Gee, it sure seems like the way to quickly get famous online these days is to get fired for blogging.
Category: Blogging
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Cancelled!
Well, I posted too soon. Tonight’s blogger get-together has been cancelled, too many people had something come up. Hopefully we can convene next week or something.
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Bend Bloggers
Unless plans changed when I wasn’t looking, the Bend/Central Oregon bloggers are getting together again tomorrow, Tuesday the 8th. It’s at the Cascade Lakes Brewery Lodge (upstairs!) on Bend’s westside, starting at 7pm. I don’t know yet if I’ll make it, but I know a bunch of the others will. Cheers!
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Trackback spam
Woke up this morning to find 116 notices of trackback spam littering my inbox. Out of the blue, and I notice that a whole bunch of other weblogs got hit today, too. It appears some spammer finally wrote a script to exploit trackback. Ah, well. It was easy enough to fix; do a quick mod to my
add_trackback.phpfile, redirecting bad traffic, and a quick SQL query on the database to clear out the offending spam, less than 10 minutes. Gotta love having absolute control over my system. -
Blog desert
Yeah, I know, but I just haven’t felt the need to blog much of anything lately. My ambition to post has waned, and the empty stretches between entries grow larger… It won’t last forever, though. I know this much.
Meanwhile, Central Oregon has been experiencing unseasonably warm weather, and they’re saying it’s going to be a drought year because there’s been no snow. Not that I mind the springlike weather overly much, but could we at least wait until it’s spring? I like having seasons, and it seems vaguely ridiculous to be washing the car by hand in January (which I did last weekend).
Damn global warming.
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New Bend blogger
Found on ORBlogs: The Grumpy Forester, a new Bend blog. Well, Lapine, I guess, but that’s okay. And “new” is relative, the archive go back to January 22 of last year. But it’s new to me! Welcome!
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Jury duty recap
Jury duty was interesting—I skirted being on a DUI trial by that much. How it works is about 30 people show up for the jury summons. Of those, 12 are randomly selected and interviewed. I was one of the 12. Several potential jurors were excused, and after an hour of jury interviews they finally selected the final six.
Two things stand out. First, the courtroom was cold, like air conditioning was on or something. (Hello, it’s like 20 degrees outside!) Second, the defense attorney was just a kid, a young guy who looked like he’d just graduated from law school. He spent a good 45 minutes interviewing us, and asking the randomest, strangest questions. Total newbie.
I don’t have to go tomorrow, and I don’t know yet about Friday. After that, I’m done for whenever I get summoned again. Mark off another milestone in life.
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Jury Duty
Yup, that’s what I got tomorrow. Never been summoned for jury duty before, so I’m anxious to see what it’s like, but I hope I don’t end up on some big trial or a sequestered jury or anything like that.
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2004 Zeitgeist
In the spirit of the Google Zeitgeist, I’ve pulled together some interesting stats from chuggnutt.com for the year 2004. On to it!
- Number of blog entries: 306
- Approximate total number of words: 45,537
- Average words per blog entry: 148.8
- Total visitors: 242,433 (includes bots, spiders, aggregators, all that junk)
- Average visitors per day: 687
- April was the most active month, as LiveJournalers found my Matrix Name page; April 1 alone showed 6,122 visitors
- Most popular phrases people searched this sitefor:
- matrix name
- matrix
- mysql
- html2text
- ebooks
- php
- amazon
- kermit
- netoffice
- black butte porter
- sony
- spokane
- beer
- Most popular phrases people entered on search engines to get here:
- free palm ebooks (and tons of variants on this and “palm reader,” “pdb reader,” “palm ebooks,” etc.)
- boba fett
- matrix name
- scary picture
- darth maul
- kermit the frog
- what’s in a name
- name generator
- html to text conversion
- a-team movie
- zach braff blog
- Internet Explorer accounts for about 62% of all traffic. Mozilla/Netscape, about 14%. Blog- and RSS-related “browsers” are running at about 17-20%.
- People made 566 comments on this site (not counting comment spam I deleted).
Interesting year! Can’t wait to see how 2005 will shape up.
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The Fortune blogging article
Fortune magazine has a big article about blogging out (here, via Joi Ito), it’s pretty good. There’s a few quotes I really liked that I pulled for everyone’s enjoyment:
- “If you fudge or lie on a blog, you are biting the karmic weenie” — quote from Steve Hayden of Ogilvy & Mather
- “Yes, for all its democratic trappings, there are hierarchies of influence in the blogging world.”
- “E-mail is for old people, says Irving; kids prefer to communicate by phone and IM, and, now, by keeping blogs.”
- “Our legal department loves the blogs, because it basically is a written-down, backed-up, permanent time-stamped version of the scientist’s notebook. When you want to file a patent, you can now show in blogs where this idea happened.” — quote from Marissa Mayer of Google
Email is for old people? What about if I use email to notify me when I get a blog comment? Hm.
The Google comment about timestamping ideas in blogs in especially interesting; I touched on similar issues and themes nearly a year ago in my RSS as Poor Man’s Copyright post. (I don’t know how patentable an idea from a blog might be, though.)