John Lamansky

Cool! McAfee SiteAdvisor has given this site a “green checkmark,” saying “We tested this site and didn’t find any significant problems.” Meaning no spam, no dangerous downloads, no popups, etc.

Of course, I already knew that I didn’t spam or allow popups, but having it verified by McAfee is nice.

So this means that if you aren’t subscribed to the feed, you can subscribe to this blog via email (on the homepage) without any spam worries (hint, hint ;-)).

I can’t believe it: JohnLamansky.com is listed in the DMOZ, one of the most popular website directories on the Internet!

To tell you the truth, I thought for sure that this blog wouldn’t be listed, since I had submitted my listing more than once (not realizing at the time that that was frowned upon). But despite this, today I was elated to find that about 9 months (!) after my submissions, this blog has been listed! I guess my listing must’ve been assigned to a nice editor.

Yea! Fantastico’s WordPress bug is fixed and I finally have a WordPress installation that is 100% WordPress 2.0!

Hooray! My webhost’s Fantastico deployment finally has WordPress 2.0.

Begin the backups!

[Update: Well, that didn’t go so well. Fantastico said the upgrade was successful. The theme was upgraded because it included the new functions.php, etc. But the admin interface was still the same and the version number in the admin area still read “1.5.2″. Bother. I guess I won’t be upgrading to version 2 for some time now.]

Cool! This is my 100th blog post.

I’ve decided to change the email subscription system to use a WordPress plugin instead of FeedBlitz. Since FeedBlitz requires account registration, it’s a real pain to subscribe via email if you don’t already have a FeedBlitz account.

With the new system, all you have to do is enter your email address in the box on the sidebar, click the OK button, and then click the link in the confirmation email that will be sent to your address. Then tada! You’ll be notified of any new posts on this blog. Enjoy!

Actually, it’s 6 months and two days old (the first post was on July 15). I forgot about it on Thursday, and was very busy yesterday. But anyway, I’d just like to say, “thanks for reading everyone!” Feel free to leave comments on what you like about the blog, what you don’t like, and etcetera.

Yippee! On October 20, I checked the Google PageRank of my blog and it was 4 out of 10, up from 0 out of 10. Naturally, the zero was because my blog is only, what, 3 months old. Anyway, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the acronym “SEO,” PageRank measures how important Google considers a site to be. Google calculates a site’s “importance” by determining how many other sites link to that particular site. There are two types of PageRank: “actual PageRank” and “toolbar PageRank.” Only Google knows a site’s “actual PageRank”; that’s the PageRank used as a factor in search results. The toolbar PageRank is the PageRank that is visible in the Google Toolbar, and it is a good indicator of how high your actual PageRank is compared to other sites.

In order for you to understand what toolbar PageRank is, imagine that the web is split into ten equal slices (well, eleven, if you count zero), ordered from lowest actual PageRank to highest actual PageRank. The “slice” that you end up in is your toolbar PageRank. So that means I’m in the fourth-lowest (or sixth-highest) slice of websites. So I’m about in the middle of the Web in terms of importance. Not bad, in my opinion.

I’d like to let subscribers know that my feed has moved to http://feeds.feedburner.com/JohnLamansky, so please update your RSS reader accordingly. Thanks!

Later that day on July 27 when Microsoft Windows Vista Beta 1 was released, I started feeling very sick… I really didn’t feel like being on the computer, and therefore didn’t feel up to blog posting. The next day, I was still recovering. And yesterday, I was extremely busy due to miscellaneous reasons.

But today I’m back (at least, I think), ready to keep you informed about the Vista numero uno beta release!