BlogBoy doesn’t often make political stands when it comes to the online world, but this is one that can’t be ignored. There isn’t a blogger alive who doesn’t need to consider freedom of speech issues in fact. In Yahoo news this morning they write about public online spaces not having the same freedom of speech rights as say your public park.

‘Public’ online spaces don’t carry speech, rights
“Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content
that’s controversial but otherwise legal. Service providers write their
own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they
cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors.”

That might sound ominous and horrible, just like everything that the Bush administration has done for the last seven years, and in a way it is all of that. On the other hand that is the nature of doing business. Suffice it to say blogging is a business or at least you should be thinking of it as such if you ever plan to make money.

These companies be they MySpace, Yahoo, Google or even your own hosting company all have an image to maintain. If you associate yourselves with them and threaten that image they have every right and not to mention a responsibility to their stock holders to maintain that image even if it means pissing off a paying subscriber. That is called risk management, the world revolves around it. Yes, sometimes it seems unfair, but life isn’t fair. If you think life should be fair take your candy ass somewhere else because I can almost bet I won’t like you or really care what you have to say.

Do you see how that works or get the subtle of what I have just told you? This space is mine and there is very little you can do to stop me from saying what I want. if this was MySpace, Facebook, or LiveJournal I could could still get away with telling you to ‘go fuck yourself’, however there are plenty of places I couldn’t and keep my account very long. Just as i could get away with saying what I would like to do to Cat Deeley or Kourtni Lind on those same places, I couldn’t tell you the same thing about the teenage girl who lives across the street. Not that she interests me in the least, I could tell you what I would like to do to her on my my own blog if I had such an interest. While I don’t have an unlimited ability to say those things because of the agreement I have with my hosting company, it certainly lets me go a lot farther than any community blog will.

Now if I wanted to write twisted perverse stories about the girl, i am pretty sure I couldn’t get away with that very long with Host Gator, especially if I used any sort of details. More precisely, I could until someone told on me and my account just disappeared. I am not willing to run that risk, even if I do get daily backups of all my databases and have every post stored locally for all of my blogs. I like the price I pay for hosting and get good service, so my risk management assessment says no to cute blond mid teenage girl meets thirty something blogboy who turns out to be the sperm donor that gave her life porn stories. There are hosting companies that would let me host that and wouldn’t even bat an eye because it is tame compared to some of what people post. Those companies have made risk assessments too, and charge you accordingly.

When it comes right down to it if you are a blogger and want to say what ever the hell you want, there are some rules you need to pay attention to. First unless your speech and ideas are very tame, you risk losing an account almost anywhere you go. If you want to say what is on your mind pretty much unfettered then you need to get yourself a domain account with a good hosting company, click the Host Gator ad to your right for a really good deal. Lastly if you are going to publish what amounts to porn, get a hosting company that specializes in and allows it.

Before you say you shouldn’t have to put up with a company interfering with your right to say what ever you want while using there service it is time to ask yourself if you want to be called a hypocrite. If you blog and use any sort of spam filter or moderate comments you are censoring another person’s speech. Know the game, know the rules and know that you will always be playing by someone else’s rules…

Everyone needs to go have a look at their Technorati accounts today and make sure that their posts are getting indexed properly.  Because of some flaws and coding errors, and down right hacking by theme designers your Blog may be at risk.  Not only is Technorati not indexing, it can very well lead to your sight as being mark for spam on Yahoo and Google.

To see if you possibly aren’t being indexed or the spiders are just taking their sweet ass time getting to you try manually pinging  your account by entering a post specific url into the form at http://www.technorati.com/ping/  Give it an hour or so to get around to you and see if you get your pages added in, before bitching at tech support.  Also remember if you are using FireFox as a browser you should hit control f5 to reload the page and bypass the cache file when you are checking these accounts.

Check out Vulnerable WordPress Blogs Not Being Indexed for further reading.  If you have WP 2.5 you can also find the link on your dashboard. 

The install of WordPress 2.5 is a pretty painless event if you can follow easy directions and don’t go out of your way to make things harder than they really are.  I know what you are thinking thinking, why would anyone want to make things harder than they need to be.  The answer is simple, they are either idiots, morons who think they know everything already, or simply really bored smart people who need a challenge in their life and do so at the risk of being thought of as idiots, morons or assholes put on this earth to aggravate everyone else.

If you are doing a clean unassisted install on your server, you will need a few things.

1. A clear head, trying to do an install with a migraine going on is just plain stupid.  Do as I say not do as I do and you will have much better luck getting things done right the first time.
2. If you are caffeine junky you should get your fix before starting and keep another hit close at hand.
3. You need to know some pretty basic information if you are attempting a clean install on a new database.  The database name, your mysql user name and password are the ones you need most often.  If you set up the database, then you should know them too.  The address is 99% of the time the default: localhost.  Unless you know differently try this first.
4. Load up your directory  in FireFox your web browser of choice and follow the instructions.
5. First it will tell you  it needs to create a wp-config.php file.  Click the link and enter the information I told you to get in step three.
6. Click through the next two screens and enter the admin login information with its randomly generated password.
7. If you are used to earlier versions of WordPress be prepared to stumble along for a while trying to figure out where they put what.
8. Before stumbling around proceed immediately to the Users link in the top right corner of the screen.  Click on the admin user link and immediately enter a new passowrd that you can remember because you will never remember jhkj83l or what ever other crap it feeds you.
9. After that is done create a second administrator level user and make sure it uses a different email address.  You will be thankful you did this the first time you get locked out of your account and primary email at the same time.  I use one with a Yahoo and one a Gmail address to be the safe side.  A third Redundant isn’t a horrible idea, but a fourth is probably just playing to your paranoia.