This is a quick post to acknowledge Wolf Paulus’ great, simple instructions for installing the Tomcat server on the Mac. Works like a champ. The Tomcat Controller he mentions in the post is also very helpful.

Merman (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Warning: this post may contain bait -- proceed with cushion

What is “The Gobbledygook Grader”?

This blog has done more investigative journalism regarding David Meerman Scott, and his alleged “marketing” activities since 2009′s Gobbledygook Grader, which has recently disappeared mysteriously after being mentioned by this marketing industry insider blog. What follows may shock you, it may even surprise you. 

First I will explain what “the gobbledygook grader” is (was). According to his own blog post, Scott himself analyzed every press release that was put out in 2008. He says “I have just completed an analysis of all 711,123 press releases distributed by North American companies in 2008 through Business Wire, Marketwire, GlobeNewswire, and PR Newswire”. (Note that I get all of my information from his blog and other websites, so keep in mind the dubiousness of that kind of source material). Scott claims that he then made an application, called (I am getting a little tired of typing this term now) “The Gobbledygook Grader.”

What it did was this: you input a URL or text, and the program would compare the content with Scott’s handmade list of gobbledygook, and determining the amount of gobbledygook words and phrases used in that writing. It would then output the “score” and you could then adjust your wording to SAY WHAT YOU ACTUALLY MEAN instead of deliberately obfuscating a message by deliberately manufacturing alternative phraseology using world-class, marketleading gamification technology designed blah blah blah BLAH BLAH! (Shout the last “blah” at the top of your lungs for the best effect).

On May 30, 2012, a reader of Scott’s “marketing and leadership strategies” blog, known only by the name of “Jo Guerra,” made this comment:

“Jo – Sorry, no.”

 While it is true that blog content changes frequently (and therefore not considered legitimate source material), I found the timing of Scott’s removal of the “gobbledygook grader” strange. Maybe they felt that the content was stale: after all, the original post refers to an e-book written in 1996. This argument holds no water, though, in light of the fact that the original post is still there, but the gobbledygook grader is not. I suspect a profit motive.

The disappearance of the gobbledygook grader without a trace, then a cleansing of the blog post of any trace by Scott makes me really curious. I am going to look at this more closely. If you Google “gobbledygook” the autofill brings up “gobbledygook grader” in the top five.

Why do I care what happened to the gobbledygook grader?

 I am interested in how computers process natural human language, right now, written English. For instance, I use a little plugin on this blog called Zemanta, which basically looks through  the words in the post and suggests links and pictures that go along with those words or phrases, which the blogger can insert into the post with a single button. By the way, I find the Zemanta software to be incredibly clever, so there’s that. Of course, this idea (semantic search) is a big interest in computer science in general, going back to Alan Turing and his famous “Turing Test.” I thought it would be interesting to apply a kind of statistical analysis (I know, boring) to writing found on the internet, which would certainly be a rich source of gobbledygook, bad grammar, and other abominations against the language. As a computer science student I decided to make a project out of this idea. While researching the concept, I thought that it might be interesting to seek and destroy gobbledygook marketing on the web, if for no other reason than to continue my unbroken streak of being a pretentious and arrogant bastard for the rest of my life.

In my research, I came across Scott’s gobbledygrader, and wrote about it in this post. Soon after, they took it down and put up a 404. This upset me because I stopped working on  my own version of a gobbledy grader, having found that one already existed.

In conclusion, it appears that it is time for me to go back to my lab and do what I should have done a long time ago. If you need me, I’ll be trying to learn how to write software in PHP.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

It was my understanding that David Meerman Scott was following me in the war against gobbledygook. Along with other such notables as Carl Sagan, George Orwell and the Socratic School (not to mention the Aristotelians), together our team of skeptics and truth-seekers would certainly find a way to rid this earth of crap writing once and for all. But soon after I wrote this post (which I consider a masterpiece, by the way, please commence tearing it to shreds) the gobbledygook grader about which I pontificated was removed from the internet without a word. You could have called, you know. What am I going to do now? How will I ever be able to tell the difference between “gobbledygook,” a term coined by DMS himself, and just plain english?

Plus, I wonder if the Jerry Garcia estate approved the appropriation of his image. I seriously doubt it. Not a single one of you smarmy self-lathering dorks is going to ever hire me for anything, so why the hell should I care what you think? You want me to buy a book which proposes I use a marketing strategy ostensibly derived from a musician WHO DIED FROM A HEROIN OVERDOSE?!! Really?

Thanks a lot. I linked to you from my blog (which entertains millions of people) and you just shut it down. I don’t have time for this. OR, maybe your own crap writing is just a sham, you know it and I know it. Dorks.

Related articles

• Awards Will Highlight Gobbledygook, Gibberish and Jargon (prweb.com)
• Can Anyone Read the Writing on Your Blog? (jeffbullas.com)
• Gobbledygook (minnesodad.com)

Image via Wikipedia

The title of this post is a shill. I can imagine thousands of people every day searching for this phrase, “How to get more traffic to your blog” or some such thing. Experiment #234, or whatever.

THE REAL point of this post is this: I was working in my dank cellar laboratory, mad scientist that I pretend to think I incorrectly don’t claim to not think I am, under the light of the moon and ancient candles, the din of my homemade equipment and iron tools filling my ears with a constant buzzing and humming that would drive lesser men insane. Owls screech in the distance and there is a wafting scent of mold. An occasional undefined and unrelated “knock” disrupts the monotonous buzzing of my instruments, but in a concentration so pointed it verges on the absurd, I pay no nevermind to the various diruptions.

MY DETECTOR WAS ALMOST COMPLETE. I will have freed all humanity from the chains and toil of a hundred years of malapropisms and mixed metaphors, a humanity whose greatest contribution to this universe was formerly nothing more than the pathetic entertainments of children, who feed nightly on the souls of those middlemen and self-proclaimed geniuses responsible for fleeting transactions between middlemen and other middlemen, an economy whose design and construction, not to mention its very walls and cloying decorations, are composed of nothing more than the faintest bovine defecations. This fecund matter has been distilled over time and regurgitated ad nauseum, if I may use such a cliche.

Oh, it wasn’t always this way. There was a time when a person’s futile mortal toil was rewarded with more of the same. Not so in this era. The very masterpiece I now write will contain no labor whatsoever. Yes: the machine has won, my friends. All manner of directed criticism is expounded without limit or bound, and every person who chooses to do so may, at their will (the smallness of which cannot be overstated) add to this infinite heap, this pile, this overflowing box of dreck and rumination. The words you read now are just one example, one grain of wheat in the paradox of a heap. It has become impossible to extract whatever wisdom or useful information

The burden of this weighed heavily on my small mind. Then, I found that utilizing the same tools we have utilized to wash our society with this thin layer of baloney, malarkey and hogwash could also be utilized to shield us from it! I had done it! THE BULLSHZZ DETECTOR HAD FINALLY BEEN REALIZED! My previous work, what I like to call “The Perpetual Motion Machine“, a device which uses no energy to run but moves constantly without ever stopping, pales in comparison. And now, I would unleash it to a public who would certainly be eternally grateful. And I would do it all for no remuneration, anonymously, that all humankind could benefit.

It was not to be so. I have been usurped , by THIS: Gobbledygook Grader. I will now withdraw again, to my rightful place as another object in some scheming billionaire’s calculus, waiting for them to inform me about what I ought to do next. No doubt it will involve a transaction between a series of middlemen.

I have been experimenting with analyzing marketing gobbledygook for some time now. I have just now (literally, just NOW) realized the ultimate goal of all this will be a “Gobbledygook Analyzer”, also known as a “b&#@!^&%$ detector”. Scientists have been working for centuries on this problem: that is, the problem of clearing the haze of gobbledygook and superstition to find The Truth.

With my newly acquired skills in the intellectual realms of logic, language, and computer science, I believe that the time has come to unleash the BS Detector on the world. Although it is still in development, the tool will enable the masses to crack the hogwash code and uncover what lies beneath. Stay tuned, batfans…

"I really don't care about your personal problems as long as I still have a job. Oh, and by the way Greeley, SCREW YOU."

Another local Colorado printing plant closes. RR Donnelly in Greeley will lay off 177 workers. Maybe they will lay off the genius who came up with the idea of making phone books their major line of business in 2011? What are they going to do? Compete for dwindling jobs. It just keeps getting worse, even as the economy “improves”. Sorry about the bad news. Read this article if you can. I wish I had some kind of answer for these folks, but I don’t. By the way, the unemployment rate in Greeley is already 11+ %.

prepress Job Trends

Prepress jobs

Image via CrunchBase

My difficulty instituting a CDN continues

I had been using a CDN, the acronym for “Content Delivery Network”, to deliver the pictures on this blog to your browser. The reason for doing this is to speed up the load time of the web page and it certainly fit in my “Experiments with WWW” or whatever I’m calling it. A CDN stores your pictures/videos/whatever (content that is larger than the rest of the html in a site) and when the page loads your server doesn’t have to spend a bunch of time pushing that heavy content around, it can focus on the simpler and faster html  and associated scripts.

But, what happens when your CDN provider gets shut down and you didn’t even notice? Or get a notification? And what if that happens at exactly the same time that you upgrade your caching plugin, which leaves a file on your server that breaks the website? And not just your website, but the other three websites on the same host? What happens is that even if you put your server right side up again, all of the pictures that you call on the deceased CDN no longer answer.

Oh MY GOD this is SO boring!

 The CDN I was using was called “SimpleCDN“. As I recall, they offerered 150Mb of storage, and up to a Gb download per month for $FREE. I’m using MAYBE 10% of that. I could pay some “cloud” service like Amazon $100.00/mo. And there are others, most of which are as expensive. SimpleCDN “fit my needs”, as they say. Apparently, SimpleCDN were using a hosting service then reselling it as a content delivery network. This article explains it better than I will, so you should read it if this type of thing is interesting to you. So the host shut them down. Hit the kill switch, with no advance notice. UH OH! Now you have subscribers who are using your service to run their websites, and they all go dark (sort of, I mean, their content wouldn’t be visible if the page tries to refer to stuff on the CDN server).

Two lessons I learned from this experiment:

1. You get what you pay for. This is an immutable natural law. Whether it be for Graphic Design, a CDN, or a bottle of wine.
2. If you want your blog to stay online, you MUST do some maintenance and pay attention to all the stuff you have tacked on to it.

I finally found the time to update this blog, hopefully some fresh content will finally get me a third reader.

Why I haven’t posted since March, 2010:

I decided that enough is enough and after having been laid off by no less than three printing/marketing places, then suffering through unemployment along with the other thirty million Americans like me, I went back to college to get my BS. That is, an official BS, not the BS I usually deal in (HA!). Thankfully, I have been working during that time, and so was left with very little time left to write on this.

Why my blog went off the air:

I thought that the internet had, like, ghosts or something that would alert me to problems. Let’s say you installed a plug in on your WordPress blo, in order to make it run faster, as an “experiment in www”. Then let’s say that this plug in, out of the goodness of its heart, creates and deploys what’s called an .htaccess file all up in your server’s face to get it to do its bidding. Now, this is a long story, and I’m not going to bore myself with the details of it, but let’s say that the plug in did this WITHOUT TELLING YOU. I’m not mad at it (I am kind of mad at it). Now, when you put a(n) .htaccess file on the root folder of your webserver, usually that’s okay, it actually needs those instructions. But when you put that file in a subfolder on a server, and you point a URL to that subfolder, apparently you are then FORBIDDEN to enter. As in “403 Forbidden“. After a couple days, I was able to find the .htaccess file that was hurting me, hid it, and voila, my site pops back up. Thankfully this is my own thing and I’m not running it for someone else, otherwise I might be looking for yet another job. Thanks a lot, W3TC!!! But I will not give up on the whole CDN thing. Once I nail it down I can pretend to be cool by saying my website utilizes a cloud-computing architecture, or some such gibberish. {I did not know the word gibberish was spelled with a “g;”. I’ll be darned.}

Anyway:

Buried deep in this post is another reason I am back on this experimental blog. I DID in fact set up a site for someone else, and I will probably need to test some stuff out over here to make sure everything paechy before I deploy it on my client’s site. Here it is

StudioLazerus

So, go check it out (yes, I am telling you what to do), buy some jewelry for yourself and your loved ones, and stay tuned to see the results of further experiments in www and in real life as well.

Related articles

• .htaccess redirects (ask.metafilter.com)
• How To Make Your Blog Load Faster By Offloading Server Resources (johnchow.com)
• How To Make Your WordPress Blog Load Faster (johnchow.com)

Below is crap writing at its finest; that is, at its worst. (Did you see how I did that? I used the phrase “at its finest” in an ironic way, where the literal definition of a word or phrase is intended to actually mean the opposite of what is being said.)

From a local “Integrated Branding Communications Company”:
“All of our Brands are crafted around a strong narrative that is competently delivered on by management and the organization, is relevant and scarce to the customer, and, compared to the competition, offers a sustainable competitive advantage.”

Maybe I’m just not very hip to the whole “Integrated Branding” scene, but what exactly does this mean? I’m imagining these people in a large Theatre of Branding, where “strong narratives” are “crafted”, perhaps something like:

The Jeff Lazerus Online Museum of Marketing Gobbledygook and Hogwash is proud to bring you lovingly hand crafted integrated communications built around a strong presence inside of and around the various brand crafted narrative which has leveraged our experience in integrated leveraging of managed narrative properties built around a strong craft built organizational advantage to the customer and the constituents of the clients’ customers, with a foundation in message delivery that goes straight to the heart and mind of hand crafted brand business meta-branding delivered through and around the leverage that only our powerful preposition and noun repurposing technology can provide around of in with.