Posts Tagged ‘Blogging’

I haven’t blogged in a while, mainly because I’ve been so busy with Rationalist Week. If you are around LUU any time this week drop in for a drink, we have events going at 12 noon, 2pm, 4pm and 7pm every day as well as all night debate on Friday and live entertainment at certain points too.

It is a strange time of year. Often the large amount of procrastination that occur at such periods as this sends people towards the blogs encouraging a flurry of posts. But things are for the most part silent at the moment. Hell, even my blog has been fairly infrequent recently. We’re talking days between posts. Days!

People on the whole have been fairly quiet. It’s a mix of people not being here and people generally being dispontent. The usual suspects can be found in DEC-10 every day – myself, Si, Dan, Jezz, Chris S and crazy Spanish guy.

Stress levels seem to be flucuating quite a lot at the moment. I felt fairly good about Rationalist Week this morning, I had found us some places that would rent us a van and things were falling into place. But it occured to me this evening that if we don’t get our funding sorted by the end of the week – we are going to have to cancel Rationalist Week.

Yeah.

Then there is FYP.

Yeah.

Then there is post graduation plans.

Yeah.

The moral of the story is, you all need to blog more. So the rest of us have something to read when we’re supposed to be doing things that will affect the rest of our entire lives.

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 the 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.