BunkBlog

Underworld userpics for you Livejournal users:

This is something I didn’t know existed before. You can view the latest posts to all of LiveJournal in one place. Two things struck me: I know a lot of the old hands, and they seem to post an awful lot, but none of them were shown when I glanced at the feed; second, there’s a lot of Russian folks on LJ.

Oh, and there is an RSS version as well. Gotta love RSS…

For you Livejournal users, I knocked out some userpics today.

The LJ Times – Randomly created newspaper based on AP photos and LJ entries.

You belong in Time Enough For Love. You are older than you look. Your wit and wisdom are prized by others. People throw themselves on you, begging to be with you.

Which Heinlein Book Should You Have Been A Character In?
brought to you by Quizilla

From Jeremyful.

I’ve moved the past 14 months worth of LJ entries into Movable Type (minus comments), and I’ve added the RSS feed as a syndication for LJ. Anyone who wants to keep up with the site via LJ’s friends pages can now add the feed to their friends list. Those who read via any other RSS feed aggregator, look on the main page for the “syndicate me” link.

Now let’s see if I can sit still for a while…

_Tuesday_

Weblogs, blogs, online journals – all the same thing, different ways of referring to the same phenomenon. This phenomenon is not new, although you’d think it was invented in 2001 by the sounds of the media coverage of the blogging revolution, the traditional media way of describing nearly anything they don’t really understand but feel may be destabilizing their way of business. In my opinion, weblogs are part vanity site and part content management.

Like most personal websites, mine has long had a series of personal posts from me to the adoring public. My adoring public tends to be geeks, and not very many of them either. Nor do they seem to adore me too awful much, but I digress. The entire purpose of a vanity site, as personal websites were once called with derision, is to tell the world about yourself, to stake a claim to a tiny piece of the electronic zeitgeist. To that end, we old-school webgeeks painstakingly worked on webpages that looked like parts of a whole, building our own menus of links in text editors with exciting names like vi and notepad. It is a tedious way to update a site, and so many vanity sites tend to fall into disrepair. Fortunately, nothing actually decays online, so long as your host stays viable. There are a plethora of dead sites out there, with “last updated” dates in the last century.

Businesses which publish frequently-changing content online need a way to make that process simple, as well as accessible to the vast majority of their employees who are scared of that whole cyberspace information superhighway thing in the magic box. So, some clever folks came up with content management systems (CMS). The author of a document doesn’t have to know anything about HTML, CSS, tags, links, and other such exciting geek stuff. The author just writes up his story in whatever (usually proprietary but sometimes web-based) interface the CMS uses. This separation of content and format is usually based on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which kick serious butt in general.

So, we had serious tools for businesses, costing thousands of dollars, used by CNN and CNet and other big news sites. And, we had the personal users typing away in their text editors, hoping they didn’t miss a closing tag and hose their layout. Along came weblogging tools. The best-known tool is Blogger, and others include Movable Type, Greymatter, PHPNuke, and Livejournal. Livejournal was started in March 1999, Blogger in August 1999, and Movable Type in October 2001; I can’t find authoritative start dates for the Greymatter and PHPNuke projects. For most people, the two big players are the two oldest: Livejournal and Blogger. I’m a big LJ fan, and I’ll try to explain why.

All weblogging tools allow comments, although many users may disable that capability. Although I had a decent number of people coming to my site with my old manual system, I had no way for them to comment aside from email or a guestbook. The guestbook, like most guestbooks, has been largely stagnant for years; almost nobody emailed me from my site. So, interactivity being the hallmark of the web, weblogs allow a discussion to occur centered on any comment you put on your site.

I wanted a way to keep my website looking fresh, without the pain of editing a full page of HTML each time I had something to say. LJ has been very effective in fooling people that come to my site, making them think I actually have new content almost daily. LJ embeds into the HTML of my homepage, allowing me to use it as a CMS for my own page. But, the great thing about LJ is the community.

When you join LJ, your comments are on their servers. This is often a problem, as their servers have issues due to expansion beyond the founder’s wildest dreams. The architecture of the LJ code, some have said, is not really capable of handling the load to which it is subjected, and the servers slow down too often. These are valid complaints, in my experience, but I’m still sticking with the service. The good thing about a central repository is that every LJ user is findable in some way. It may be a tedious way of going through every user, which number is approaching a million, but it is possible to find anyone on LJ. It’s easier if they want to be found, as LJ has “interests” to search, as well as having regional searches. If you want to find everyone in your town that has a journal, you can. The immediate outgrowth of the searchability of LJ is the Friends Page. Rather than visit 10 different blogger sites, you can just go to your own Friends Page, which is in a style you specify, and view all the entries written by people (or communities) that you find interesting. No need to search with Google or wander around Blogspot, you can just hit the Random button on LJ. Or, look at the people that others find interesting. Many times I have added friends that were friends of older friends. Very goofy-sounding, I know, but the web of connections is the big draw to LJ.

When people join LJ and then leave to start a blog on their personal site, I just look at the single line of code it took me to embed my journal on my homepage, and wonder why.

Livejournal – because you like to think people care.

I noticed that very few of my friends are friends of Robont, so for the few of you that are, sorry to be redundant.

Billiam is infamous on LJ, and he “died” back in January as I recall. He’s alive again, and posting the usual hilariously bad shit. But, he is somewhat famous outside of LJ now. Yahoo Internet Life has an article about his first incarnation, before he was unmasked. I find him less entertaining now that I know for sure that he is a joke. The ambivalence before was kind of cool. Most times, I assumed he was a huge fiction, just playing with people. Other times, he seemed almost real. Now that we all know he’s a character, does that diminish the interest his posts hold? Does he no longer have hordes of nubile women sending him boobshots? These are the important questions of our time.
current_mood: contemplative

The statistics, in more detail than you can possibly need, for my website in the month of December: right here.

Things to note: search terms for this month are skewed heavily toward XXXmas and such; the CinPics and Lianna directories combine to be more than half the bandwidth for December. Go figure.

And, for some reason I’ve got a lot of hits from Saudi Arabia, but they’re all looking at Lianna’s Christmas Archive. Perverts.

OK, there is no way I’m going to make or attempt to keep any resolutions, but here’s the quiz result anyway:

Take the What Should Your New Year’s Resolution Be? Quiz

Added a page (now gone) of holiday photos, all taken Christmas morning.

Alex was being very greedy that day, go figure.

In other news, we signed the papers today that “petition” the court for me to adopt the boy. Not sure how long until the court date and all that, but it’s one step closer. Bio-dad has never even seen this little cutie, can you imagine?
current_music: Kevin & Bean – Swallow my Eggnog

Added a long-planned new thought on my site. If you need to explain to someone why ICQ is better than MSN (or Yahoo is better than MSN, or AIM is better than MSN), I’ve listed all the good and bad of each client.

While the boy napped, I played with my forums.

There are now two skins available to choose from, with more as I find ones that don’t suck. There are also several languages: English, French, Spanish, Swedish, and Dutch (formal or informal options).

Next up – Klingon?

To go along with my new LJ Styles, I’ve also updated my forums with some new software. Feel free to wander over there, and please fill out the poll in the News forum.

OK, once more into the LJ Styles breach…

I’ve revamped all four styles on my Livejournal. The two biggest changes are, of course, “LastN” and “Friends” pages, since they’re seen most. Following a model I discovered on the community, those two pages have been rebuilt using DIV tags instead of nesting TABLEs. The reason? Speed. Now, when you load my pages, you’ll not have to wait for the entire meta-table of entries to load before you can read the top ones. The Friends page also loads progressively like that. You’ll know you’ve hit the end when you see the “skiplinks” block (Previous 15 entries etc.).

I’m assuming this will look funky on Netscape 4.x, but it should be viewable on it at least. The boxes will be out of whack, but you really should upgrade to NS 6.2 anyway. Or Opera.

Cheers.

I guess with the advent of Naked Parts and their ilk, we don’t really need to do another Nekkid XXXmas this year, but I will miss the fun from last year, checking the post every hour or so to see who else got up the nerve…

To my friends in Asia and Australia, Merry Christmas! Those of us in the States just have to wait till tomorrow. 🙂

Some random thoughts for you budding web designers:

• Validate your web sites against HTML standards, so every browser can see your site.
• Don’t waste your time on a “splash screen” to start the site. Look at the big sites (Yahoo, CNN, etc) – Nobody visits them for their intro screen. Most people will either blow your site off because of it or bookmark your real index page.
• Your site is not best viewed in any particular browser. Don’t tell visitors what to use, some don’t have a choice.
• Consider heading over to Bobby to check your site for accessibility issues. It’s a requirement for .gov sites, but a good idea for anyone. You don’t want to block some of your visitors, do you?
• Don’t use the following:
  1. Poorly contrasting colors
  2. Tiny fonts
  3. Fixed size fonts. Those 8-pixel high things look like dots on a high-res monitor.
  4. Flash as your only means of navigation. Ever hear of Lynx?

Just my pet peeves of the day. I’ve been surfing some “personal” sites today, made by folks who think they’re Picasso with a mouse or something. Ick. Not everyone has DSL…
current_music: Nickelback – Good Times Gone
current_mood: tired

WELL I had another conversation with someone about Microsoft V Linux
I would love to know why I get into some many conversations about it, it much be because I am willing to stand up for companies that many people put down Namely Microsoft.
I wish people would just realize that companies are not out there to give you everything you want on a silver plater.

Um, let’s see how many English errors we can count, and then subtract that from the level of seriousness with which to take the opinions expressed therein.

Again I say – If you want someone to take your opinions seriously, spellcheck, proofread and then re-think the entire posting. After you’ve thought about it and run it through “ispell” or some other such tool, then go ahead and post. Your views might still be stupid, but more people will listen to them anyway.
current_music: The Vandals – Christmas Time for my Penis