Online Fame | A 'blog written by Chris Rhee

The Bad Seed, a rapper from Brooklyn, NY went head to head with MySpace.com for the first time yesterday. Someone told him it was a more user friendly community site than some others that he was already a part of and a good way to feature some of his music, so he decided to give it a shot:

Bad Seed: yo the shit wont let me sign up….it keeps saying that nobody under 16 can join…im screaming at my pc like…”im fucking 30 years old homie…!!!”

Whenever you sign up, you automatically get the founder of MySpace (Tom) added to your Friends list. I was wondering why this guy was showing up on so many people’s friends list.

mma productions: how come seed didn’t automatically get Tom as a friend?
Bad Seed: i did…i deleted his ass…

Turns out that Bad Seed didn’t sign up for a MySpace Music account, which is what he needs, if he wants to be able to post his tracks up on his MySpace page. Unfortunately, you have to navigate to the Music section and then click “Artist Signup” (so that big, orange sign-up button on the homepage is a bit misleading if you’re trying to get a Music account).

It would probably be better to have one sign up form for the site with an option to choose whether it’s a regular account or a music account. I don’t really understand this because other than the fact that you can post a music player on your site, the overall look and function of the website is exactly the same as a regular account.

I’ll try not to go into too much of a design discussion — apparently, the website is purposely “ghetto simplistic”.

Anyway, Bad Seed is forced to sign up again with a different username in the Music section. Now Tom is back on his new account’s Friends list.

Baby_girl: TOM IS YOUR ONLY FRIEND RIGHT NOW!!!! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Bad Seed: i just deaded that nigga again…

I definitely need to work in some “real life quotes” to my company website re-design… Reason #1303 for why you should step your website’s usability game up:

Bad Seed: can someone tell me how i can send a friend request….my space aint that user friendly…boy wait til i see tom man…..

Now with all that said… Check out The Bad Seed’s MySpace page and check out his tracks. Cause The Bad Seed is in the building — SU-PER!

I find myself accidentally typing in the wrong forum addresses sometimes — most people use either “TheirSite.com/forums/” or “TheirSite.com/forum/” (without the “S”) and I end up getting plenty of Not Found errors.

For each forum I’ve helped set up, I’ve also included a little bit of .htaccess code that redirects wrong forum address to the correct location. The idea is that people can type in a popular forum address and always be directed to the forum, rather than risk getting a Not Found error.

Here’s an example for people who have their forums located at TheirSite.com/forums/

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## Frustration Free Forums by Chris Rhee
##

RewriteEngine On RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^forum/?$ /forums/ [NC,R,L] RewriteRule ^board/?$ /forums/ [NC,R,L]
RewriteRule ^boards/?$ /forums/ [NC,R,L]

Throw that in a .htaccess file and upload it to your root folder and it’ll redirect people who type in those folders (”forum”, “board”, “boards”) to /forums/.

Don’t send your visitor’s to Not Found error pages if possible, people. Carry on!

I would think that it’s kind of lame to have an official website that isn’t the best website for the topic. I see this a lot with official celebrity websites — the unofficial websites created and maintained by fans are far more extensive, have more content and are updated much more frequently. And a lot of times, the fan-maintained websites don’t even create any profit. And they definitely don’t get any website development payments from the celebrities. They’re simply doing it for the love.

I guess you can file this under the, “Money doesn’t always compare to the drive/motivation of passion” category.

Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) was released by Apple yesterday and I have a feeling I won’t bother upgrading until I buy another Mac system.

I’d rather run it on a dual G5 than my G4 PowerBook (like any Mac user in the world) and I’d rather get it as part of the default configuration than pay $100 and upgrade. We’ll see, though. Another Mac system may be out of the question for a while — I’ll check with my accountant.

I told my girlfriend about the new operating system yesterday and our conversation went like this:

Chris: Tiger was released today
Annie: Who’s that?

And that concludes the Obligatory Tiger ‘Blog Post.

I meant to write about this a week ago, but maybe it’ll still help people who are having the same problem. I get a call from my dad saying that he can’t send email from his work using Outlook. I skip past my initial, “Why are you still using Outlook, you fool” line and try to help solve the problem.

After a couple of attempts to fix things, he still can’t send email, but he can receive it fine. I try to send email from my computer (using his login information) and it works fine. So the problem lies somewhere on his work network.

After resetting computers, routers, etc. I’m told that their ISP is Yahoo!/SBC DSL. So I start searching for errors related to that company. It turns out SBC blocked port 25 and didn’t bother to notify anyone about it (or if they did try to notify people about it, they did a shitty job about it). And port 25 is the default port used to send emails through SMTP… So let’s recap:

• ISP
• SBC
• DSL
• port 25
• SMTP

If you’re an average computer user, I’ve lost you, already. And that’s the point. Why would they block a port that all average computer users have been using to send emails with ever since they got their internet service from them and not make a decent attempt to notify their customers of the change? Well, that’s one more reason I’m glad I switched from them to a different broadband provider.

Solution #1

Use Yahoo/SBC’s SMTP server to send email. Go into your account settings and change the Outgoing server (SMTP) to: smtp.sbcglobal.yahoo.com

If possible, I’d avoid this because they have some sort of limit set on their server. Which I hit while trying to test emails on each computer… I sent a test email from one computer. Then went to the next and sent a test email from that computer. Went to the next computer, tried to send a test email and bam, I was temporarly banned from the SMTP server. Thanks, a lot.

Solution #2

If you can, enable a copy of SMTP to run on your server on a different port (like port 26– or any other port that isn’t blocked). Here’s a how to guide. Or if you have cPanel/WHM on your server, you may be able to simply enable a copy of exim on a different port through the control panel.

Either way, it’s a pain in the ass that their customers could do without.