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Abandoned Blogs

abandoned blogs are not all the same, you know. some are like pieces of lovely driftwood; floating into and out of the life of the writer with peaceful ease. others are like an old pair of socks, pushed to the back of the internet dresser by newer concerns, eventually forgotten but still there. then there are the ones that are like an old dirty jacket on the side of the freeway; who knows how they got there, but when you see them, there's a sort of embarrassed pathos surrounding them.

Hadashi

Trendy

I thought I just was embracing my lazy/ADD side by tumbling everything these days and only sporadically "blogging proper", but maybe I'm really part of the "slow blogging" movement!

Self Aware

Among the things that go through my head as I write on my blog is, "I wonder if my kids will read this someday? Or how about my grandkids?!"

My dad's dad died when I was young, and not getting to know him is one of the big sad things in my life. So I think it would be cool to have a blog/journal of his to read. Maybe my kids and their kids will enjoying getting to know their dad and grandpop like this.

So when I saw this this video, of the lovely and talented Molly the Ukeist, it made me laugh.

HT: Jonathan Coulton

Testing MarsEdit

I got a copy of MarsEdit in the latest MacHeist promotion. So I'm giving it a try.

I have the feeling that once I get used to it, I probably won't be going back to the web interface unless I need to.

UPDATE: I was wrong. It wasn't part of the MacHeist bundle. Sooo... I have no idea how I came across it. Hobbes, maybe?

I Believe That (You) Children Are Our Future

Peevalicious

I just discovered a blog that tracks one of my personal pet peeves — unnecessary quotation marks. Now let's put that camera phone to good use...

Other "abuse" blogs:

• The word literally
• The apostrophe
• The lowercase l
• And just for fun... crummy church signs

HT: PyroManiacs

My Cuddly, Little Blog

Apparently my blog is rated "G" because "No bad words were found." And animated violence.

Like many rating or quiz sites, this spits out some HTML for you to just paste into your blog. It includes the obligatory text links (which I removed) that take you back to the site, which is for online dating. The somewhat devious addition to the HTML is they include an alt tag for the image of "online dating". So even if you delete the "visible" stuff, you might still paste in some search-engine friendly meta so they can get dating traffic.

Of which I am probably adding even more to with what I've written about in this post.

You can still "rate" your own blog by clicking the picture.

I got this link from Dan Kimball's blog, which was humorously rated "R" for using words like missionary, death, hell, and dead.

My Patriotic Readers, You

I'm doing a little gumshoeing to figure out what people like to read about on my blog based on a little stat I discovered.

Yesterday, I came across a new stats feature TypePad rolled out where you can see day-to-day traffic over the last four months. And I noticed a dramatic spike in readership on one particular day, March 29, a day which only had one post on it—the Sons of Liberty Bowl post.

For comparison's sake, according to TypePad I currently average 59 page views per day. The two days before the Liberty Bowl post, I had 115 and 120 visits, jumping to 198 on Bowl Day, dropping to 111 the next day and then returning to around normal.

So maybe it's not that one post, but one of (or several of?) the posts before it that people were telling their friends about, thereby driving up traffic.

Some possible favorites from that week:

1. Soft & Slow playlist (crap! I still haven't posted the other two!)
2. Eddie Griffin crashes rare Ferrari
3. The BeWells

Any ideas? Are you fine folks just strong patriots, sharing the love of our founding fathers? Or were people enthralled by my prediction that Kyle Snyder would have a good year out of the Red Sox bullpen?

This is where Spiff or pudge or patch chimes in and tells me I'm missing some obvious (and uninspiring) answer, like that's when Google updates their index or something...

Tagging Up

I'm generally not a big fan of "blog tagging," but this one is better than most because it actually has value, in that it compiles local restaurant recommendations from around the world. And Julie is a dear, old friend, so I will gladly accept her tag.

1. Add a direct link to your post below the name of the person who tagged you. Include the city/state and country you’re in.
Nicole (Sydney, Australia)
velverse (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)
LB (San Giovanni in Marignano, Italy)
Selba (Jakarta, Indonesia)
Olivia (London, England)
ML (Utah, USA)
Lotus (Toronto, Canada)
tanabata (Saitama, Japan)
Andi (Dallas [ish], Texas, United States)
Todd (Louisville, Kentucky, United States)
miss kendra (los angeles, california, u.s.a)
Jiggs Casey (Berkeley, CA, USA! USA! USA!)
Tits McGee (New England, USA)
Kat (Ontario, Canada)
Cheezy (London, England)
Paula (Orange County, California, U.S.)
Jeff (Colorado, USA)
Fringes (around Houston, US)
Monstro D. Whale (New England, MA)
Motormouth (New England, MA)
Julie (San Jose, CA)
Doug (Orlando, FL)

2. List your top five local eating places.

My list is based on preference, not necessarily frequency of visits. Because who doesn't already know how great Burger King is?

Chains
Jersey Mike's Subs
Five Guys Burgers & Fries
Bahama Breeze
Smokey Bones
Chipotle

Independents/Local chains
Taquitos Jalisco
Gator's Dockside Bar & Grill
Pizza Xtreme
Jackomo's
Bubbalou's Bodacious Bar-b-que

3. Tag five people and let them know they've been tagged:
I guess I'll pick off my blogroll... Jeri, JP, Marti, Paul, NPSteve. Consider yourself tagged.  Chad would certainly be an interesting one, but I don't think there are five restaurants within two hours of where he lives now. :-)

My Latest Internet Endevour

I am experimenting with a "tumblelog". This is, essentially, a clipping file of things I've found interesting, funny, or have somehow, in some way, captured my all-too-short attention span. There's an RSS feed for it, which is a perfect compliment to this type of blog as I will probably update it more frequently than I do this one with less detailed posts (if with any details at all!).

So, if you want short little bits of stuff to give you a moment of distraction or levity, check out Tumbling Back Home.

I'll still, of course, be using this blog. But I'll move things like Tony's Hot Links and whatnot over to Tumblr.

Tasty bits there, bigger bites here. There's also a link in the "menu" up right. If this all fails miserably, well... how will I know?