On This Day Revisited

Only hours after seeking out (and finding) an On This Day link, I found a Blogger Hack which puts it at the top of each entry.

Seeking Out New Blog-Forms

Eighteen days of semi-serious blogging and I've only just come across Technorati - a blog search tool. Blogger fares less-well than other tools in most categories, (but it's both free and advert free), but all Blogger posts automatically get added, as do those of some other tools. For those blog tools that don't do this, a post can be pinged to Technocrati

Come The Revolution

I'm proud to announce that my Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Plasma Rifle of Forgiving Tolerance. What's yours?

(via RedSugar)

Thank You BBC

Well that didn't take long
BBC On This Day

Serial Blogseeking

I'm slowly working through David's sites. The funny thing is, the links I find most interesting are "second generation" the sites that other people link to such as
Today in History - BrainyHistory
What a shame that it focusses so heavily on US History - I'm off to see if I can find a UK (or even World) equivalent

Wake Up And Smell The Coffee

I used to wake up to the smell of freshly roasted coffee every morning - the Kenco factory was two streets away. But it didn't put me off - still the best smell of the day. Time to pour and take the caffeine hit (what is the point of decaff?)

Café Society

Yesterday we had coffee in Starbucks. I had presumed that the name came from the character in Battlestar Gallactica. It seem that I'm not well enough read and that Moby Dick is the source - or at least almost. It still doesn't explain the missing apostrophe.

I'm old enough to remember the days when the High Streets of England where sprinkled with Tea shops - every major town had a Lyons and even when they dissapeared in the late 60s, there where plenty of places around for tea and a bun. The tea shops sold coffee, but no one bought it, those were the days before the English had learned how to make it. Then suddenly, about 15 years ago, all the tea shops seemed to dissappear, I remeber visiting Epsom with my parents and finding that the last local tea shop had gone.

And then - when? - about five years ago, maybe less, everywhere suddenly had a US style coffee shop and now every town centre seems to have three. In general I'm not a fan of the Americanisation of England, but the current spate of cafés are much nicer and more relaxed than the old tea shops

A Dark Place

It's a strange and sometimes dark place, the world of blogging. After my last post, I headed off to David's links. The first of these was to A Perfect Anomaly. A quick scan down the posts and this post caught my eye, refering me here, where a totally unrelated comment led me to the extraordinary 63 Days

Close Encounters

I'm starting to get visitors
To this page I mean. Not large quantities, but there seem to have been 6 different people (or rather 6 different people so far). Probably entirely due to David who was kind enough to include me in a post made up entirely of links - I'm off to follow them.

The Wrong Blog

Having published the post below I (as is my habit) checked that it had posted OK; it hadn't; but the screen said published OK; it hadn't. It finally dawned on me that I'd posted it to the wrong blog (there's one incorporated in next season's FF site). I wonder how often I'll do that - and whether anyone will notice.

Taking that thought further, presumably at any given time there are hundreds of posts somewhere other than where the poster intended them to be. It's a strange medium - there isn't really an equivalent to that in the traditional written word

Late Night Blogging

Once again it's later than I'd like it to be when I reach this point. I don't know how other people manage complete with trawls of half the internet.

I suppose its because I guard the time I spend in front of the PC jelously and am always looking to get something productive out of it. At the moment I'm working both on ItOpens and my closed membership Fanatasy Football site for next season. I carry on until I've solved at least one problem. Tonight's problem revolved around a bug in the stylesheet for a page in the latter. Solved, so a feeling of achievement. At the moment, these pages (and trawls of elsewhere on the Intranet), are just end of evening wind-down activities.

Writer's Blog

Having recently started this weblog, regardless of whether anyone is reading this or not (the evidence suggests "not"), I feel under a certain pressure to post. I sit in front of the screen wondering what to write and - nothing. Now, in the real world, I'm known as someone who can talk indefinitely on virtually any subject (and some people may even have the impression that I know what I'm talking about), but when it comes to writing things down, the casual dishonesty of giving the impression that you are imparting wisdom just doesn't work - well not for me anyway. I shall call this writing paralysis Writer's Blog.

Tracking Back

I'm very new to this blogging lark, so finding something about Tracking Back was very useful. The power of the blog this as I found it from a RedSugar entry.
Then I had to figure out how to do tracking back with Blogger, it can't do it, but luckily there's an add-in from Haloscan. Finally I had to figure out how to do a ping - this also courtesy of Haloscan.

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Getting Soft In My Old Age

Below I said how it had boosted my ego that someone had linked to my site. I was so chuffed I put a link to her site in my links on the right hand side of this page. Now, in reading her blog more closely I discover that's she's a rabid, Bush-supporting right-winger who has just promoted Buy A Gun Day. Once upon a time I would have been embarassed and angry about this in equal measures and would have removed the post and the link. But her site is well presented and very readable and I'm still chuffed by the link. I'm getting soft in my old age.

Knowing The Audience

To publish successfully, one must know one's audience - so who are my audience? Well as far as I can tell, I haven't had any visitors yet, so I can either
a) imagine my audience to be anyone I wish or
b) be realistic and recognise that I'm the audience.

Taking (b) first (because I know this audience better), what does the audience want? Probably the same thing as I do - a conversation. Now that wasn't too difficult was it. Talking to oneself electronically somehow seems less "dangerous" than talking to oneself out loud.

And the imaginary audience? Who would I like them to be. Well that's easy as well, people who enjoy reading what I have to say. So that's probably me as well then.

Heavy Topics

All the topics below look extraordinarily heavy at the moment, which is probably why I haven't posted for a few days. I have a tendency to drift towards the heavy. Memo to self: try to keep posts short and light-hearted.

Future Topics

I've had a little think about some of the areas I want to touch on here. So far I've come up with:
The Power Of The Internet
Aging
Proof By Induction
Reverse Polish Notation
UML
Searching The Internet
Hand In Hand
Poetry
Demographics Of Weblogs
Weblogs - Private Or Public
RSS and Atom

Watching the Counters

I (and I suppose most people who have ever built a web site) am obsessed (too strong a word, but it will suffice), by the hit counter on my web site. I've had various sites in the relatively short lifespan of the internet. The only site that had any hits to speak of was a site that gave the first lines of a few hundred books - at it's peak it was clocking up 50 hits a day. Not a lot, but as I didn't average 50 website visits a day, I figured that made me a provider rather than a consumer of websites. I can't remember exactly what caused the demise of that site about five years ago, but apart from a succesful Fantasy Football site which catered for a closed group of friends, I remained a resolute consumer until earlier this year when I decided to give the first-line site another go. This was mainly to flex my amateur skills in different directions in particular PHP and MySQL. But of course I was vain enough to add a hit counter. Hit Counters have moved on and I used one, StatCounter which had the two key requisites (free and no annoying ads), while having more than just a basic count. Funnily enough, the number of page loads a day currently averages about 50, so I suppose the number of extra consumers has been neatly balanced out by the number of extra providers.
The extra statistics show the number of visitors and when they visit. The time between visits is slowly reducing, currently averaging about an hour and a quarter.
But the biggest fascination is where the visitors are from. So far I've attracted visitors from 50 countries (apart from Morocco and South Africa, none of these are in Africa), the bulk of which are not English speaking. And they haven't visited the site by accident, they've got there from a Google search on an author or a title or a First Line - in English.
Just as interesting is the visits (and lack of visits) from US States 38 (+ DC) have visited, which means that 12 haven't. Have a look on my Spreading The Word page.

The Wonder Of The Internet

I, like most people, am old enough to remember life before the Internet. How quickly we've all taken it for granted. The Gramophone was the new Theatre; the Radio was the new Gramophone, the Television was the new Radio. But the Internet is so much more than the new Television. And it's all happened so fast. Think about the first time you used the Internet and how much it's improved since then. Now think how recently that was. Frightening isn't it.

Teddy Bear Tales

I was going to call this blog "Teddy Bear Tales".
Why "Teddy Bear Tales"? The answer is in three parts:
The Teddy Bear bit comes indirectly from the nickname we have for a friend of my wife's. I was at home one unseasonably (in England the weather is always unseasonable - either unseasonably warm or unseasonably cold) warm day in early Spring, alone in the house pretending to read a book, but in truth dozing, when the doorbell rang. I gathered my various loose limbs and brain fragments together and headed for the front door, where I found an attractive woman with what I think is referred to as strawberry blonde hair. She just stood there. In my experience when one opens one's front door, the onus is on the caller to start off the conversation and as I was half asleep and had no idea who she was or what she wanted, I just stood there too. This went on for what seemed some time (whole seconds probably) until I summoned up the wit to speak.
"Yes?", I said (perhaps "you rang?" would have been wittier, but I'm afraid "yes" was all I could muster).
"Jill sent me to pick up the spigots", she said. I was awake enough to remember that Jill was my wife (still is - I used "was" because the conversation happened in the past, not because I was married in the past) and that she was out running a stall for the Guides and Brownies at a local fête. Jill had obviously sent this woman to pick up something.
"She said that they're in a plastic carrier bag in the hall", she added helpfully. Now if you'd been to our house you'd realise that that wasn't in the least bit helpful. Everything in our house is in a carrier bag in the hall. But luckily I turned and tripped over the bag of spigots, which I handed to the visitor.
Now here I have a confession to make. I said she said "spigots", but to this day I have no idea what she asked for or what I gave her or whether the two matched, but she seemed happy enough and left. I went back to my snoozy book reading.
When Jill came home she said: "You made quite an impression on Ann". (Ann it transpired was the name of the visitor and was a new friend of Jill's). "She came back and said 'Isn't he gorgeous! He's like a great big teddy bear' ". Now not even my mother would ever refer to me as gorgeous, but I'm undeniably big (6 feet 7 tall and a little overweight) and always dishevelled so I guess that the soubriquet wasn't entirely inappropriate.
"Ann" also happens to be the name of our daughter and so the "new" Ann become known as "Teddy Bear Ann" or more simply "TBA", we still refer to her as TBA - I suspect that she knows that we do. No-one has ever referred to me as a "Teddy Bear" since, even though Ann still has it as part of her name, so maybe it's time to re-appropriate it.
The Tales bit is easy. It's a bit of a family trait, my late father and my late elder sister also suffered from it: an inability to relate an incident simply - a need to tell the whole story. I'm sure you've spotted that already.
And Teddy Bear Tales as a whole, well I have a love of phrases that sound like they have two different meanings (is that homophones?) and we all know that Teddy Bear Tails are very short.

So why isn't it called "Teddy Bear Tales". Well can you imagine saying "read my blog - it's called 'Teddy Bear Tales' "? Well neither can I

What Now, Why Now?

Blogs have been around for years and years - in fact I've been registered with Blogger for over two years, so why start now? Probably because, I've started working on the web site (or should that be website - I've never been sure) for next season's Seventh Floor Fantasy Football League (if this blog becomes regular then I'm sure that will become clearer) and dusted off my old Blogger account as an easy way to populate a news page. Simultaneously the hits on my site ItOpens incresed sharply and a bit of digging through StatCounter showed that I was getting hits coming from the site www.redsugar.com/muse which turned out to be the weblog of (at a guess) a red-headed American woman, who had recommended my site. Ego fed ego, the thought that someone liked my site enough to recommend it to others and also the realisation of the power of the weblog and here we are.

Well that's the "Why Now?". As to the "What Now", why don't you stick arouns and find out?