Bengfort.com

You probably have already noticed that the design of the Bengfort.com site has changed dramatically overnight. I wish I could take credit for this design and programming, but unfortunately I have simply given up with the custom site that I was building myself, and installed a prebuilt blogging software- WordPress. In the end, I just didn’t have enough time to continue to update the site on a regular basis, and continue the maintenance of the software I was writing. School had to take the priority, and even though I felt like I was writing good software, the external design was suffering as you all noticed (no more red and white!) Therefore I just moved to the more effective solution, and I think we will all benefit from it in the time being.

This is not so dramatic as it seems- the software is installed on our server and is very customizable, and I have started customizing it already adding plugins and even writing my own add-ins to the site. There are some downsides, which I will discuss in a second, but the interface is better designed, you can upload pictures, user management is improved- as well as security which is huge! You can comment and participate in the blog now, and everything is fully functioning- the software I had wrote had some gaps that I kept intending to fix, but just never got around to it.

Hopefully you guys can embrace change as we move forward. I still have your old blogs archived, and I will work on re-posting them to the site so that you can have them documented. However you will note some overall structural changes to the site that are necessary because of the software. For instance, we all blog on the same page- there is no separation by author. This might cause you some concern, but hopefully we can all collaborate together to generate awesome content! I will post some recipes, so they will appear as their own post rather than as a page. And some of the other applications, like the photo albums application isn’t available- and we’ll have to use tools like Flickr to share our photos.

Using this software may take some learning, and if you need any help getting around the interface or with blogging on the site in general, please let me know and I would be glad to help! If you are a user of the Bengfort.com site, then please register as a subscriber- this will mean that I don’t have to moderate your comments. Users from the old site are already on here- so you guys should update your profiles! And everyone should be blogging! Enjoy!

In a recent post, I described a new condition that is rapidly spreading around members of the internet population whose definition of the word privacy has not yet been updated in an age of instant information availability. Well, that sounds kind of insulting, really I mean that their foundational understanding of what privacy was developed in a time without instant information availability and therefore they have a natural (and understandable) anxiety of tools that provide personal information instantly, especially like Facebook. While I hope to start a somewhat long running discussion on what privacy means, today I hope to give you guys a remedy to FAD in the hopes that you will be able to reduce the symptoms of FAD.

Protect yourself on Facebook with the following steps:

Step one: on the top of Facebook, go to the settings tab, and a drop down menu should appear, select “Privacy Settings”. Under profile you can control exactly what other people see when they visit your profile. Make sure that you have some basic stuff available to all friends (but not friends of friends), but here is an interesting tool. Select customize, and you can set groups who can only see your status updates, and some other features.

Step two: Create groups! Categorize your friends, here are some basic ones: work, family, close friends. Allow family and close friends access to all of your things: profile, pictures, applications, status, etc. Don’t let your work group access anything- especially not pictures- except for things that you are happy to have public. If you don’t want to create groups, use the Limited Profile group- which is a default Facebook group that only lets the folks in that group see a limited amount of your profile. Until I set specific permissions, I stuck most folks into this group.

Step three: Control your newsfeed: Again under privacy settings you can tell Facebook which “stories” you want published to your news feed. Customize this to your comfort level, but note, only your friends can see your newsfeed.

Step four: Sick of seeing stuff on the newsfeed from people you don’t even know? Well customize the settings of your news feed. Scroll down to the bottom of the newsfeed (that’s the main page list of everything that your friends have done recently, and click on “Options for News Feed”. Its hard to find because Facebook uses the newsfeed for advertising. You can then scroll down or up the frequency of various stories, or add friends you want to hear more about, or friends you want to hear less about. Have someone who is annoying because they are constantly on Facebook and therefore on your newsfeed? Add them to the hear less about list, and they will stop bothering you.

Step five: Edit the notifications you receive from Facebook. Turn off the emails: this is again in the Facebook settings section- if you don’t want to get emails constantly, tell Facebook what emails you want to get. Beware though, it is easy to miss things like comments on photos if you aren’t alerted to them via email.

Other Suggestions:

At this point you should have the basic privacy settings set to a level that should decrease your FAD symptoms. But there are some other things you can do:

Use Facebook on your mobile or Blackberry. There are specific Facebook applications, or you can just use your browser to go to m.facebook.com. Because of limited bandwidth issues, Facebook mobile is much more lightweight than the web version.

Search for applications that are specific to what you want to do on Facebook, remove all others- if you don’t want it, don’t join the group or accept the group invitations.

Add twitter to Facebook and then you don’t have to be on Facebook all the time, you can use other Social Networking sites just as effectively. Also, see a future post on Flickr. Facebook can be used as a portal for all these sites.

Get a chumby! This is basically the same thing as using Facebook on your mobile. It makes Facebook more lightweight and less intense.

Finally, always do the following:

If you don’t know the person, don’t friend them. There is no consequence of ignoring a friend request, the person isn’t notified that you ignored them, in fact they won’t even realize unless they are truly trying to friend you for some reason.

Ignore application/group/event requests that don’t apply to you. Don’t pile on your Facebook by just accepting everything. Many times applications ask people to select 20 people to send an application invitation to, and people just select the first 20. If your name starts with B, that can be particularly annoying…  But they don’t care, they just wanted the app, and they didn’t want to ignore the friend invite portion. Don’t worry about ignoring it.

Don’t ignore messages! Messages on Facebook are like emails- treat them as such.

Hopefully with these tips you will be able to minimize the effects of FAD on your internet lifestyle! Of course, I am available for personal counseling and FAD treatments if you need me- just friend me on Facebook, but don’t be surprised if I ignore you because I don’t know you!

Recent conversations have let me to the realization of the existence of a new social/medical disorder that seems to have only recently spread amongst the adult and non-collegiate populations of the world. I’m talking about Facebook Anxiety Disorder, more commonly known as FAD, and it is a serious condition that we need to cure soon! If you think that you or a loved one has FAD, and then please speak to a doctor or a blogger as soon as possible. FAD is treatable, even if there is no cure. To minimize your risk of FAD, please post this blog on your Facebook profile and share it with at least 20 of your Facebook friends…

FAD, simply put is the anxiety related to Facebook. You know that you are exhibiting the symptoms of FAD when you start to ask yourself questions like the following. Why do I care what the heck my high school friends who I haven’t spoken with in 20 years are doing every second of the day? Is everyone else on Facebook at least once an hour except me? Who is this person that just friended me, should I accept their friend request? When did friended become a verb? Will my boss see those drunk pictures from my birthday party? Should I put contact information on my profile? And finally, is there any way to gag myself with this f****** news feed?

If you exhibit any of these symptoms then you have FAD. The root cause of FAD is a genetic resistance to a new definition of the word “privacy”. Privacy has a slowly evolving definition (exhibited by changing contexts in the OED). In recent studies it has been shown that the initial users of Facebook- internet savvy college undergraduates have a different idea of privacy than the social/legal definitions that are currently in the vocabulary of basically everyone else. Those internet savvy college undergraduates participated in “network socialization” meaning that they had a regional view of their Facebook network- their college campus. Indeed, in the initial versions of Facebook only allowed you to be in one network and to join that network you were required to have a campus (.edu) email address. These college students were interested in meeting new friends, finding connections between their existing friends, and figuring out what any one person or group was doing at that specific time to facilitate the interactions of the network. Basically every default application that comes with Facebook is meant to lubricate the social networking of a college campus.

But you, with FAD, are not in a college campus. In fact you are not in a regional network either via geography or time. The result is that your Facebook friends span both time and space and all the social facilitation that was once applicable in a regional setting don’t translate to a global one, and that causes anxiety. While there is no cure, there is a treatment. For college students it was to change their definition of privacy. For you, it needs to be a change in the way you use the privacy settings of Facebook.

Here are two typical responses: friend no one, friend everyone but avoid contact. Here is the thing with Facebook it is a non-intimate social setting. Email, phone, SMS these are all intimate network technologies. Facebook should not be. The first response, friend only those you want to use Facebook is a very good response- but it eliminates the ability for you to contact people you are acquainted with in a non-intimate manner (intimate meaning that you have communication obligations). The second response eliminates all other applications of Facebook. The middle ground is to use privacy settings, groups, and management of applications to make Facebook work for you and therefore eliminate FAD.

This blog is getting long, so I will get into specifics in a later blog. Just know, there is hope for FAD, and I will give you the tools to treat it!

New email addresses! That’s right folks, come and get them- your new @bengfort.com emails! Feel that cold chill of fear at getting a new email address? Of course you did- and really you shouldn’t! Let me tell you why in today’s installment of Bengforts on the Web.

Do you have an ISP email address? ISP email addresses may not be around forever, relying on @comcast.net as your personal email could leave you without the ability to receive mail if say Comcast got bought by SBC or something like that. More importantly, a personalized email address is just the thing to impress everyone else.

Have a business email? Well same thing as the ISP email address- you might not work there for very much longer. But more importantly- you should only be using your work emails for work! Your employer has full access to all emails that you send and receive and the right to read through them any time they want- and why would you want to be sending personal emails when there is the possibility that you could send it to your entire office by accident!? Not only that, but you are restricted to the private policies of the company when it comes to email- you might not be able to make full use of the power of email.

Your email is your identity- you use it as a username on many websites. Folks you give your email to know more about you from your domain (having @bengfort.com makes you seem like a sophisticated and knowledgeable internet citizen). And because your email is your identity it can be attacked- why put yourself into a large group of targets with an email like @hotmail.com?

Have an @gmail.com account? Great! You have a secure account on a website that will ensure your data protection and give you access to many different applications including docs, chat, and calendar besides email. The Gmail web interface is one of the most well thought out, well designed interfaces of all email (better than Outlook). If you have a @gmail.com account then you have proved your internet saavy. So why switch to an @bengfort.com account?

@bengfort.comm email is provided by Google! Yay! The same interface, the same applications, the same data confidence will continue to be yours – all continuing to be free, but with the added benefit of an Internet identity that won’t be lost or broken! Basically, an @bengfort.com email is the best of all worlds. Not only that, but you have increased confidence because we own the @bengfort.com domain and can back all of our own stuff up!

But what about my old accounts? How do I move everything over? Asking these questions? Well you should- but the fact is because @bengfort.com is hosted by Google Apps, this is as simple as forwarding your old email account to the @bengfort.com account (or adding the new account to outlook) then passing on the new email address to all of your close contacts (let everyone else send to your old account, you’ll still get the emails in your @bengfort.com inbox), then just start using @bengfort.com for all your stuff! Done- no data loss, no switchover hangups!

And also- please ask me if you need help with all this stuff, I’m perfectly happy consulting to my family for free!

So head over to mail.bengfort.com and get started with your last email account you will ever need!

Yesterday I substitute taught a class for my adviser- TL 725; a graduate level class for computers in logistics (TL stands for the Transportation and Logistics major). My job was to teach a brief survey of HTML and web development to a class of pure beginners- their task was to build a website and later on to convert their sites to e-commerce style web sites. During the course of the class I realized two things: anyone can learn the basics of web development, and not only that everyone should learn the basics of Web Development!

Here is the deal: everyone in our family uses the Internet from everything to getting directions on Google maps to online grocery shopping, to instant communications, to sharing pictures. We even have a dedicated server all to our own family! The Internet is such an ingrained thing in our lives, yet we treat it as a mysterious thing that we can only know the surface of, even if we are perfectly content to have it as an necessary part of our lives.

I see a strong parallel to cars. Cars are so ingrained in American culture that 15 year olds own them- and really it is their first major purchase. From 15, we eat, drink, live, even sleep in our cars (and possibly other nocturnal activities!), and spend close to 5% of our day (1.2 hours) in them! (I spend close to 17% of my day in the car…). Yet only a select few Americans spend anytime building cars, or designing them. However, all Americans do know some very important things about cars:

1. The basics of internal combustion
2. How to change their oil
3. How to fill their tires, and check them
4. What technologies they want need to buy for better performance

We should treat our knowledge of the Internet the same way! We should know the basics of client server relationships (internal combustion), we should know how to change our il (write HTML), we should know how to check and fill our tires (formatting with CSS), and we should know what technologies we want when we need better performance (JavaScript, PHP, ASP, MySQL, etc). This basic overview will give us a better Internet experience, just like the car knowledge gives us a better driving experience.

To that end, and for the class, I wrote an introductory survey to Web Development, its only 10 pages long, but I wrote it with you guys (my family) in mind! I would highly encourage you to read it and respond with comments to me! Also, check the links in the appendix of the document for further tutorials.

The survey can be found here:
[Link to be updated soon]

Yesterday I mentioned that the Internet was the Wild Wild West, well folks, our own covered wagon that is Bengfort.com recently got mobbed by a pack of angry bison. That’s right- if bison get angry, they attack! Ok, maybe they don’t, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a pack of angry bison- or one angry bison for that matter (NDSU students are mostly just cold). But I can imagine that if you left food outside your covered wagon, the bison would show up and take advantage of you.

Now that I have you properly thinking: “what?” I guess I should let you know what happened. Bengfort.com is our covered wagon- the bison are spam comments delivered to us via robot, and we my friends just got spammed on the way to Oregon. You have probably heard of spam emails, but what in the heck are spam comments? Well, they are basically the same thing, but instead of being sent to you via email- they are posted on the comments section of the blog- so if you were wondering about all those comments about Viagra, don’t worry: its not your post!

You may or may not know that I have been working hard on ripping out the internals of the site to add better and new code- things that you can’t see in real time since it takes a lot of development work on my part to get anything ready to go. Well, on Monday while I was working on it, I happened to query the comments portion of our database- only to find that we had 4268 comments on the blog! While this is my dream to someday have that kind of participation, it struck me as odd considering no one has really been blogging as of late, so I checked it out, and it was comment spam!

Everything from “love your post, want to buy a car…?” to “free viagra, get longer faster” was on the comments section, and really the only thing I could do was delete the entire table from the database and start from scratch- so I did so, vowing to make the problem go away. The next day I checked again (without fixing the problem) and there were 278 comments on the blog! Well- the Bison had our number, so I had to drop the functionality completely (for now).

So in the future, you are probably going to have to sign in to add a comment to the page, which means that the site is going to have a lot more members, or else a lot of permissions work that I’m going to have to do, but out here in the wild wild west, sometimes you have to pay a guy just for the water rights (watch more westerns if you don’t get that!)

For now, please comments via twitter or email!