TheGarage Tech Blog

It’s amazing how much time can be spent on this web design stuff once you get going. I wasn’t doing any photo-blogging today but I was working on the site design. I got it laid out pretty much how I want it and I think it is kinda cool. I am sure there will some tweaks here and there over the next few days before I leave it and never touch it again.

Even if you are not in to photoblogs, I’d sure appreciate it if ya’ll would hop over to the photoblog and tell me what you think of the design. Suggestions for improvement are welcome and requested.

Oh, comments on the photos are welcome too. As if that needs to be said.

I also finally got around to creating a banner for this site. It is as close to what I want as I will be able to get with my current skills. But, my skills Paint Shop Pro are much greater now than they were just a few days ago. Two, three days straight of photo/graphics editing reveals many powerful tools. These graphics programs are simply incredible. And I am using PSP 7.0, which is several years old.

Comments on the new enormous iNCoNgrUiTieS banner are also welcome. If it sucks, have no fear, you can tell me. I’d like to hear it is great, but I’d rather have the truth. I have put up some shitty banners over the last couple of years. That’s why I have the plain-jane theme now. I came to realize that all the other ones sucked. So kindly tell me if this one sucks.

My original plan was to change the banner every few weeks by using some of my photos. Pfft. Too much work. And like I said the other day, these graphics projects tend to drive me nuts, not to mention the wrist and shoulder problems that flare up with the repetitive mouse work. I’d say that an hour of intense graphics work is like three hours of blogging. Maybe more.

I need a better ergonomic computer setup.

Now, for some actual blogging….

I watched inside the NFL in HBO the other day. I really like that show. Marino, Carter, and Collingsworth are good together. Costas ain’t that bad either, for a runt. On the last episode some chick did a piece on the Bill Romanowski / Marcus Williams incident where Romanowski flew off into a roid rage (Romanowski denies roid rage,) threw a brutal blow at Williams, breaking his face and effectively ending Marcus’ NFL career.

Now, this is not a new story, but as far as I know the interview is new. Romanowski is evidently out pimping a new book and his account of what happened is slightly different that Williams version. In a nutshell, Romanowski claims Williams threw a punch and Williams says he never threw a punch.

The lady interviewed both Romanowski and Williams for the story. I know how easy it is for “Hollywood” to frame a story and make the viewer emphasize with one side of a story over another. The news media does it all the time. I just noticed today that the news still calls the terrorists who made the coup in Iran “students”.

But anyway, all that aside, just looking at the body language between the two during their interview, I mean, how can I say this? Bill Romanowski is a psycho piece of shit, in my opinion. The dude is still on something, probably roids. I thought he was gonna slap the chick doing the interview. Romanowski said, “It’s he said, she said.”

Romanowski claims, “I grabbed him by the helmet and at the instant I was throwing a punch the helmet cam off and I hit him in the eye.” Paraphrased.

I played a lot of football in my day. Had a lot of pushing matches over the years. Never saw or heard of anything close to that kind of damage being done.

Williams, on the other hand, was sincere and believable. He might not be the brightest bulb in the box, but he just does not seem like the kind of guy to incite that degree of violence. No charges were filed and Williams received $340 K in a civil suit, about $2 MM short of what he sued for. Why he didn’t sue the Raider’s and the NFL is beyond me.

I have thought about that story every day since I saw it last Wednesday. Sometimes something just gets to you. Imagine if it were you and you had worked your ass off your entire life to make it to the NFL, only to have it all suddenly ended by a maniac in a violent rage.

I don’t mean to orphan my blog over here, but I’ve been working on my photoblog for the last couple of days. The photoblog has been around for a while but I just haven’t been messing with my pics that much (I’ve still been taking plenty, I just haven’t been spending the requisite time to get them processed and posted.)

I’ve started to add some design elements like a banner and background. I am at a stopping point with that until I get some new ideas. In the meantime, now that I am not repulsed by the site design, I will be posting some pics there probably daily. I’ve added about seven today.

Mitch commented in the post below about blogger ratings and says, in summary, that he basically don’t care. My reply, in summary, was that according to Technorati, that’s currently true for about 19.699 million others as well–and counting up at about 100,000 a day.

I used to be just like Mitch. I went a year before listing my blog with anybody. I put the ecosystem on my site for a while last year, got really pissed off and removed it. A little after a year and some very lackluster results, I decided to get serious about blogging again. There had been about a four month dry season while I was doing some contract work that I was barely posting three times a week. What little traffic I had built up slowly drained away to about 20 Google hits a day.

In contrast, for the last several months my attitude has been that if I don’t post at least three articles in a day or one really long one (target is 1500-2500 words a day, every day,) then I am not getting it done. I think of it as working to build up a small part-time business. Or at least building a prototype for one.

There are two reasons I blog. First, I like to talk a lot of crap and I like to write. A blog is a natural medium for someone who is always on a computer anyway. Writing is also a good way to work through difficult thought processes and can even be cathartic.

Second, and more importantly, I want to figure out how to implement a successful strategy for search engine optimization. What can be done once can be done over and over again. A lot of people blather on about techniques for successful SEO, but there are few who can point to a site they personally built and run that gets 50,000 plus hits per day. And even fewer who can do the same and lay claim to all the content too.

In today’s computing environment, the ability to point to a successful blog is a strong testament to one’s understanding of and ability to manipulate internet technologies from a technical standpoint and within the context of mass communication and marketing. Not to mention a strong testament to one’s tenacity and persistence.

To put my second reason into perspective, think of owning the major newspaper in a medium sized town. Every town has a newspaper or two for one reason and one reason only: they make money. A fifty-thousand daily is making money and likely has a couple dozen employees to help them do it.

A good blogger can accomplish the same thing with a only a few people or even single-handedly if they are exceptional.

Now, unless a blogger is already financially free, it is only natural for him or her to have a desire to make money at a hobby. Who doesn’t want to do that? For someone who believes they can make a little bit of extra money at what is basically a hobby, a thousand, ten thousand, or even 50,000 hits per day is a goal that at first appears quite attainable.

Alas, such numbers are quite elusive for most bloggers.

The best advice I can give to a new blogger is to have a take, and don’t suck. (That is blatantly stolen from Jim Rome, so I’m sending him some love. Jim Rome.com) To make the little saying more applicable to blogging, it needs to be embellished a little: Have a unique take, and if you suck, link often to someone who doesn’t.

If all a new blogger can say is what a bajillion other bloggers are already saying, they better be blogging for fun.

Remember there are 19.7 million blogs–and counting–and Google displays search results at only ten per page. The top two percent of blogs is 380,000. If your blog is ranked in the lower third of these, your search listing will be somewhere between pages 26,000 and 38,000.

In regards to the post that Mitch commented on where I was discussing the accuracy of the TTLB ecosystem, Technorati, Sitemeter and the others, the point I was making is that if the metrics provided from the free services are not reliable, then I may not come up with the best solution. Or the right solution even. I may even fail completely. Knowing that the metrics are skewed to the point that they are worthless is just as valuable as knowing that the information is reliable. Maybe even more so.

The bottom line, of course, is that I may need to provide for my own stats or be willing to pay for some. I am not about to be one of these guys who complain about free services. I appreciate the work put in to TTLB ecosystem, it’s a lot of fun to look at.

Why is Miers so secretive about her past? Well I’ve got a theory.

Follow me on this, and you will see that Harriet Miers indeed has a lot to be secretive about. I hope none of this comes out in the hearings; it is of a personal nature and has no business in public discourse.

Harriet Miers –> Mike Myers –> Austin Powers –> “She’s a man baby!”

Using this euridite line of deductive reasoning that is closely related to Farrakhans numeralology bullshit, I think I know the secret to Mier’s past…

Has anyone ever seen Harriet Miers and Michael J. Fox together?

I just noticed, on September 17, I submitted my 1,000th post to this blog. In the 29 days since, I have posted about 100 additional pieces. Each post is about 300 words, on average, and I post about three pieces a day, on average.

I ginned up that little report so I could gauge my production. Those are rough numbers over the lifetime of the blog. I excluded HTML from the count.

Including all the words written over at Repoman.com over the last five years (I have not written there in well over a year,) I bet I’ve written almost a million words on the internet as well have recorded 10,000 photographs. Of course only about one out of ten photographs will ever get published, but the same time and effort goes in to getting each shot–even the bad ones. Actually quite a bit more time goes in to the published photos due to the cleaning and cropping and whatnot, but still, I’m just saying, it’s a lot of photos.

Doohan’s ashes to be launched into space along with fan tributes.

I don’t know. Seems to me they should expend every available resource to figure out some way to beam Scotty’s ashes to space. Anything less than ‘givin it all they got’ would be inappropriate. Once the technicalities are overcome, they can get Captain James T. Kirk to flip open his communicator and say, for the first and last time, “Beam Up Scotty”.

If nothing else, they should make up an elaborate hoax. The people interested in this kind of stuff would most likely buy it.

I just had an epiphany while cleaning the garage. I am referring to the regular garage that is full of garage-type crap as opposed to TheGarage where the secret lab is located.

The epiphany? I had just cleaned this bitch up a few weeks before the Hurricane Rita evacuation. Now I’m pissed.

And what really sucks, TheGarage is in similar piss-poor condition. I guess when I put everything back, I just put everything in the general area where it goes. It didn’t actually put stuff up where it goes.

We didn’t even get any rain, though there was some horrendous wind damage. That’s why all the crap from oustide the house is stacked to the ceiling inside the garage. When you are expecting winds from a category 4 hurricane, the last thing you want is to get hit with a mop bucket flying through the air at 145 mph.

Oh well.

My hits for today are in the tank, I think. I don’t usually get a lot of daily hits but on average I’ll get about 200 a day, with as many as 2000 on some rare occasions and around 500 or so several times a month.

But today, like I said, hits are dismal. I think. Sitemeter shows that I have a whopping 23 page views today. Not visits; page views. So, I start checking around to see what’s up and open the referral log on my server. Hmmm. 40 referrals. Page views usually run anywhere from 50 to 150% times referrals. Oh well. I have pretty much accepted that the free online services are but general guidelines anyway but it still pisses me off for some reason.

Same with TTLB. When Bear rebuilt his indexes a few weeks ago my incoming unique links stat was knocked down by about 2/3 to somewhere in the mid fiftties. Now I am back up to almost 100 incoming unique but my rank keeps falling the more incoming links I accrue. If I look at the listing for Marauding Marsupials, for the past week I should have been ranked somewhere between 3300 and 3500. Today I have 95 unique incoming and I am ranked 4044. In the big list of Marsupials, the last blog with 95 unique incoming links is ranked 2613.

At least I am back to being a marsupial. I had been hanging with the riff-raff in the rodent section for the past couple of weeks even though I had enough incoming links to be with the marsupials.

The onliest thing I can think of is that Bear’s ranking formula must be docking me for some of my incoming links. If that is the case, I would rather not have credit for the links that are docking me. Here’s why:

Like I said in a previous post about Search Engine Optimization, the ranking systems like TTLB and Technorati are for the most part useless in the greater scheme of SEO. But… If you are a webmaster who is trying to optimize your site for search engines, those ranking services provide valuable feedback as to the success, or lack thereof, of your SEO efforts. If the stats coming back are whack, a lot of value of the ranking is lost.

Speaking of whack stats, Technoratis has me with 6 incoming links. WTF! I hardly ever go there anymore. Except for maybe to find out what not to blog about.

Same with Sitemeter. If I am trying different things to increase my traffic, and I do not have faith in the counter, then how do I make decisions about which strategies and tactics are paying off the most? Or more accurately, since this is a post about accuracy, how can I be confident that I am making the right decisions on how to spend my efforts if I have no confidence in the information on which those decisions are being based?

Short answer: It is very difficult.

Gigglechick finds her mom’s crochet magazine cover to be funny. I don’t see what the big deal is.

Can you see what the big deal is?

x-posted in my Photo blog.