robglazebrook.com

Thing One:

I never really gave much thought to the random titles I’ve attributed to my weblog over time. If I come up with something I find particularly witty, or fitting, or funny, or just plain “fun” without the “ny,” I add it to my list of random titles. Eventually, I grow tired of some, and they fall off the face of my CGI script. Others stick around for some time.

The thing is, spiders sometimes notice these titles. Not the eight-legged arachnid variety of spiders, but web spiders. Little pieces of code that wander the web, categorizing stuff. Spiders are what, for instance, Google uses to keep its content up-to-date. Google uses titles as part of a website when it’s figuring out search words that should lead to that website.

Normally, this wouldn’t mean much, but I’ve noticed something interesting. In the last two days, no less than seven unique visitors have started at a Google search and ended up here by using the same two-word search term. That term? Anal Leakage.

Yes, that’s right. If you’re looking for Anal Leakage on the internet, you end up here. That, my friends, is food for thought (with Olestra).

Thing Two:

I’m in the running for the Apex Awards, which is another ‘un of those weblog awards. This award (based on the other nominees) seems to focus on aesthetic quality more than much else. There are some beautiful weblogs in the running, to be sure, but I think I’ve got an edge over the competition if readability is involved anywhere in the equation. Mine is one of the few weblogs currently nominated whose content can be readily interpreted as containing textual elements intended to be read. The others are pretty, yes, but I’ve done my best here to incorporate elements of form ~and~ function into what is (I hope) an overall pleasing whole. A bunch of unformatted text without pretty graphics is still a weblog. A bunch of pretty graphics without text… not so much. (Photoblogs being a notable exception, but generally in photoblogs, what little text there is, is quite legible)

Thing Three:

Standardized buttons (such as those I use) continue to gain in popularity in the Blogosphere. Taylor McKnight has created a website for the purpose of collecting these buttons in one location for the general public. He was even nice enough to include a few of mine. :)

Speaking of buttons, I created a new button for Wander-Lust and submitted it to them today. Here’s a sneak peek:

The administrator of Wander-Lust emailed me back and seemed quite happy to have my submission, so hopefully we wanderers will have a new choice in buttons soon.

Thing Four:

I took a photo of myself and submitted it to The Mirror Project this evening, though I haven’t gotten their confirmation yet, so I can’t directly link to it. Thus, here it is:

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To The Fourth. HP C500

I like it, ’cause I caught my reflection in two mirrors, and my eyes appear twice in the metallic frame surrounding the mirrors. If I look tense, well, it’s because I am. :) Dead Week is anything but, and Finals Week is fast approaching. To make matters worse, I’m not even getting the expected bonus of warm weather inspiring relaxed attire in the female population. *pout* In case you can’t tell from the picture, I’m wearing a sweater (though no jacket) today.

Have a good evening, all.

I cleaned house a bit yesterday, if for no other reason than to prove to Megan that I was still capable of such things. *g* She’s been taking care of the housework (and me in general, really) for a while now, so yesterday I mustered up some initiative and did the dishes, ‘cuumed, cleaned up the living room, took out all the trashes (from the various rooms), and cleaned the bathroom. It made me feel as though I’d earned my keep for the day. She even noticed when she got home. :)

I also cleaned up the website a bit. I finally got around to fixing the monthly archives so they render right (I’d never re-coded them after switching to the new table-less design, and the new skins weren’t working right on the old, tabled design). Normally, I wouldn’t worry about the monthly archives all that much, but they seem to be what Google links to with the greatest frequency. So I thought it might be a good idea.

I’ve also made a few changes to each of the skins over the last week or so, though hopefully, no one really noticed. All I did was tweak the images a bit so the page would load a touch faster as a whole. I made the “Old School” skin 6KB smaller (that’s a couple of seconds download time on a 28.8, negligible download time for the rest of us. *g*), the “ArcanaBot” skin 7KB smaller, and the “True Blue” skin a full 20KB smaller, which may even be noticeable on a broadband connection. Of course, the only people who will likely notice are new visitors who don’t already have the images cached. And they wouldn’t know the page loaded slower initially. Hrm. :)

Missed the bus again this morning, so I missed my first class. I’m starting to worry that I’ll have to retake Grammar class my last semester as an Undergrad to get an acceptable grade. My tests and so on are all decent (with the last quiz a notable exception), but my attendance has left something to be desired. My clock and the bus driver’s watch have disagreed with each other too often.

I’m going to be intensely stressing over my final French project these next couple of days. We finally got a couple of scenes filmed last night, but one of our group members (Troy, our star, the guy with 40% or so of the lines in the movie) couldn’t make it. So I guess we’re filming more tonight. You know, since the finished move is due Wednesday. And I’m the one who has to piece the whole thing together in Adobe Premiere. To make matters worse, the stuff I imported from the camera last night has an audio-sync problem (the video started to lag behind the audio at some point in time during the capture), so now I have to re-sync the audio and video for each and every scene I use. If I cry, you’ll understand, right?

I think this is Dead Week. Hopefully, more of my teachers will honor Dead Week this year than in years past, and give us a chance to study for finals. Of course, seeing as how three of my four classes have assigned major projects due within the next week… I guess not. Hosers. I’ve always disliked how, come Dead Week, each of my professors assumes the same thing. They all think to themselves, “It’s Dead Week, so the students aren’t going to have anything to do in any of their classes. That would be the perfect time to assign that major project!” Of course, when ALL professors assume this, it doesn’t bode well for students. No one I’ve talked to thus far is going to have time to study this week.

Cool Link Found: the World as a Blog (found via Metamorphosism) uses GeoURL, weblogs.com, and some fancy-schmancy scripting to compile real(ish)-time geographical locations of blogs as they’re updated. And I’m pretty sure my blog will show up, so I’m happy. :)

Okies, time to get ready to leave for my French class.

Data sure is fun. I found a new site today (allconsuming.net) via my stats that collects information on what people in the Blogosphere are reading. It hourly scours recently updated weblogs that ping weblogs.com (as any self-respecting blog should do, sayeth the… me) for links to books on Amazon.com (as any self-respecting blogger should do for the books they’re reading, with a very slightly possible exception for M’ris, because I’m afraid she might make the smoke come out of Amazon’s servers). It then aggregates this data, and posts most popular links for who’s reading what. They also allow users to keep a “What I’m Reading” list on their site, which I’m considering doing. Novel ideas, no? And yeah, that pun was pretty much intended.

This was published a couple of days ago, so I’m likely the 8,000th or so blog to link to it, but Anil Dash recently posted a nice entry on the motivation behind his time spent in “the blogging industry.” He’s also joined the sixapart team (makers of MovableType), so I’m all hot and bothered now. :)

I find Anil’s post interesting because there are many times when I forget how good I’ve got it here in the middle of the state in the middle of the country that likes to beat up other countries smaller than my state. :) Forty years ago, his father lived in a village in India that had no running water or electricity. The majority of the population was illiterate. His father immigrated from that situation to 1960’s USA, because he’d read of all the self-improving possibilities offered here. Wow. Try as I might, I can’t think of anyplace I could move foreign enough to fully empathize with such a change. Anil suggested the moon, but I don’t think that’s drastic enough. Sure, it’s far from home, but you and I know damn well that when (and I’m going to say when, because I’m an optimist that way) we humans colonize the moon, it’s going to be a Western or at the very least a Westernized country doing the colonizing, (I’d prefer to think it will be a collection of countries working together, but you get the idea) and we’re going to bring our culture and our everyday technology with us in our carry-ons. Anil can move to the moon, but he’s going to bring an awful lot of the States with him when he goes.

I signed up at wander-lust.com today. It’s a website for those of us that like to find new blogs. I’ve posted a link alongside my site badges, so check it out. You click the link, and it takes you to a random blog. Fun stuff. Their servers are a bit slow, which is annoying, but I’ll just hope that will improve over time for now. I’m going to design a badge similar to the ones I’ve already got and submit it to them (a frustrating, sure-to-be-slow step. I prefer Blogshares’s method of allowing people to create their own links), in hopes they approve the thing for use. It’d speed up site load times, for sure. And it’d fit my site a whole heck of a lot better.

I fiddled with my Blogroll a bit today. I dropped Raging Platypus because his bi-weekly updating frequency and general lack of new content were bugging me. I’ve clicked his link at least once a day since I added him to my blogroll, but aside from the nice badge idea and a new link or two, it hasn’t done much. In recompense, I’ve added MemeMachineGo! to the blogroll. That’s the weblog of the Zed M’ris refers to so often. I clicked, I was amused, I scrolled, and I continued to be amused. Therefore, I linked.

I need fewer Californians on my blogroll.

I’d like to make a couple of things regarding my “Ethos in the Blogosphere” post a bit more clear, just so you, Dedicated Reader, don’t get the wrong impression. I’ll go in order of comments. :) First, in case anyone was thinking such, I’m not complaining that I’m not popular (I’m not sure if this was the intended insinuation or not, but I thought I’d mention it). Content comes first, acknowedgement second, so forth, so on. I’m just trying to figure out the rhetorical bases for ~how~ the popular weblogs gained the ethos they have. I’m planning on doing my Rhetoric final paper on it. It’s actually an idea spawned from a conversation between myself and my Rhetoric teacher regarding the insta-popularity of Where is Raed? (which I’ve never linked to, first because of his insane level of popularity for questionable reasons, second because he’s stopped updating, for whatever reason) at the onset of the war. Want another scary Google search? Google ‘Baghdad’.

Second, I understand that being gay, Asian, and Bayside doesn’t make someone special, unique, or instantly better than the rest of us. It does, however, make them different enough from who I am that I can gain insight and glean humor from the similarities and differences found within our individual perspectives on everyday life. I consider Ernie’s life to be not-like my life in many ways, making his perspective of interest to me. Also, the ways that my life is-like his are of interest, for the same reason. His life is not in any way inherently more exotic than mine is, and his perspective is not inherently more interesting than mine. But the differences ~between~ our perspectives… now THAT is interesting.

Read here long enough, and you’ll come to find I’m obsessed with the idea of perspectives. Assuming I’m writing coherently, which I’m working on. :)

I found out yesterday that the hot girl in my Media class knows about my website now, and that she’s checked it out a time or two. One of the perils of mentioning my website in a homework assignment, I guess. Which means I probably shouldn’t talk about the hot girl here, or something. You know. So the hot girl doesn’t see it. [wonders how many times he'll be smacked for this paragraph. And by whom. Experiments are fun, no?]

That’s about it. I plan to go out tonight, assuming I can find someone to go out with. To places that cater to those of us over 21, so Megan isn’t an option as an escort. That, and she’s down home (in Suthe’n Eye-wuh), so she wasn’t really an option regardless of my destination.

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Ross Hall. HP C500

Normally I wouldn’t post this image, since I posted it shortly after taking it a few weeks ago. However,
1) I think it’s beautiful,
2) I created a new thumbnail (so it’s ~sorta~ new),
3) Today’s Photo Friday is Shadows, and
4) It’s supposed to be cloudy all day.

So, enjoy. :)

In other news, I forgot to set my alarm last night, so I’m running frightfully behind schedule. Have a good day.

Thus far in my preliminary observations as to how weblog writers (and blogs in general) develop ethos, credibility, or whatever, ethos seems to be derived primarily from one of two sources: a previously established ethos in another genre of the rhetorical tradition, or a sort of community endorsement enabling an amateur to gain a sort of professional (or maybe celebrity) status.

The outside establishment of ethos can be seen, arguably, in the blogs of people like Dan Gillmor, Chris Pirillo, and the like. Dan has been a journalist for many years: it makes sense that a trusted print journalist