have to see to believe!

3 Comments

This is my annual “Blog You Have To See To Believe” entry. I spend an entire year going through over a million blogs. Then I pick one blog per year that is just so unbelievable and cool, everyone has to see it for themselves.

Words cannot describe it, so just check it out.

You can also find last year’s winner over here.

Update

It looks like last years winner is no longer online, probably because they were overwhelmed with the amount of traffic I sent them.

Blogs

People DO Read My Blog!

9 Comments

Well, I posted a picture of my friend (a guy) wearing a bikini top yesterday at 4:21 pm as an experiment to see how long it would take him to notice and call me. It was less than 24 hours (without anyone telling him).

Sorry if you missed it, but I since took it down since I just wanted to see how long until he saw it. heh

Blogs

My Mom’s Blog Sucks

7 Comments

You know what? I try to help a mom out… hype up her blog and drive hundreds of thousands of visitors. And what’s the thanks I get? Nothing. Her blog hasn’t been updated in 6 months.

That makes me look foolish for sending all my dedicated readers (which is like me and my sister basically.. heh) to her blog which practically could be talking about the Cold War it’s so old and outdated. Maybe if I say it sucks, it will be tough love and she will get on it.

Update… Wow, that was quick. I noticed my mom updated her blog tonight (only 30 minutes after I posted this… uhm, hey mom, how many times an hour do you read my blog?? heh). It’s a good one too… you should read it and click on the link after you read it. I fell out of my chair I was laughing so hard. Finally! A good post! 🙂

Blogs

Blogger Stats

Leave a comment

I wonder if Google is ever going to fix it so Blogger stats are updated on user’s profiles. It’s now been over 6 months before any user’s stats were updated (and counting). According to blogger, my last post was on November 3rd, and one of my blogs (which has well over 100 posts now) doesn’t have any posts and doesn’t even exist yet for that matter.

Google has a monster computing grid which essentially gives unlimited computing capacity for anything they want, but they can’t figure out how to get the stats updated on Blogger? Weird.

Blogs

Pink Is The New Blog

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It’s really rare for me to post about someone else’s blog unless it’s *really* good. But I ran across one today.

//trent.blogspot.com/

It’s really just some guy rambling about celebrities, and I’m not one to give a rat’s ass about celebrities… but it’s pretty funny. Another nice thing is that it’s updated more than once a day, so there is always something new (unlike my blog.. hehe)

Blogs

Publish To Blogger Via Email

4 Comments

Did you know that you can publish to your blog simply by sending an email? I didn’t until I noticed it under the Email tab under Preferences.

This is my first post ever that I published without logging into Blogger. Let’s hope it works. 🙂

Blogs

How To Hide Deleted Comments In Blogger

4 Comments

It’s really annoying when someone spams your comments in Blogger (or accidentally posts twice). You can delete the comment, but it’s not “really” deleted… instead it has a message saying the comment was deleted by an administrator. In the case of a spammer, it’s really ugly to have 20 or so of those if you ask me.

So I decided to come up with a hack that will remove it. This only works if you run your blog on your own server (FTP or SFTP published) and your server is running Apache with PHP extensions installed.

First I created a PHP file and dropped it in my blogger base directory:

myfile.php file:

<?php

    $file = file_get_contents ($_REQUEST['file']);

    $a = substr_count ($file, 'deleted-comment');

    $b = preg_match ('/<h4>(.*?) Comments:<\/h4>/i', $file, $matches);

    

    echo str_replace ('<h4>' . $matches[1] . ' Comments:</h4>', '<h4>' . ($matches[1] - $a) . ' Comments:</h4>', $file);

?>

Then I created a .htaccess file in that same folder:

.htaccess

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} 20..\/..\/

RewriteRule ^(.*) myfile.php?file=$1

Great… problem solved. Basically it reads the file and spins it through the script before it’s output to the user.

BTW, this is not a detailed “how to”, so use at your own risk and don’t email me if it doesn’t work. 🙂