This really is a horse race now, with ten great blogs at the starting gate to determine who gets the bragging rights to claim the…
Posts published in “Site News”
About 8 pm last night the email accounts we use here at FOSS Force went down. The problem was a server located at a datacenter in Pennsylvania that suddenly disappeared from the Internet. The server was used by us to host our oldest website, Alternative Approaches, a site we made unavailable to the public a few months ago as we’ve worked to reboot the site with a new look and feel. However, we have continued to utilize the domain as our main email domain. The site is our only web property that doesn’t reside on the server we use to host FOSS Force our other web properties.
We were hoping to have 20 to 25 blogs for you to choose from here in round two of our competition to see who wins the honors as FOSS Force Best Personal Linux or FOSS Blog–2013. We end up offering you a total of 19.
Voters in our qualifying poll that finished at noon today wrote-in plenty of web sites for us to consider. The trouble was, most of them didn’t meet the criteria we set-out in the article titled What’s Your Favorite FOSS or Linux Blog? which was published on July 29th when we began this competition.
To a degree, we expected that. We knew some voters would write-in names of great Linux sites that in no way qualify as personal blogs. That they did, placing votes for many of our favorite sites and for some we think downright silly. So we first cleared out votes for sites that obviously don’t qualify, such as Omg! Ubuntu!, phoronix and OStatic.
After taking care of that task we were left with a long list of sites. As most were unknown to us, we had
The first round of voting in our quest to see whom our visitors will vote “Best Personal FOSS or Linux Blog–2013” has ended. Right now we’re busy checking out all of the blogs that received write-in votes to see which qualify for round two and which do not. We’re estimating that by late afternoon or early evening eastern time in the United States we’ll be ready to announce our line-up for round two.
Round two will be an elimination round from a field of 20 to 25 blogs taken from the results of the poll that just ended. There will be no write-in votes, but voters will still be allowed to vote for up to two blogs.
You might’ve noticed, we’ve been busy making some changes to our home page. If the page looks a wee bit fuller than usual, that’s because…
If the unscientific poll we conducted on tablet operating systems is any indication, it appears as if Canonical can depend on a community of early adopters if and when a tablet is released with Ubuntu OS preinstalled.
In our poll we asked, “What operating system would you be most likely to consider for a tablet if available?” The options were Android, iOS, BlackBerry 10, Windows Phone 8, Windows RT, Ubuntu, webOS, None of the above and Other. Those who chose the “Other” option were given the opportunity to name another OS.
It’s no fun getting sick under any circumstances. It’s especially no fun getting sick when you can’t afford medical insurance. And if you’ve ever heard it said that there’s no need to worry, the ER will take care of you no matter what, don’t believe it. First you have to be pretty much dying, then you have to be prepared for a whopping huge bill. I visited the ER in September, a month after I came down with some mysterious respiratory illness that wouldn’t go away and got a bill for over a thousand bucks for a diagnosis that was questionable at best. That was enough to keep me away from the ER after that.
I had to give up working on FOSSForce. My day job, which is really an eight bucks and change an hour night job, doesn’t pay me when I don’t work, so I’ve been spending my days in bed resting so I’d have enough energy and health to keep working and keep myself from ending up on the street. At 61 years of age, I don’t think I want to end up in a homeless shelter, capisce?
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
This morning I found a rather weird pingback on this site. Weird because although the pingback appeared in the comments to the article I’d written about Steve Jobs resignation from Apple, it was a pingback to yesterday’s Friday FOSS Week in Review article. Being the curious sort, I clicked on the link and was taken to a site called TheoryReport, where I indeed found my Friday FOSS Week in Review article.
The article was posted in it’s entirety, but with two small differences. First, Joe Lovrek is listed as the author of the post, with no mention anywhere that the post was copied from FOSS Force or that it was written by me. Also, seemingly random words are inserted into the post, in an obvious attempt at keyword spamming for the “benefit” of search engines. The page contains Google Adwords, so the idea is evidently to garner some free clicks without having to work at actually creating content.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
I thought I’d take time out from blowing up fireworks and grilling hot dogs to wish everyone a happy 4th of July!
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
By now, both of the regular visitors to this site have doubtlessly discovered we didn’t publish a blog on Friday or yesterday, though neither of them have contacted me about it. Those who know me might be inclined to think the missing blogs are due to my laziness. How I wish that was so. How I wish I’d just said to myself, “To heck with the blog, I’m going to have a mint julep.” Instead, I’ve been done-in by Murphy’s Law.
My first clue that Murphy was going to strike came late Thursday afternoon, just as I was getting ready to close down the office for the evening. I was intending to go home, have a quick dinner and bang out “Friday FOSS Week in Review” and get it scheduled to publish here on Friday morning. As Google was having their big developers’ fest out west, and everybody in tech was continuing to sue everybody else in tech, this was going to be an easy column to write. But just as I was getting ready to turn off the office computer and take the trip home, I received an email with no message, just the subject line: “PLEASE REMOVE ME FROM YOUR MAILING LIST.”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux