You know…I think I am going to try to wean myself off posting every day. I’ve missed four days so far in November and I feel bad about it, and to me that is a sign that I take it too seriously. I’m not DCist or Lifehacker, I don’t have multiple authors, there’s just me. So while I will still try to post daily, I won’t kill myself if I miss a day, because it’s not that big a deal. I think.
I had a dream last night about my 10-year high school reunion which is tomorrow. I suppose I should rent Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, too.
Every year I like to make nominations for the Bloggies, and this year is no different. I spent a very large part of my day today working on this; my wife had to work late tonight anyway so I even stayed an hour past my normal end time to finish making my nominations. I know that none of my picks will turn up on the list, but it’s important to me to choose people I think are deserving of the individual awards. I also like to give my choices some linky love, so here’s a listing of my picks. I did get a bit silly for the “Weblog of the Year” category - who can really pick the ultimate weblog? All of these, though, are worth a look.
• Best Application: WordPress, Feedburner, Ping-o-Matic
• Best Australia/NZ: AustraliaBlog, Beautiful Monsters, Pop Smear
• Best Asia: Motoki Log, Japan Window, My Thailand Diary
• Best Africa/Middle East: Healing Iraq, Israelity, The White Path
• Best Europe: A Nice Gesture, BlogZira, Finland for Thought
• Best Britain/Ireland: Neil’s World, London Underground Tube Diary, A Welsh View
• Best Latin America: Line of Sight, Made in Brazil, Blog for Cuba
• Best Canada: Fawny, The Wish Jar, Neuroti.ca
• Best America: Michelle Malkin, Bionic Ear Blog, Neil Gaiman’s Journal
• Best Photography: Cute Overload, Beyond Monochrome, Photojenic
• Best Crafts: MAKE: Blog, Luv 2 Crochet, One Hour Craft
• Best Food: Asado Argentina, Burrito Blog, The Impulsive Buy
• Best Sports: Bali Dive Blog, The Homeless Equestrian, Woody’s Kayak Trip Reports
• Best Music: Music Thing, Chrome Waves, Soundroots
• Best Entertainment: MoovGoog Movie Blog, Reality TV Blog, Simply Broadway
• Best Politics: The Washington Monthly, Demagogue, LiberalOasis
• Best Web Development: Weblogs Tool Collection, Wisdump, ScriptyGoddess
• Best Computers/Technology: Museum of Modern Betas, Googling Google, TechCrunch
• Best Topical: Strange New Products, ModBlog, Sarcastic Sex Toy Blog
• Best GLBT: Big Queer Blog, Lesbian Dad, Queerty
• Best Teen: Agent Tim Online, At0mica.net, Indiegirl
• Most Humorous: Office Humor Blog, Waiter Rant, The Sneeze
• Best Writing: Alternate Currency, New York Hack, TactileJunkie
• Best Group: DeafDC.com, Radio Free Blogistan, WIMN’s Voices
• Best Community: Overheard in New York, Metafilter, Digg
• Best Design: Clusterfook, PhotoMatt, The Shape of Days
• Best Secret: Time For Your Meds, My Pink Room, Cygnoir’s Quill
• Best New: Mishka Zena, Los Brushes, The Cat Lady
• Lifetime: Erika - Wonderbliss, Christine - Big Pink Cookie, Chris Pirillo
• Of the Year: Popgadget, The Official Dreamhost Weblog, Vegan Lunch Box, Baruchito’s Homecage
I just got through tagging the entries around Empress Wu’s death. Damn, that sucked. Much worse than tagging those around Toadstool’s death. I am going to need to go home and hug kitties big-time.
So I have tagged almost all of 2006 now. Tagging is not easy; as I mentioned it requires reading everything. It’s also been a bit of a pain because my site doesn’t like me opening so many windows on it at once; I keep getting timeouts trying to load edit pages. Only four more years to tag now.
Today is another woot-off, but I’ve had four meetings today and I missed the electronic sudoku game that would’ve been $10 shipped. Nothing else has been remotely tempting, really.
Am I advertising too much? I feel like I might be spending too much time at PayPerPost. At first I thought I would only make a few paid posts per week, but I’ve been doing it much more than that. I’ve made quite a bit of cash from it, but I don’t know how I’m feeling integrity-wise. I’ve been checking my stats and I see that I’m giving the advertisers their money’s worth - people are coming to my site by searching for things I’ve written paid posts about.
I don’t worry about it with my LiveJournal friends, because I created a filter to share posts with them. So the advertising is opt-in there (I’m not getting paid for it, I’m just mirroring posts from my site), and I do get a few comments on those posts.
But I don’t know how my regular readers feel about it. Do you care? Is it turning you off from my site? Would you prefer I did it less frequently, or not at all? I only know a very few people who read my site regularly - probably less than 10 keep up with me on a regular basis, with a few more who are occasional readers.
I know it’s my blog and I can do what I want, but I’ve been been blogging for five years, it’s my favorite hobby, and I don’t want to drive away all my readers. Please chime in - how do you feel about the advertising I’ve been doing on my blog?
I am testing my post-by-email function. I’m pretty sure it will work for LiveJournal, and I think it will work on WordPress, but I’m not 100% sure. I don’t really have anything useful to say, I just wanted to try out my email posting! (I am sending this to two addresses, rather than posting to WordPress and letting Live+Press do the dirty work.) Whee!
This is my third video blog entry! Putfile was being screwy, so I looked for alternative hosts and came across ZippyVideos. (If you want to sign up, please let me know so I can give you a referral link. Or don’t, up to you.) Anyway, this is still in WMV format, because for some reason the MPG version I made isn’t uploading. I e-mailed the ZippyVideos people to ask about it; if I can get it uploaded I’ll mention that here. Also, I’ve updated the links to the first two entries to point to the new locations at ZippyVideos. Stuff is public at ZippyVideos, which is a little odd…people I don’t know are watching me already! Anyway, the non-ASL-literate can check below for the English translation. And yes, I know everything is a little blurry, leaving trails…I’ll have to figure that out at sometime other than 1:00 in the morning.
By the way, I also started a community on LiveJournal called
signing_blogs, so join that if you’re into this kind of thing.
Added: I’ve moved my video blogs again, this time to YouTube. It is decidedly more Web 2.0 than the other two services, and it gives a 100mb upload limit instead of 20mb. And it already seems to have a lot of deaf users, which is a major plus because it helps develop the signing blog community.
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I feel like sharing with you all my nominations for the 2006 Bloggies. As you may notice, I got bored before the end.
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Ooookay…I think I have successfully upgraded to WordPress 2.0. It seems like everything has gone okay. The only thing I am not sure about is the Feedburner stuff; the plugin is not compatible with WP2 and the workaround was a little confusing for me. Hopefully nobody is reading with wp-rss.php or wp-rss2.php directly, because I’m not sure what to do with those, but the main URLs - /feed and the legacy full.xml - seem to redirect okay. I am really going to miss Live+Press until it is updated to work with WP2; I will go back to manually copying my entries into LiveJournal. But unteins has always been pretty responsive in Live+Press development so I’m sure something will happen with that eventually. There are a few other plugins I have yet to test - Text Replace and The Execution of All Things being important ones I’d like to get back. But for now it seems to have gone okay, I think/hope.
Whee, it’s a second video blog entry! I will probably just keep storing stuff on Putfile and translating it here, unless I figure out how to do subtitles on the signing in which case I’ll just put a link to each new entry. The quality still isn’t good; I have to figure out how to adjust compression settings. English translation below!
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Okay, I just have to show off one of my gifts from yesterday. Those of you that understand ASL can click here; those of you that don’t can peek at the translation below.
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