It's been a while, but Jerktowne has finally been finished. Prop-a-lops to Billie for whipping that up today.

So send all the jerks you know to Jerktowne.

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If you haven't noticed, I've been compiling all my online activities into one general news feed that appears on my home page, but I couldn't find anywhere that let me view my favorite YouTube videos as an RSS or Atom feed. Until now. I found this handy link while looking through the developer's guide for the Youtube API:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/your_youtube_username/favorites

It's not listed anywhere on the YouTube feeds page, and I couldn't find it posted on any blogs or other sites either. Maybe I didn't look hard enough, but now I'm happy.

I also had a hard time coming up with a past tense verb meaning "to favorite". I would use "favorited", but it's not a real word and that bothers me. I'd also use "loved" but I am already using it for my Last.fm loved tracks. So I settled on "liked", but I am not entirely happy with it. It'll have to do for now until I think of a better word to use, or somebody recommends one that I like.

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Those who know me usually think I am "hip" and "with it" when it comes to web related stuff, which is why it surprises most people when I tell them that I don't use RSS feeds. It wasn't even until maybe six months ago that I started even bookmarking websites. I didn't think it was that odd, I just kept a mental note of those websites that I visited often and would check on them when the thought crossed my mind. You know those people who curse new things and refuse to accept changes in technology? I guess I am those people. But not anymore.

Today I decided to try out Google Reader, which lets you store and organize multiple feeds. It even has stats for nerds, like most read feeds or most viewed tags. I went through my list of (recently created) bookmarks and a few other sites I still type in manually, and I found out there are roughly 20 sites that I visit regularily. Some more often than others. They range from general news, music news, webcomics, friend blogs and other miscellaneous blogs.

One neat feature is a "shared" page. You can mark your favorite feed articles as "shared" which can then be viewed by anybody by visiting a public URL. Here are mine. I may replace the recently dugg articles on my homepage with the articles from Google Reader. That way I won't be limited to sharing strictly Digg articles.

Cool. COOL.

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It's always been obvious that those who regularily post comments on YouTube have the lowest IQs of anyone on earth, and today I am happy to find out that the people at YouTube are aware of this growing problem. Taking inspiration from one of xkcd's latest comics, they've added a button next to "Post Comment" that allows you to listen to a preview of your comment spoken out loud. The idea is that when people want to submit a comment, they can listen to it first, and hopefully become aware of their own idiocy. I like how they added the new button exactly where "Post Comment" used to be, so people who are quick to reply without paying attention will be forced to listen to their own dribble. My only suggestion would be to trigger the voice upon pressing "Enter".

Taking a minute to play with the new feature, I am impressed at its pronounciation of "lol" as "lawl". It needs some work, however, on "roflcopter" and "lollercoaster".

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A friend of mine directed me to this handy website. If you ever suspect a website of being blocked or otherwise inaccessible, you can give it a test by entering its URL into this site and it will let you know if the site is down, or if you are just being paranoid. It is pretty neat.

In other news, the National Do Not Call List (DNCL) is now active accepting registrations. This means you can submit your phone number, and (hopefully) within a month, you will no longer receive phone calls from telemarketers. Growing up, my parents always had an unlisted phone number. We never received a single call from a telemarketer that I can remember in the 19 years that I lived at home. So I guess that is another option if you want to protect yourself from telemarketers AND stalkers.

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I haven't made a post in a while so I am going to share with you some fine internet media. The first is an advertisement for some new Wario game for Nintendo Wii, which I feel is pretty neat. Watch it here. Do not continue reading until you have watched, because the next paragraph contains SECRET SPOILERS regarding the video.

Now that you have finished watching it, you can agree that it is the neatest thing. I want to know what kind of javascript turns your website into a drag-and-drop physics toy like that. If you know, tell me.

The next thing I want to show you is a video of a baby laughing in slow motion. It is extra hilarious if you don't actually watch the video, and just listen to the audio instead. The result is something sounding like a man barfing and crying at the same time.

That is all.

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Since the beginning of the month I've noticed my BitTorrent upload speeds have been significantly reduced. I used to be able to max out my connection while uploading, but now I am lucky to get 10KB/sec, even though regular upload speeds through HTTP or FTP remain normal. I have tried all sorts of tips and tricks to fix the problem, all of which have been unsuccessful. If anyone can give me any suggestion, chances are I've tried it.

It has got to the point where I am beginning to think Shaw is to blame. My last hope is to call them and hopefully they will be like *FIX*, but I doubt it will be that easy. I really really hope I don't have to switch ISPs because of this, as I've been using my shaw email address since 1998 and it would be beyond a major headache to change it on everything I've ever subscribed to, ever.

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Just over a week ago I mentioned Jerktowne, a website that you can send people to if they are being jerks. I've been working on it a little, and just as I promised, I've developed an API that will let anybody with a website running PHP to connect to my database of jerks. This will allow you to do a quick background check on all of your visitors, giving you the power to restrict your content as you please. Nobody wants jerks reading their website.

Every time a user visits Jerktowne, their Jerk Rank is increased by one. This is limited to a one-time increase every 24 hours. For example, if somebody gets sent to Jerktowne 50 times in a day, their Jerk Rank will only increase by one. However, if they are consistently sent to Jerktowne every day of the week, they would gain a significantly higher Jerk Rank than others. This means you could optionally restrict your website from jerks who have a Jerk Rank higher than five, or ten, or even just one.

You can download the API here. It comes with an example file to get you started.

Also, I know the Jerktowne website isn't very pretty yet. It will be, one day.

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In an attempt to justify all of the stupid domain names that I buy, I've forwarded two of my more recent purchases to my blog. So if you are really sick of typing iamthejeff.com, or you don't have it in your favorites by now, you can also visit my site by using jeffgordon.name, or if that isn't 1337 enough for you, j3ffg0rd0n.com. I only recently switched over the DNS entries, so if you are getting a parked page, just give it a few more hours.

In related news, I sometimes google my domain names after buying them to see if they appear anywhere on the web prior to me owning them. While doing so for jeffgordon.name, I came across an auction where somebody is trying to sell it with a buy-it-now price of $5000. I emailed GoDaddy about it, so now I am forced to play the waiting game. Update: GoDaddy has realized the mistake and closed the auction!

Also, I don't think anybody noticed, but since I switched to a new webhost, I had to transfer over Totallies as well. As a result, it was offline for a couple days. Everything is back online as of this morning, however. Thank goodness.

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My previous hosting company (1&1) was giving me grief, so I was forced to switch to a new one. My sites would go offline almost daily, for hours at a time, for no good reason. So, by recommendation, I switched to Media Temple, and so far everything is great. How does this affect you? Well, my site will (hopefully) have less downtime and it should be a heck of a lot faster.

My friend Ryan has a couple sites on 1&1 as well, and he has been having the exact same problems as me. I wrote 1&1 to inquire about the recent downtime, and they basically told me "Hey, it works on our end, check your ISP".

THANKS GUYS. -1 CUSTOMER. FOR YOU.

After looking around on google for any possibly reason why my ISP would be preventing me from viewing my own website, I came across a whole bunch of not-so-good customer reviews of 1&1's services.

I am not alone.

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I used to be a fan of the webcomic Spamusement, until the writer eventually ran out of motivation and gave up (it's also kind of ironic, the website is now completely filled with ads). The comic took regular spam email subject lines and turned them into hilarious single-panel comics. Some were pretty funny. I don't get a whole lot of spam myself, but a couple months ago I started receiving some pretty awesome ones. This is the one that started it all:

Sweet! It didn't take long before even more gems found their way into my inbox:

And finally...

Usually they didn't even contain any links, just a nice little message for me to read every day. It got to the point where I was actually disappointed when my inbox didn't contain any spam that day. Unfortunately, I haven't received any funny ones in a while, but I'll share them when I do.

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I was looking at websites in the wayback machine and I decided to dig up some of my older projects from when I went to NAIT in 2004. I found this flash game that I used as one of my final projects. Play it here. It's basically like lunar lander, except you have to dodge asteroids while collecting fuel. It's actually incredibly difficult and everyone complained how impossible it was. But if you try really hard, there is an ending. It's even still on Newgrounds. It originally had a scoreboard, but it no longer works.

I also made a 3D render of some kind of tentacle monster in a dumpster of a dark alley. It was originally animated with falling rain and a flaming trashcan next to the dumpster, but I can't find those original files anymore. This is the only thing that remains.

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I came up with an idea for a website. It is a really good idea. This is the idea: The idea is somebody sends you to www.jerktowne.com if they think you are a jerk, and in doing so, your IP address is collected and you are forever labeled as a jerk. Forever. Except if your IP address changes, of course. I wish there was some way to uniquely and permanently identify every single user on the internet, just so my website idea will work better.

Eventually the dream is that there will be a single database of all the jerks on the internet, and any website owners out there will be able to access my database and restrict jerks from viewing all their cool content.

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