The Unix/Linux desktop environment GNOME's many components include a full web browser that used to be called Epiphany and now goes by the very non-Googlable name Web. Yes. it's a Web browser called Web.

Back in the GNOME 2 days, I used it a lot. That wasn't just the GNOME 2 days but the Gecko days, when Epiphany was based on Mozilla's Gecko engine rather than Apple/Google's WebKit.

In the early WebKit days, I think Epiphany/Web went downhill a bit.

Now I use Google Chrome much of the time, though I know in my heart that I shouldn't. I'm usually logged into Google Services for my job, and Google is getting into everything I do.

These days Firefox is just frustrating. Once I get 10 tabs open, it tends to hang when Chrome doesn't.

Maybe a basic browser like Epiphany/Web can help me. Maybe not.

I'll give it a try and let you know how it goes.

Update: Epiphany/Web works very well. I can't say for sure that it's "lighter" than Google Chrome, especially since it uses the same Webkit engine.

What I can say is that for general-purpose web-browsing, it is very fast and stable. And I bet Google is tracking me a whole lot less.

Epiphany is a simple browser. Like Firefox was in its early days.

It's well-integrated as a GTK3 application, so it'll look good either in GNOME 3, or (in my case) among all the other GTK3 apps I'm using in the Xfce desktop environment.

For search, Epiphany defaults to Duck Duck Go which bills itself as "the search engine that doesn't track you," and so far I'm happy with it. It's nice to have an alternative to Google, even in a Web browser using the same engine as a browser that is most definitely tracking you.

I'm not saying I will give up on Google Chrome, especially for my , but when it comes to personal browsing, I can see myself in Epiphany much of that time.

From the Ode forum:

How to do a slide presentation with Ode

Get the Presentation theme here.

I've been meaning to get back into the Counter addin that I wrote for Ode with Rob's help, and over the past few days I added some functionality to the code and deployed it on my site, where you can see the results in the right rail.

The original Counter addin only counted posts, which in my case are files in the documents directory with .txt suffixes.

Since I now create many of my social-media updates with Ode, I added some code to count those entries and report how many of the overall entries are "full" posts and how many are social updates.

While I was in there, I wanted to play around with regular expressions, so I also added a count for the number of jpg and png images both in the entire documents directory (which includes themes) as well as in my images directory (where I try to keep all images that go into posts).

It's definitely fun to write a very little bit of Perl and have something happen on my live site. It's a nice feeling, for sure.

The addin uses the File::Find CPAN module to crawl your filesystem and count the files.

The way the Counter addin works is that you download it (for now I'm hosting it here) and unzip it, stash the addin's directory/folder in your addins directory (mine is under /data/addins), add some HTML with calls to the addin to your theme (generally in the sidebar area), and it should just work.

Once again, thanks to Rob Reed for creating Ode and helping me get off the ground with this addin.

If you missed the link above, download the new Counter addin from my site.

I still have some code cleanup to do, and I will probably add some documentation, licensing information and acknowledgments. But this version does work.

In the future, I can see this addin, or something like it, creating even more dynamic (or even static) content for the sidebar of an Ode site. It could help build a list of directories and certainly could provide more statistics on how many posts you have under any given directory.

But for now I can instantly see how many posts and social updates I have written (and you can, too).

I just found this great list of free C++ books from @TFETimes

I picked up about five.

Like me.

I've got plenty of IDEs on my laptop. At least one has been here a while (Padre, focused on Perl). A few have been here a short time (Eclipse, Netbeans, whatever incarnation of IntelliJ comes with Android Studio).

I've barely used any of them. There is a learning curve.

I never really needed Padre. I write scripts with text editors (often gedit, sometimes Notepad++ if I'm in Windows).

I like Netbeans, and I am able to create, compile and run simple Java programs with it.

I tried to create a C++ program in Netbeans after adding C and C++ support but got held up at the make/configure script portion.

That was after I created a script in gedit and used g++ on the command line to compile it. That works.

So I turned to Geany, the "IDE" (heavy quotation marks) I've been using not just for my rudimentary Java programs but also for most of my general text editing (I need cr/lf line endings for my company's main CMS, and gedit is kind of broken in this regard).

Since I have OpenJDK and all the C build tools installed on my Fedora system, Geany happily builds and runs my Java programs and my now-sole C++ program (see it above). Not much of a learning curve. Click the build brick, then click the "run" gears.

That's it.

There will be a time in the near future when I will need to run a "real" IDE. I will need training wheels.

I have a plan for 2016 to dramatically increase my programming knowledge and experience.

When that plan is further along -- I'd say I'm at 25 percent this week, will be at 50 percent next week and 100 percent by the end of the month, I will provide the details. But I can promise that I plan to do more and make more progress in 2016 than any year previous.

I am aiming to use git and/or GitHub for as much of my programming workflow as possible, both for my new projects and practice as well as my previous projects, however small (or ungainly) they are.

The key is balancing this new push to learn with my home, family and work lives. I hope I can do it.

Like any software upgrade, going from Fedora 22 to 23 has its wins and losses, however temporary in both cases.

In the "wins" category: Yumex-DNF, the graphical package manager that isn't GNOME Software now displays normally with the Adiwata dark theme that I've been using.

Hopefully there is improvement across the board in GTK3 application rendering with dark themes.

I'm noticing this issue when using Ode's EditEdit in Fedora 23. It looks like the line spacing in the CSS for the "composing" windows is screwed up. See the screen grab above (click for full-sized image).

You can see that the top line in the "Title" windows is cut off on top, and the lines are a little cramped in the "Body."

I need to check this in Firefox to make sure it's not some kind of overall Fedora 23 issue (I just upgraded my OS from Fedora 22), and I'm sure I can adjust the CSS for EditEdit to make this problem go away.

Update: It looks fine in Firefox:

Update: This has something to do with the Courier font. Rather than go crazy about it, I'm just going to knock it out of the EditEdit CSS.

Fedora Magazine did a "How Do You Fedora" interview with Kevin Fenzi, longtime Fedora contributor and Red Hat employee who does so much for Xfce in the distribution.

So you want to start selling advertising on your blog or website?

There's always Google AdSense, which doesn't pay all that much. And there is NO customer service. I had a client blackballed from the service for doing something I KNOW they didn't do, and there is no recourse.

But looking around, it appears that you can do this outside of Google and make a lot more money.

Michael Hyatt says if you have 10,000 unique visitors per month, you can make it happen. And it looks like he used the Boston-based BuySellAds platform to help him do it.

Things he did included:

• Launching a reader survey
• Setting up an advertising page
• Creating an "advertising kit"
• Signing up with an advertising service (again, he used BuySellAds) Then capping it with:
• Pitching an irresistible offer

If self-help and career/life coaching is your thing, MichaelHyatt.com is all about that. He also offers a podcast and a bunch of products like e-books, print books, audio books and even a WordPress theme.

Not having spent a lot of time at his site, I imagine that Michael thinks of a blog as part of the overall marketing/monetization strategy in your life (or your business' life, I suppose).

Does this blog have 10,000 unique visitors per month?

Even I was asking that question after reading this. The purpose of this blog isn't direct monetization (or its content would be a whole lot different instead of "whatever the hell I'm thinking about" and "here's what I'm putting on social media").

I don't really pay much attention to the traffic. I don't even have a "real" analytics setup. I just rely on the AwStats functionality that my web host bakes into my account.

I usually get between 4,000 and 7,000 uniques per month, but I host a few other things on the stevenrosenberg.net domain, and I had a huge spike in November 2015, doubling the number of uniques to 14,000.

It turns out the spike was due to Los Angeles County election results that I host here for my employer. I should definitely move those to a company server, and I actually do have one now that can handle it (it's all Bash scripts, chewing gum and super glue). For the next election, I will.

I'm not saying I will never sell advertising on my "personal" blog, but I don't see it happening. I might do it if I started one or more "specialty" blogs that had some focus, but this isn't that blog.