Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

You’re probably reading this on Facebook or Netvibes.

Therefore it probably has slipped your attention that my homepage has a completely new look. Having managed to fix the site and looking for a new style to give the podcast mini site I decided that it would be better to just come up with a whole new look for everything and use that across the site.

And, for the first time, my blog has a seperate skin which matches the main site as well! Finally that integrated look which I know Kieran has been suggesting for so many years ;). So, give me your feedback, what do you think, does it work in your browser, have you found any problems?

You may notice once you start playing around that the image at the top keeps changing. At the moment there are only 6 that it “randomly” selects out of each time (I put randomly in quotes because most of us know how bad computers are at picking out random numbers, on saying that, humans are no better), two of them are photos - from graduation and Rationalist Week, two of them are collages of loads of different pictures of me and two are of composed of some of my favourite stock photography. As the months pass I’m hoping to add more and more until there is a sizeable library of them.

It occurs to me, as of last Friday, I’ve now been blogging 4 years.

Over that time I’ve clocked up a total of 1,328 posts. That works out as a little under one post per day (4 years is 1460 days). Looks like my posting average is slipping :p.

I’ve messed around with the blog a little. The topic links now use /category/ again rather than /tags/ to differentiate them from the actual tags themselves which I am going to make an effort to use from now on. The tag listings are a little ugly at the moment but hopefully I’ll get round to sorting that out eventually.

I was reading a topic on Cozy Campus (an adult webmaster forum) earlier today about the gossip blog PerezHilton.com.

Standard ad (150×200):

One week: $9,000
One month: $30,000

Hi rise (150×600)

One week: $16,000
One month: $44.000

And before you say, “Yeah, but how many of those ads is he selling at those prices?”, take a look at his site and count them.

I count 15 standard size ads and 5 hi rise.

That’s over half a million dollars a month. I always said there was qood money in gossip blogs.

My server has been suffering quite a lot of downtime recently which on top of the less of revenue and amount of hours I have had to spend fixing it rather than doing uni work has had a far more important consequence - I have been unable to rant on my blog!

In order to solve this sites are getting moved around to new servers including my personal site which is now located on Jennifer.

I have a crazy amount of draft posts at the moment. I was never one for leaving drafts to drag on. I had one for my many-times re-drafted “season two” post which I eventually scrapped because I didn’t think I could do the first post justice in the sequel and because of what happened at the end of summer. As a general rule though I have none.

Yet at the moment I have 7 and I’ve just published a draft so I had 8 before that! I guess I just have a lot to say and not enough time to write it at the moment. Not that a lack of time ever stopped me blogging before. I wonder what is different now.

Up till now I’ve used a fairly limited taxonomy system. I had three categories - general for my blog posts, video for my video blog posts and gossip for things to be syndicated to SoC Gossip. This dates back to when I was blogging on Nerd Federation and the posts were organised into channels. It’s a bit out dated and not very Web 2.0 these days though so I’ve finally got round to implementing tagging instead of categories.

So from now on posts will be tagged, usually with multiple tags. There are also new URLs, though the old URLs for the categories will still continue to work in that they will redirect to the new URLs.

I’ve finally made some changes to my blogroll. With Raby getting his blog started I decided it was finally time to make some changes. So I took a few blogs off that I either don’t read any more or people simply weren’t posting on them anymore which annoys me as the way I read blogs is to go to my blog roll, hold ctrl and click every link. I’ve also added a few more blogs.

Quite a few of us have blogs now. It’s great to see people blogging, uni involes far too much face to face contact for my liking. I don’t want to have to leave my room to find out what you did today. Blogs are the solution. I feel we’re slightly under utilising them though. We could be pinging each other like crazy.

For instance, I could make a quick comment on the fact that George has auctioned himself off as a human pet when only two months ago when I offered to purchase him in a deal for his liver, he declined my offer.

So in the spirit of cross-circle blog linkage, tell me what you are up to in the final week or so before the start of the new academic year. How do you feel about coming back to uni, what are you planning to do this year, etc, etc.

Personally, I don’t really know where I’m at. I didn’t really think about it for most of summer, then I didn’t really want the new term to arrive. Then I started to. Now I don’t really know how I feel. I can’t say I’m looking forward to the work and the general hecticness that uni brings. With work I can generally go home and stop worrying about it (to an extent at least) whereas at uni it’s never really off your mind as you always have something to think about.

I still haven’t really set a plan in stone as what I’m doing yet. I’m going to start moving my gear in any day now but I can’t really be bothered to be honest. It’s just more upheaval and stress and to be honest, I have other things on my mind. Indeed, other things on my mind than university as a whole.

For those who have missed it, Michelle has started a new blog called Forever Dreaming which documents her various crazy dreams. It’s providing quite an insight into her mind so it’s well worth a read.