The last time I wrote about the urban container garden on the roof of our Philadelphia apartment, I was dealing (poorly) with an infestation of bugs that had attacked my Asian greens. I never did come up with a good solution for that problem, but I have to admit I didn’t try very hard. That […]
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Halting State
I’ve been reading science fiction and speculative fiction stories since I was a kid. But I’ve tended to have a soft spot in my heart for the stories of the past… set in the distant future. Authors have a lot of freedom when they’re writing about a distant world we’re never likely to visit in […]
Endings are hard
As a radio producer I’ve often struggled with the difficulty of ending stories. It’s easy to start a story. People often say just start at the beginning, but there are plenty of different places to start .You can start with an idea, an event, a character, an example, or any number of different elements Ending, […]
Google Panda 2.3 and recovery
The good news is that Liliputing appears to have recovered much (but not all) of its search engine traffic. The bad news is that I have no idea if any of the hundreds of changes I made to the site had any impact at all, or if I just wasted an awful lot of time. […]
Infestation
The battle for the rooftop garden continues. While my green bean plants are still shorter than I would have expected at this time of the season, they’re generating some full-sized and rather tasty beans. The Pai-Tsai, on the other hand, seems like a lost cause. I had hoped that I could find a hot weather […]
The beans of summer
There’s still a fair bit of greenery on the rooftop, but the snow peas, bok choy, and spinach are done for the season, and the green beans, peppers, and pai-tsai are starting to come in… but not as quickly as I would like. I think that’s going to be a recurring theme on the rooftop […]
Kicking the Panda: Steps I’ve taken to try to deal with Google’s latest algorithm update
Over the past few months I’ve made a number of changes to Liliputing and Mobiputing in an effort to recover from a loss of Google search engine traffic following the company’s Panda update. Here are some of the things I’ve done. You can find more details and the back story below. Remove some web pages […]
Sweating to the…documentaries
After watching the season 3 finale of Primeval last week and realizing the series continues to have plot holes large enough to drive a whole… planet through, I decided I needed to exercise my brain a bit more. So this week during my morning workout routine I’ve been cleaning off the DVR and watching programs […]
Spring harvest
After a very tiny spinach harvest, it was nice to be able to pick a few bok choy leaves and cook them up with dinner last night knowing that there would still be enough more for at least a few additional meals. I’m a little concerned that the growing season appears to be shorter on […]
How to add a “nofollow” attribute to all affiliate links on your WordPress blog
Google recently updates the algorithm it uses to rank web sites. One possible solution for this is to add the “nofollow” attribute to all paid or affiliate links on your web site. If you’re using WordPress there’s an easy way and a hard way to do this. I’ll show you both below. Background In theory, […]
First harvest
The spinach I planted in March never got quite as big as I would have hoped, and this week the plants started to flower so I went ahead and started snipping before things got too far. What you’re looking at is a very tiny bunch of baby spinach. It might be enough for one meal. […]
Snow peas are so clingy… who knew?
The weather is warming up and so are the plants on my rooftop. The snow peas are finally starting to show some spirit and I wandered out to pick up a couple of tomato cages last weekend to give them something to latch onto as they grow. They weren’t quite starting to fall over yet, […]
RIP Download Squad (2005 – 2011)
AOL has decided to shut down popular tech blog Download Squad. The site was launched by Weblogs Inc in 2005. It’s the second time an AOL web site I wrote for has been shuttered, although this time it happened after I left the fold. My first paid blogging gig was with PVR Wire, another Weblogs […]
It’s not easy being green
So it turns out that growing food on the roof of a Philadelphia rowhouse in March may be tougher than I thought. while all the experts agreed that it was time to put out the snow peas, spinach, and some other cold weather seeds and seedlings in March, things got off to a rough start […]
Groupon vs. LivingSocial
After spending the past 10+ years as a radio and online journalist, I’m about to have my work published in print for the first time. Laptop Magazine asked me to research and write an article comparing Groupon and LivingSocial, the two largest daily deals sites. The article will hit newsstands next month, but it’s already […]
Green roof
I was starting to get worried that my entire rooftop garden was going to end up living in a third floor windowsill. While there’s been an awful lot of greenery popping up in indoor seed trays over the past few weeks, up until this morning I hadn’t actually seen anything pop through the soil in […]