Big Day for Battlestar Galactica: Season 3 Finale & The Wait for 2008

March 27, 2007March 27, 2007 / Adam Nash / 7 Comments

Wow.

Big day for Battlestar Galactica. Out of respect for those who missed the Season 3 Finale, “Crossroads, Part 2”, I delayed this post until now. Please be careful reading ahead if you are averse to spoilers.

First off, the interest in the Battlestar Galactica finale was pretty amazing, if my blog is any indication. Here is a snapshot that shows my blog as one of the 50 or so that were big enough to be sampled on the homepage of WordPress.com:

This was reflected in the record-setting blog stats for the day. On Monday, this blog saw a record 4,593 page views, almost all of which went to the top posts on my blog for Battlestar Galactica topics. The post on the Final Five was a big winner:

The source of this amazing traffic is simple, and to me, kind of surprising. When you do a search for “Final Five Cylons” on Google, or even Google Blog Search, you get terrible results. In fact, it seems like my posts are one of the few out there on this topic that actually discuss any theories. You can see the search terms that led to my blog on Monday:

One last source of traffic which is a new one for my blog is my favorite information site, Wikipedia. Surprisingly, my blog is now a reference (number 1) in the online encyclopedia, as an example of how fans now think that Starbuck may be a Cylon.

The link to my blog is literally a superscript (1) in the middle of a multi-page post on the topic “Kara Thrace”. Still, that little linked number was the source of over 100 page views to my blog, in just one day, beating out the sampling from the WordPress.com homepage:

I am a huge fan of Wikipedia, and I believe that if the natural search engines aren’t careful, they may be disrupted by wiki-based content aggregators like Wikipedia for the “peak” informational queries on the web. This might be just a single data point, but this tells me that that Wikipedia as a traffic source for information should not be underestimated.

In any case, the long wait is now setting in for Battlestar Galactica fans, as Season 4, which is now 22 episodes, will not kick off until January 2008. The wait for ’08 is on.

Here are a few pieces of information, however, to navigate the gap.

First, this article explains that there will be a 2-hour television movie in the fall, based on the Pegasus and the timeframe between the Cylon attack and the rendezvous with the Galactica. It’s before the timeline of Season 3, but Ronald Moore states that it will be relevant to the arc of Season 4.

Second, this interview with Ronald Moore in TVWeek covers a set of questions about the story, the return of Starbuck, and the softening ratings for the series this season.

Third, this interview with Ronald Moore in the Pittsburgh Gazette answers some questions about Season 4 (including some spoilers!) He actually answers the question on whether or not the 4 crewmembers in the Season 3 Finale are Cylons or not (they are). He also strongly implies that Season 4 may be the end. He has stated on many occassions that he wants to have the creative freedom to wrap up the series properly, and not get cancelled leaving things unresolved. Odds are, the 22 episodes of Season 4 will end the series.

Lastly, this three-page interview with Ronald Moore in Salon covers almost everything. Some duplicate data here, but I’ve saved the best for last.

OK. I think that’s enough Battlestar Galactica posts for now. You know, this blog was going to be more about personal finance this year. So, back to the real stuff, but boy, what a ride.

Blogging Update: Big Day for Psychohistory, and Updated Stats

March 9, 2007 / Adam Nash / 4 Comments

So, let me just be blunt here. If you find my posts about the statistics for this blog boring, you’re not going to find this post very interesting.

However, I am writing this blog for a reason, and that reason was to learn about the medium. I’m a big believer in learning about technology through experimentation, and this blog was originally meant to be a 30-day test.

Of course, that was about 7 months ago. Look where we are now.

Anyway, today happened to be the biggest day, from a page view standpoint, in the history of this blog. 1953 page views in one day, nearly half of them going to a single post. The post was my first one on the mint errors for the new dollar coins, from March 2nd, about 5 days before the major news coverage began.

Makes the rest of my days look puny, although I’ve been hovering around 300-500 page views per day this past month. Amazing when I think about the first month, when I thought 10 page views was a big day. Right now, my run rate is likely 250,000 page views a year. Not a small number.

More and more people seem to be reading me through RSS Feed Readers, programs or websites that let you get my posts directly, rather than visiting the website. I was surprised to see that roughly 100 people seem to be reading my posts that way.

If you are interested, here is the breakdown of the types of readers people are using. An awful lot are using websites, but there are some common names in there. A lot of people using Google.

Not surprisingly, my top posts are now skewed towards coins. Here is yesterday’s top 10 posts:

Until recently, however, my top traffic driver was still the Harry Potter posts, with American Idol, Battlestar Galactica, and Coins all bringing in significant visits as well. Personal Finance has been a steady performer for me, and the most requested. However, it’s not generating the page views. Here are the top posts from the last 30 days.

Finally, my favorite little insight, the search engine terms that people are using to find my blog. It looks like I no longer get much traffic from people looking for Seema Shah… they seem to find her own blog directly now. Yesterday was all about the dollar coins. Look at the search terms.

Over the last 7 days, it has been a little more balanced.

Right now, I’m finding that I don’t have enough time to post on all the topics I’d like to. I’m going to likely have to start focusing a bit more on certain topics, like personal finance, and indulge a little less in the “news of the day”.

Easier said than done.

I hope this information is somewhat interesting for the other newbie bloggers out there.

The Winner of American Idol, Season 6, is Announced Early

March 2, 2007May 21, 2007 / Adam Nash / 9 Comments

OK, major spoiler alert.

Watching the American Idol announcement tonight about the next four voted off, I could help but feel somehow detached from each exit. Why? Because the winner of Season 6 has already been announced… by Jim Ambach.

Yes, Jim has a blog on eBay, and he posted yesterday his grand prediction: Melinda (not Melissa) Doolittle.

Well, we’ll see. Jim’s American Idol skills may be a bit rusty from the 2.5 years he recently spent living in Switzerland. I haven’t placed my bets for this season, yet, but I will tell you that the size of Melissa’s head does freak me out a little.

Since we’re on the topic of American Idol tonight, can someone please explain to me who is voting for Sanjaya, and why? Please comment.

Jim, if you are out there, please explain.

Update (5/21/2007): Well, it’s obvious now that Jim was wrong in 2007. Clearly all that time in Switzerland has affected his read of the American voter. The final episode is tonight, and it’s hard to believe that Jordin won’t be crowned the winner for Season 6… that is, unless Melissa’s votes somehow make their way to Blake (unlikely).

WordPress: Easy as PI

February 17, 2007February 17, 2007 / Adam Nash

Sometimes, WordPress.com just impresses me.

An announcement today that WordPress now includes inline support for LaTeX. If you’re not familiar with LaTeX, it’s a typesetting language, designed to easily produce complex, mathematical statements for sophisticated academic documents.

I don’t know LaTeX, but it’s going to be neat to be able to properly represent mathematical equations here on a simple blog, particularly when I post about how to evaluate investments, etc.

For now, I’m just going to close with my all time favorite equation:

$e^{\pi\i} + 1 = 0$

The five most important numbers in math, all together in one equation. Euler’s Identity.

Blogging with math is going to be fun.

eBay Blogs Wiki is Now Live…

February 13, 2007February 13, 2007 / Adam Nash / 2 Comments

There are quite a few eBay employees and former employees out there with blogs.

Shri Mahesh has started a Wiki to keep track of them all.

The wiki is here.

If you fit the description, add yourself to the list…

Personal Finance Education Series: Introduction

February 8, 2007February 21, 2007 / Adam Nash / 5 Comments

As this blog continues to grow, I try to be very open to advice and suggestions from people who have become regular readers. Today, I got some advice from a friend who, while she hasn’t come clean with me on where her blog is located on the web, has been reading mine regularly.

She told me today that she liked the new aggregated page I made of all my Personal Finance posts to date, now featured in the header of the blog. However, she had a fundamental question about where I get all my information about personal finance, how I learned about these different ideas, and how a person with limited time could learn more.

She suggested I put together a series of posts for people who are interested in personal finance and investing, but aren’t sure where to start.

So, this post is going to be an introduction to a multi-part series on personal finance and investing, based on my own history on the topic. I’ll try to produce posts in the series that cover recommendations on magazines, websites, and books, as well as on basic topics like saving, investing, asset allocation, investment clubs, brokerages, retirement accounts, real estate, derivatives, commodities, and funds. Not necessarily in that order, of course.

I don’t pretend to be an expert in all of these areas, but if through a series of posts I can help people get started on their own personal finance education, I’ll feel like I’ve done a truly good thing with this blog.

As a personal note, I was not one of those people that had an early exposure to personal finance and investing. Although I’d like to think that I learned good personal finance values from my parents and grandparents, when it comes to investing, I didn’t know much about anything other than bank certificates of deposit until college.

Since then, I’ve been mostly self-taught, although now I have had the benefit of coursework at institutions like Stanford and Harvard, direct experience in the venture capital industry, and about fifteen years now of growth and learning.

We’ll see how it goes, and of course, I’m willing to take requests if there are topics people would like to see added to this series. I will try to do at least a few posts a week in the series, and in the end, I’ll group them together on the Personal Finance page for easy reference, as well as link them back here for navigation.

So, a special thank you to Rebecca Nathenson for the great suggestion.

Articles (complete index here):

Fascinating: Referring Links to This Blog (Psychohistory)

January 30, 2007 / Adam Nash

This is just a quick note on blogging, but it is just so much fun to see the list of referring URLs every day in WordPress.

WordPress tracks the list of most common source URLs for your readers, every day. You can click them, and see how people found your blog. Unlike the “search keywords” that people use to find your blog, these URLs are usually real articles or blogs themselves, and it can always be surprising how people are finding your site.

One day, I noticed that a common referring URL was Google Translate, English to Spanish. That’s right, it seems that a number of people out there are reading my blog regularly, in Spanish. How neat is that?

Here is a fun one from today. The referring page led a lot of people to my article on Wii Damage, which has been very popular the past few months.

http://www.gay.eu/thread.html?threadid=22518&offset=30

I don’t know what they are saying (I think it’s Dutch, but I’m not sure), but it seems to be leading a lot of people to my blog.

Another referral today… Google Translate, English to Arabic:

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=ar&sl=en&u=https://psychohistory.wordpress.com/2007/01/17/my-tivo-ate-my-24-series-premiere/&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=10&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3D24%2BSeries%26start%3D30%26hl%3Dar%26lr%3D%26rlz%3D1T4GGLH_enEG203%26sa%3DN

It’s amazing how global the web is. I’m a little surprised that my post is worth translating, but there you go.

For those of you keeping score at home, my blog is now averaging 300-400 hits per day, a steady increase of almost 100% month to month. More importantly, the traffic seems much more even these days, as my older posts seem to draw a steady stream of views daily.

And the number one search term leading people to my blog is still, after two months:

harry potter and the deathly hollows

Right now, it’s link number #5 on Google for that query.

Domain Hosting: Your-Site.com & Terrible Customer Service

January 7, 2007October 26, 2016 / Adam Nash / 4 Comments

There is no nice way to put this: Your-Site.com sucks.

I host a handful of domains for various websites and email accounts that I maintain. My biggest account is adamnash.com, which I use to host a wide variety of email accounts that I use regularly.

For example, all of my eBay business goes through my email address, eBay-at-adamnash-dot-com.

I have hosted this domain, website & email accounts with the same company, Your-Site.com, since 2000. At the time, they were a very highly regarded Linux hosting shop, with low prices ($60/year), and great technical service for someone who could handle the technical details of FTP & shell access.

As of January 3rd I have read many hosting reviews, InMotion Hosting Reviews and FieldHost reviews changed the way I host my content, I have moved all of my accounts over to GoDaddy.com. Not only are they cheaper (less than $4 per month!), but they also offer great customer service (1 hour email response), more storage, more accounts, and more features.

As a warning to others, I’m putting this blog post up to tell you the simple truth: stay away from Your-Site.com. If you use them for hosting, switch to GoDaddy.com. If you don’t use Your-Site.com today, consider yourself lucky, and stay away.

The story of why is long, and I’m not sure I have the energy to post all of the absolutely infuriating emails from their customer service and sales staff. But let me give you the basics:

December 29th: All email accounts cease to receive email. I email their customer support asking when the accounts will be back online.
December 30th: Email accounts still don’t work. So much for the 99.9% uptime guarantee. I receive an email saying that they lost power in their ops center, and their backup system failed to re-establish their mail filers. They are working on fixing it as soon as possible. I respond, requesting their estimate of when email will be online. I start to worry about permanently losing important mail, or bounces to key accounts.
December 31st: Email accounts till don’t work. No response to my customer support email. No notice on the website that I can find. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
January 1st: Happy New Year! Email accounts still don’t work. No response to my customer support email. No notice on the website that I can find. I start thinking about whether I should move the domain to another provider.
January 2nd: Still no email accounts working. I finally receive an email from their customer support, and it’s a duplicate of the mail I received on December 30, but with an addendum that 40,000 email accounts were lost, and they are re-building them from backup. I respond asking for an estimated date for return. Second email response received (at least, it seems, they decided to work that day). It says, (paraphrased) Please do not email us asking about the loss of email (hah!), we are working as fast as we can. Sending email to customer support does not help.

At this point, I’ve had it. I go over to GoDaddy.com which is my domain registrar. For less than $4/month, they give me:

5GB storage
500 free email accounts (10MB storage)
5 premium email accounts (25MB storage)
250GB bandwidth
10 MySQL databases
No ads
An incredible host of features, including photo hosting, blogging, etc.

Not only that, but when I ask their customer support a question by email (they have 24/7 phone support), they promise an answer in one hour. And it’s true.

Just to finish the story:

January 3rd: I’m all set up with GoDaddy.com, email is flowing actually before end of day on January 2nd. I contact Your-Site.com, and ask them to ZIP up my existing mail folders, and to close the account. They respond by requiring me to fill out a form on their site. I fill out the form, and they close the accounts. When I ask for the mail folders, they rudely reply that I should have requested that before they deleted the account, since they are now deleted. When I provide them the email with the original request, instead of apologizing, they repeat that the mailboxes are now deleted, and that in the future I should make the request before cancelling the account.

The best part, of course, is the footer of their customer support emails which says,

Please tell your friends and business associates about us. Should you refer a new customer to us, we’ll credit your account for one free month!

Sincerely,

Mike Merrill
Your-Site Customer Care
413-499-6690

Well, that’s exactly what I am doing here. Telling my friends and business associates about them. 🙂

I think this story is a good lesson in terrible customer service. I was a long time customer of your-site.com, using them for six years. I knew there were better deals out there, but what I had was working, and I was happy to be their customer. I could have easily been their customer for six more years.

If they had just shown any sort of remorse – an apology for the trouble – this might have turned into a story about great customer service. People underestimate how valuable a simple apology can be to rectify even a very bad situation. I was expecting a proactive email that said:

“We’re sorry, but the recent storms have brought down our email service. We may be down for days. We apologize for this interruption, and we know how important our services are to you. We are working as fast as we can to bring your accounts online, and we will be providing you with the next 3 months of service free of charge.”

But that’s not what happened, and now I am not only no longer a customer of your-site.com, I’ve also become an advocate against them.

In honor of GoDaddy.com‘s excellent product & service, I’m going to honor them with a badge on my right-hand column for at least the next 4 weeks. If you need a cheap domain, email address, and website, they are awesome. I just gave my wife her own personalized domain & email address for fun, all for less than $40 per year. They even have an account with 100GB of storage for $6.29/month that might be very interesting for sharing full-size photos with my family.

Thanks for reading my rant.

2006: A Lookback at Favorite Posts

January 2, 2007January 2, 2007 / Adam Nash / 4 Comments

I began this blog August 30th, with a pledge to try and write something everyday for 30 days. I didn’t actually hit my target for frequency, as there were just some days that were too busy for blogging. But the volume was there, and now here I am, writing my 140th post to close out 2006 and welcome in 2007.

I continue to find the statistics for my blog fascinating.

Some basic blog stats:

Total Page Views: 13,766
Most Page Views in one day: 951

Here are the search engine terms that led to the most page views yesterday, December 31st:

SearchWords2006

What you’ll see here is fairly interesting at a number of levels. First, none of the numbers is very big. People are still finding my blog in ones & twos. My page views are now averaging about 200 per day, but vary somewhat with the number of new posts I’ve written in the past couple of days.

WordPress.com only keeps stats on hand for 30 days, which is unfortunate because it has been fun to see my average daily page views creep up from the low single digits to several hundred. But, for posterity, here is what my page views have looked like for the last 30 days:

Obviously, you might be wondering what caused that spike on 12/23. The answer: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Or should I say Hollows? It turned out that my misspelling was common – so common that I continue to be a high ranking hit for people who type the misspelled title into Google, Yahoo, etc. I wrote a post about it in the days following.

Now, this is my personal blog, so I have not been optimizing it for economic return. I have no advertisements, no profit motive. But I admit to liking traffic, so I guess at some level I’ve been optimizing for repeat visits and daily visits.

My biggest question continues to be, what should I be blogging about? I find a lot of topics interesting… if I based my blogging on articles that “spike” my traffic, I would stick to Harry Potter, Battlestar Galactica, Nintendo Wii, and Apple rumors. When I look at repeat volume, however, the stats seem to tell another story. Check out my top posts for December:

(By the way, the current top five posts on my blog are always displayed in a list, to the right of the blog homepage)

It’s very interesting to me, that if I categorize my top ten posts, actually, there are a number of “slow & steady” favorites that make up the list.

Sure, the first two are basically:

Harry Potter
Nintendo Wii

Both hot topics that have driven a lot of media-related volume to my site.

But look at the next three:

529 Plans
Roth IRA
New Vanguard Fund

All personal finance topics that are timely for the end of the year, and also all topics that seem to drive regular volume on an ongoing basis.

Rounding out the next 7 (yes, I’m going to 12 since there is a natural drop-off there):

Battlestar Galactica
Coins
Apple/Mac Software
Nintendo Wii
Battlestar Galactica
Coins
Apple/Mac Software

It’s interesting to me. Some of the posts seem to be getting traffic because no one else is writing about them. The article on the Vanguard Dividend Fund and the iPhoto Library issue were written specifically because I was having so much trouble finding the information on them myself.

I’m a bit surprised that the Coin articles have been as popular as they are, although given the media attention to the new dollar program starting in 2007, maybe they are just timely.

Part of me wants to look a the above and say – go with Personal Finance. The articles seem to be popular, have staying power, and reflect a genuine personal interest in how people (irrational) deal with money (rational). But, the truth is, I like having a forum to post some of the random topics that I find interesting day-to-day. I don’t post them all, but for some reason, it’s rewarding to write them down, and have them published.

I wish I could see statistics for my blog on a per session basis – I’ve been experimenting with including links to past articles in my new articles, to help people find more interesting content. I wish WordPress.com had a feature that would include my “last 3 articles” with the same tags below every article.

As a last thought… notice what’s not driving traffic or pageviews? My eBay-related articles. Now, to be fair, I haven’t posted on the most controversial topics. That would take me dangerously away from the safety of a personal blog, and turn this into a professional one.

In any case, I’m still getting the hang of comments, and how to best utilize them to write new articles and gauge the interest of my readers. I wish I had some sense of who my readers are, and what they genuinely prefer. Anecdotally, I’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback for the personal finance pieces (like the one on employee stock programs).

Anyway, thanks for reading during this very public experiment in 2006. I’m going to continue it into 2007, as I’m still learning a lot from it.

Happy New Year!
Adam

The Benefits of Misspelling on eBay & Blogs

December 24, 2006 / Adam Nash

It has been a funny couple of days for my blog.

Remember the incredible volume of page views I saw when I posted my theories on the likely ending to the new series, Battlestar Galactica? Well, let me tell you, posting the expected title of the new Harry Potter book has spiked my blog again to one of the fastest growing.

Interestingly, I found out, after about 1,000 page views and a dozen comments, that I had gotten the title wrong. I had posted the title as “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows” instead of the correct title, “Hallows”.

Apparently, however, it is a common mistake. So common, in fact, that the original news story that I had quoted had also made it.

In fact, it has been so common that literally thousands of people have been typing “Harry Potter Hallows” into Google & Yahoo, and my blog has reaped the benefit. No doubt, the post is popular because it reflects, through indexing, a common mistake that people make. The competition for the misspelled version is less, and my post is right there, indexed perfectly for it.

Misspelling has to be one of the most common “predictably wrong” things that people do in the modern world of internet search. And yet, despite years of technology and focus on the area, it still can be an incredible source of value.

On eBay, for example, it has been a long-standing trick of experienced buyers to search for common mis-spellings of their favorite items. Since most buyers don’t search for the mis-spellings, they often find great deals from unwitting sellers who don’t realize their mistake.

Similarly, I’ve seen eBay sellers take advantage of common mis-spellings by offering listings that feature mis-spelled words in their titles! Less competition, since most sellers spell their titles correctly.

Of course, eBay is always working to upgrade its search engine with common mis-spellings, since its goal is to make the marketplace as efficient as possible.

Still, new mis-spellings crop up all the time. In the blogging world, it looks like I inadvertantly contributed to a new problem, and reaped an unfair reward.

I have now updated my blog to include the correct spelling and a note, but I notice that my blog article URL is permanently indexed to the wrong spelling.

Oh well. It’s always fun to have your blog page views look like this:

Psychohistory is a Top Blog… For Today

November 15, 2006November 16, 2006 / Adam Nash / 4 Comments

Wow. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, here are the daily visits to my blog over the last 30 days:

As some of you know, I decided a few months ago to give blogging a try. Over the past two months, I’ve written about ninety posts, on a wide variety of topics.

Until today, my most popular post was:
VMware Fusion Goes Beta & Virtualization for Mac OS X Goes Pro

This was a post that got a lot of hits for a couple of days, most likely because the Mac has a pretty intense fanbase, and the news was pretty timely.

Today was the first day for a new post I made last night on one of my favorite TV shows, Battlestar Galactica:
My Theory on How Battlestar Galactica Will End

Here are the latest stats on the top posts for my blog over the last 30 days now:

All those visits in about 24 hours. It’s exciting, largely because unlike other posts, this one was something purely driven by personal interest, and less about “what people want to read”. It also is a more frivolous topic.

What really happened is this: someone found the post, and started a thread on the SCI FI channel website chat boards for Battlestar Galactica. So, it’s kind of like I was SlashDot’ed, but at one millionth the scale. 🙂

But success breeds success, so I’m happy to announce that today, for the first time, my blog is actually ranking well across all WordPress.com blogs!

My post is currently the 8th most popular post on WordPress.com today!

My blog is rated 22nd for the fastest growing blogs on WordPress.com:

And, as I mentioned, it is now in the Top 100 ranked blogs on WordPress.com (#41):

It’s possible that the fifteen minutes of fame for this blog have started counting right now. In the end, the goal of this blog was not to become any sort of popular site or property. At eBay, we typically measure success in the millions, if not billions, of page views. It’s funny to think that 600 page views is significant.

But it is kind of a kick to see the numbers jump like this, even if in absolute terms they are small. I continue to learn a lot about blogging through this process – I’m just glad that people are interested and enjoying my writing for the time being.

It’s also definitely fun to watch people debate my little theory on a potential ending for Battlestar Galactica.

Tomorrow I’ll be back to posts about personal finance and growing tomatoes.

Blogs I Read: Ben Stein

November 13, 2006November 13, 2006 / Adam Nash / 2 Comments

I really love to read Ben Stein. His first burst of fame, as you may know, came from being the teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off back in the 1980s. More recently, he hosted a game show for a while (Win Ben Stein’s Money), and he writes regularly for the New York Times on Sunday.

What people may not realize from his typical movie and TV stunts is that Ben Stein is really intelligent. Not just in a book smart kind of way, but in a profoundly intellectual way. As an actor, writer, economist and lawyer, he seems to have internalized not just the facts and theories of several different fields, but also how they fit together. I find his writing style compellingly simple, and yet rich and articulate.

More recently, Ben has become more proactive with writing articles to help guide people with their own financial lives. Here is an article he wrote in 2005 on saving for retirement:

The Early Bird Gets the Next Egg

An example passage, which I think demonstrates both his easy way with numbers and his compelling presentation of basic financial facts:

If you start at 25 with six months’ salary saved, you need only save 3 percent of your total, pre-tax salary per year to get the nest egg you need (roughly 15 times earnings at retirement) by age 65. But if you start at age 45, you need to save 18 percent of your salary (again, assuming you start out with six months’ of salary saved). If you start at age 50, you need to save 28 percent of your salary. And if you start at age 55, you need to save nearly 50 percent of your gross salary to get where you need to be.

In other words, if you start with a sensible plan at a young age, you can get to your savings goal without breaking a sweat. If you wait until you are middle aged, it takes some serious doing. If you wait until you are a silver fox, you’re required to do some heavy lifting indeed. If you assume the stock market has passed its glory days, you need to save even more.

I’ve found two great resources now for Ben Stein fans:

He has a website. It’s worth bookmarking.
He has an RSS feed. It’s worth subscribing to.

I’m going to be writing a follow up post on one of my favorite pieces by Ben Stein, clipped from the New York Times last year. I’m having trouble finding an online copy, so I may have to type up the whole thing. In the meantime, check out his RSS feed. It’s so exciting to me to find out that some of my favorite columnists and authors have their own feeds – it’s something I just wasn’t finding somehow before I started blogging myself.

Subscribe to my Blog via Email: FeedBlitz

November 10, 2006 / Adam Nash

A little over a year ago, Scott Kleper wrote a post about RSS Readers. Without reproducing it here, the basic idea was that Scott doesn’t see the need for dedicated blog readers. Instead, he prefers to use his rich email application to read his blogs. In fact, he basically hacked together his own solution for translating all of his favorite blogs into regular email streams.

I myself still use My Yahoo to keep track of most of my blogs, although that is definitely having scaling issues. However, now that I have my own blog, I’ve realized that most of my friends and family don’t have any sort of regular, blog-reading system.

Sure, if I send them an email, they’ll read my most recent posts. But they have no daily process to “check up” on a blog, or to receive notification when a new post arrives.

To them, the web is still something you use when they want something. They have nothing set up to receive a “push” from a site to let them know something interesting is available.

Well, I think I found a solution. Feedblitz is a great little service that makes it easy for people to subscribe to an RSS feed, like a blog, via email. It even allows the feed owner to customize the output in some very interesting ways.

I’ve set it up for this blog, and I hope that means that more of my friends and family who are not “blog savvy” will be able to read my posts.

I’ve added the link to my right column, but if you are interested, just click the following link to subscribe to this blog via email:

Click here to subscribe to Psychohistory via email

Let me know what you think.

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