First, before we address a couple of mixed ToolGuyd-related topics, I’d like to rant.
Shown above was what the scene at my local Home Depot looked like in early November 2016.
Magazines and newspaper “experts” keep saying that Black Friday shopping started early this year. No, this is how things have been for many years.
This is what things looked like at my Home Depot store on October 31, 2017.
I have photos going back further. After taking a look at my archived files, it seems that I started doing extensive holiday season deal scouting in November 2012, right after I earned my PhD and was thinking about what to do next.
That’s what bugs me about the media industry today. They say things like “the Home Depot Black Friday deals have slipped all customary bounds of the calendar,” but that’s patently false. The bulk of Black Friday deals starting weeks ahead of Thanksgiving IS customary.
Black Friday Coverage
Are you satisfied with the tool deals coverage so far?
I threw strategy to the wind this year. If it’s interesting, I’ll hammer through a post quickly. If it’s worth revisiting, I’ll republish a post. If it should have front-page access, you’ll see color-coded links pop up at the top of the page.
Regarding tool deals coverage, do you have any unmet needs you wish for ToolGuyd to do a better job of addressing?
Sorry, there’s nothing I can do about significant others being upset over your tool spending. Or maybe I can work out a “gift guide for the others in your life who hate how many tools you’ve been buying” post.
Gift Guide Coverage
These Tsunoda long-reach pliers look handy. It’s $25 at Amazon.
My plan for this year is to put together short posts for especially interesting tools, and have a running misc tools gift guide that I’ll be updating as needed. See Cool Tools, Deals, and Gift Ideas – Updated.
The idea is to be quick and brief, such as what you see above for the long-reach pliers.
Every year I end up with a huge list of “this is a cool or interesting tool, I should post about it” ideas simply because there isn’t enough time to post about everything, or because I don’t have enough to say to fill a standalone post.
I’ve been saving up my ideas and posting them every few days, and updating the post means prior ideas resurface rather than being buried by the flood of deals content.
This is for the regular readers who don’t need more tape measures and utility knives, or whatever it is they’ve got at retail stores that other readers and a lot of seasonal visitors are eager to hear more about.
Thoughts? Requests? Do you like the format? Do you want more or less like this?
RSS Feed, Scrapers, Legit Use
I updated our bots-blocking list. I checked server logs and looked into activity coming from high-visit IP addresses. For example, I added an IP address that traced back to a cloud computing platform in Europe to the server block list. That IP had been hitting ToolGuyd over 1,000 times a day.
A lot of automated traffic like that scrapes and steals ToolGuyd content for unauthorized copy-paste republishing, and even impersonation. So, I blocked a couple of IP addresses to stop them at the door.
Today alone, this resulted in over 15K access blocks from just a couple of blocked IP addresses.
When I checked the scraper/bot log, I opened some of the entries and saw that someone was using a cloud computing service in Canada to load java and also a “personalized start page” service as the referring agent.
So, maybe it’s a reader – whether a tool user or someone that works for a retailer or tool brand – with a dashboard that aggregates news from various websites and services.
If you’ve been blocked, but you have legitimate reasons to use cloud computing servers to access ToolGuyd content, and in an automated fashion that mimics content scraper and scammer behaviors, contact me and we’ll figure something out.
I can’t imagine there are legitimate reasons to route traffic through cloud servers and then refresh things a thousand times a day. But if there are, just know that the new blocks were intended to stop content theft and unauthorized syndication.
One range of IP addresses have been unblocked from accessing the feed thus far, but that involved different contexts I won’t go into.
Stuey
A reader told me that they were seeing ToolGuyd posts in their news feed, but instead of ToolGuyd it says “Stuey.” That was weird, but I wasn’t seeing the same. Yet.
Shown above is what a ToolGuyd post typically looks like when it gets picked up into the Google news feed on my phone.
But I’ve also started seeing them like this. Stuey.
The “follow” part seems new. I take a lot of screen captures, and that only started appearing recently.
This isn’t anything that I’ve done, and it’s not something I can change. This is Google’s AI or algorithm pulling from names I use outside of the post, or at least I think so.
It’s really strange.
I use Stuart here and Stuey on social media for various reasons.
The only time I’ve ever minded being called Stuey when was when this ad service company hunted down my cell phone. The salesmen kept calling in an attempt to get me to put up more ads and route delivery through them. At first I was polite, but then I started ignoring the calls. They then called from different numbers and “hey Stuey how it’s going” was all I needed to hear before hanging up. After a couple of times they stopped calling.
Anyway, I use semantic markup where a machine should be able to easily identify the author of my posts.
“Stuart,” I could understand. But in this case, Google is taking my post and swapping ownership to “Stuey,” with no obvious connections.
I decided this was just some kind of AI hallucination, as Google seemingly tries to turn their news and Discover feeds into some kind of subscription engine – which actually does seem like a good idea. It’s going to be an interesting couple of years.
