Okay, here's the deal.  It's okay for people to vent on THEIR blogs about things.  The main golden rule is that you may not put the person's real name or full handle into the title of an article (since JoeUser is so popular, what you write here ends up on Google pretty quickly). That said, you post it to the forums and then it becomes our business.  When you make an article, by default it has a checkbox that says "post to forums too".  If you're writing something that is e...

"Having your own business".  It's a phrase I have heard friends and others use.  But what most people think of when they say "Having your own business" is having a business that includes themselves and maybe a couple other guys. In nearly all cases of companies that have 30 or more employees, the company is founded either by venture capital or through a group of friends/associates who build the business together. My business I founded on my own.  I didn't have partners. ...

http://top500.feedster.com/ According to Feedster, JoeUser.com isn't in the top 500.  Which is surprising given our relative traffic. It makes me wonder how their system works. Perhaps we aren't even registered in there.  So I'm creating this blog item to make sure we are. No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster feedster:f531b608b914eec2d8483a525d3a2174

The points system doesn't exist to promote fairness.  It doesn't exist to encourage competition.  It's not even designed to encourage bloggers to blog more. The points system is designed spefically to promote articles and bloggers that have already gained a readership.  It doesn't care what you write about.  It doesn't care whether you're a liberal or a conservative.  It doesn't care what color your skin is or what sex you are.  It simply designed to promote thos...

In about 10 days we are going to do a points audit on the site.  Every time someone makes a comment, post, etc. they receive points for it. It's recorded in a log. I know, from casual inspection, that some people have far more points than their available # of comments and articles could possibly warrant.  Now I have a confession to make, I've been very competitive in my life and I've played the system my share of times. I haven't done so here since I'm the #1 user because I know...

Does JoeUser.com seem like it's faster? In the past week in the course of trying to fix the site, we (and by we I really mean T-Man and Alberto) have been working like madmen to optimize the site code to make it more efficient.  Hopefully, getting to articles and such feels a lot faster.  How does it feel to you? It should feel significantly faster so if it doesn't, let us know. Thanks!

JoeUser has been going up and down and up and down.  What's the deal? This is going to be a bit technical but we want you guys to know exactly what is happening. All Stardock community sites share the same underlying Stardock.net database structure.  Your UserID and Password will work on JU, GalCiv2.com, TotalGaming.net, WinCustomize.com, SocietyGame.com, PoliticalMachine.com and even in Stardock.com's forums.  The same is true of the blogs/posts. When I write a blog...

I suspect like many of you, I've been very frustrated with JoeUser's unreliability and downtime recently.  It's just one of the downsides of increasing popularity and not having the resources to address it. Last week, it really came to a head and we literlaly had to take the site down in ordre for any of our sites to stay up.  So while it was down, we started cleaning things up where we could.  We're still not happy where things rae but right now, we're up. I am really sorr...

We're trying to figure out a database issue that is related to JoeUser.com.  So we have been having to take JU down periodically in order to test potential solutions.

Well tomorrow is my birthday. Which means, naturally, my family has come down with a virus.  I've finished tucking them all in and can now surf the net a bit before getting some late night work done. Linda Folely demonstrates why people don't trust the media anymore even if her demonstration is unintentional. Democrats are mad at Karl Rove  for pointing out a stereo-type between the left and the right when it's come to the war on terror. The American Right: "Let's go get the g...

For those of you interested in what the new office looks like here's a video I took (in .WMV format) with my digital camera.  The first part is muted (too windy) but I narrate a bit once inside.

One of the coolest features (I think) of Stardock.net sites are the referral links. Some sites have "track back" but it's a long, painful, manual process.  On Stardock.net sites like JoeUser or WinCustomize or GalCiv.com ro whatever, if you link to a particular article, you can see your link and how many people came to it from your link via referrals. It's very cool.

So you're a kid. La-di-la-la.  One day you're 19. At college. Trying to get through your classes. And then one day you wake up and you're 33, married with two children. The good news: Your acne cleared up.  The bad news, your hair may be thinning. The zits are gone, but now I swear my hair is thinning. I'm not sure, it used to be too painful to comb it. But I swear it was thicker before! I hear that propecia can fix it but on the one hand, I'm married. Who gives a crap how I look? ...

I've been trying to talk my wife out of living in Michigan for something like a gagillion years.  Not that Michigan is awful. It's not.  It has beautiful Spring and Falls and summers are quite pleasant.  And our part of Michigan (south eastern), is no more north than Northern California.  On the other hand, Michigan has terrible roads.  Sure, there's no traffic compared to say New York or California but they're full of pot-holes.  The excuse is that trucks in Mi...

Here's some interesting links I came across while surfing tonight: Military use of nanotech: http://crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2005/03/military_uses_o.html Slashdot review of a game design book: http://books.slashdot.org/books/05/03/29/1926206.shtml?tid=206&tid=6&tid=10 Return of the Mac: http://paulgraham.com/mac.html Revenge of the Sith Comic book covers: http://www.theforce.net/episode3/story/Revenge_of_the_Sith_Comic_Book_Covers_90657.asp Today's Best of the W...