About This Site
A Late Birthday Present
I got a late birthday present, but it’s one of the most thoughtful and touching gifts I’ve ever received. Nolan gave me a domain name for this website this week. Yes, you can forget that old whatever.homelinux.blahblah stuff that you used to have to type to get to here. Now it is simply, TheMurdockFamily.org. How cool is that? Thanks Nolan!
I’ll keep the old free name that we’ve been using for a little while longer, but please start using themurdockfamily.org, it’s just so much classier. If you mess up and type murdockfamily.org instead, it looks like you end up at the website of a nice Murdock family with three young boys and lots of pictures on their website, but that’s not us. Close though!
Oh, and while I’m updating you on the website, I also added more highlighted entries on the right-hand side there. It only shows links for 5 at a time, but it randomly picks those 5 from a larger list each time. Cool, eh?
Posted by Bryan on February 6, 2008 | Filed under: About This Site Family News | 2 comments
Now Safe From Spambots
I’m continually amazed at the geeky phrases that my peers are able to infuse into everyday living. Megahertz, gigabytes, Internet, http, URL, email, blogs, World Wide Web. Does anyone else ever take a step back and listen to just how silly we all sound calling that punctuation mark that usually goes at the end of a sentence a dot? I wonder if Isaac thought it was weird when his teacher called it a period?
Spam has to be one of the best. I’m not sure where that came from, but I’ve gotten to know some native Hawaiians lately, and they actually like to eat Spam. Apparently it’s big on the islands. I haven’t asked if they are offended that we use the name of a beloved food to refer to unwanted email advertising, but I’ve been tempted.
Here’s one you probably haven’t heard before. Did you know that there are robots crawling the Internet? People write programs that download website after website from the internet. These programs are, for some unknown reason, referred to as robots, or bots, for short, and what they do is called crawling. In fact, this is how Google indexes the entire internet, by crawling it with the Googlebot.
The Googlebot is generally thought of as a good and helpful bot, but there are other more sinister bots crawling the internet. They look for email addresses and blogs that are ripe for spamming. These are called spambots. You probably haven’t noticed, but this website has fallen prey to spambots lately. Weird comments advertising unmentionable things have been showing up on old entries. I’ve been deleted them as soon as they appear, but that’s getting old. While sitting around after having had knee surgery, I added a captcha to the website’s comment system in order to battle the bots. You’ve probably seen these before, actually. If you haven’t, leave a comment on this entry and you’ll see what I mean.
The idea behind a captcha is to require you to pass a test before you can post a comment to a website. The test should be simple for humans, but next to impossible for computers (or bots). Deciphering pictures is one of those tests. Pretty ingenious, if you ask me. I’m sorry that the website has become slightly more inconvenient to use, but I really didn’t want to see another advertisement for, well, you know, on this website. Such is the price for this wonderfully open and “free” internet. Here’s hoping this helps.
Posted by Bryan on November 24, 2007 | Filed under: About This Site Family News Geek | 3 comments
The Office Is Coming Together
The office is coming together again. Last night Ily and I put together the first new desk and system control has moved back out of our bedroom. Ily, of all the most sound sleepers there are, couldn’t sleep when the computer was on at night in our room. I think craigslist was calling out to her or something. Anyway, you can no longer track our sleep habits by checking when the website is working or not. The computer should stay on all the time again. We’ll start taking pictures of the new office and post those soon, I promise.
Posted by Bryan on July 29, 2007 | Filed under: About This Site Family News | 0 comments
The system was down
Well, since I know you all check the website daily, hourly, every minute even, you might have noticed a lack of availability this afternoon. While we are “remodeling” our office (ie painting) we have moved the computer that acts as our server upstairs to our bedroom where it is temporarily residing on a card table. This means that the mongo huge power strip that we plug everything into is reachable by little fingers. I guess any button that glows must be pushed by little people, even if they are 6 years old. Needless to say we weren’t pleased to find the computer off this afternoon. But the computer hasn’t yelled at us for it’s foul treatment so hopefully it is OK and we shouldn’t punish the perpetrator too much.
Sorry the site wasn’t available. Hopefully the children won’t be pushing too many more important buttons that kill the ‘puter. Man!.... and we even got a new childproof case for the new server! It appears they are smart enough to get around the childproofing!
Posted by Ily on July 23, 2007 | Filed under: About This Site Family News | 1 comment
New Server, New Feature
The website is running on a new server now. I built a new computer and it totally rocks. The website is running on the new machine. Can you tell that it’s faster? Probably not…but I can!
I also added a new feature to the website. Nobody but Ily and I will notice, but I figured I should write it down for posterity’s sake anyway. It will now email us (the site admins) whenever a new comment is posted. That way we won’t go days without noticing that someone has commented ever again (because, you know, we check email, like, every minute). So maybe you will notice when we reply to your comments so much more speedily than before. I’m now going to post this, and then comment on it to make sure the new feature works. I’ll probably comment again to let you know whether it does. I know you’re waiting with bated breath.
Posted by Bryan" on July 15, 2007 | Filed under: About This Site | 5 comments
Use Firefox for the Internet
I just took a look at the new website design using Internet Explorer. It looks terrible, so I made this to show the difference:
Basically, if what you see on this site looks like the picture on the right, you need to update your web browser software. It’s a pain that Microsoft has allowed this to happen, but I can help if you need. If only to see our fancy new website the way it should look ;-)
Posted by Bryan on June 20, 2007 | Filed under: About This Site Family News | 0 comments
New Look
It was time to update the look of the site a little bit. I tried some orange colors for a day, but they were hard for me to read, so Ily and I came up with what you see now. The new top banner and standard blue links are much better, if I do say so myself.
I’ve seen these head-only pictures other places around the web and the idea came to me last night that I should do that. I found a Gimp tutorial that made it pretty easy to do. Reece’s head was done first, and Ily liked it a lot. That got her involved and she helped with the rest, like picking out pictures, suggesting the background color, and choosing the font. It was a great husband and wife artistic bonding experience. I highly recommend it.
Please comment and tell us what you think. The banner started to remind us of a certain TV show once we got into it. If you can guess I’ll give you 10 bonus points.
Posted by Bryan on June 19, 2007 | Filed under: About This Site Family News | 9 comments
The System Was Down
Well, the website was down starting last night and most of today. If nobody noticed, I suppose that’s good. I wouldn’t want anyone to be too addicted to this website. Anyway, it was due to a server software upgrade that went bad. I think it’s all fixed now. Let me know if you see any problems with anything here, now that it’s running on its shiny new software.
Posted by Bryan on May 9, 2007 | Filed under: About This Site Family News | 0 comments
Site Search
My good friend Nolan intimated that this beautiful website might still be lacking in one feature. Actually, he was right. This site is such a treasure trove of wonderful information, it was a terrible, awful shame to not have some way to unearth it all. Thanks to our good friends at Google, that tragedy has ended. Behold the new site search. You can even search for the term, “Nolan” and see how often he was mentioned :-)
Posted by Bryan on March 25, 2007 | Filed under: About This Site Family News | 0 comments
Friends Page
It’s feast or famine here on the Murdock family blog. I guess you can tell how long it takes us to fully recover from a trip to Utah by how long we go without posting any news to the blog afterwards.
Well, Ily tagged me to tell about the mouse incident, but I’m just not ready to do that yet. Soon. This post is just to point out the new Friends page of the website. We are adding as many links as we can. You know, so we feel like we actually have friends so we can do a better job of staying in touch. If we are missing anyone please let us know. If you really don’t want to be on our web page, let us know. You can leave a comment or email bmurdock AT gmail.com.
Oh, and happy Pi Day!
Posted by Bryan on March 14, 2007 | Filed under: About This Site Family News | 2 comments
