blogging

I’m suffering from a little bout of writer’s block these days. When you combine that with the fact that I haven’t been cruising the ‘net finding new and funny things, it makes for a dearth of new content on this site. I was thinking that it would be cool to display a single post from the archives at the top of the home page when there’s nothing new to see. Something like, “Hey! Sorry I haven’t posted anything new in x days, but check out this from y years ago …” I got as far as writing the SQL for it, but then I stopped working on it. I think it’s a good idea, though. Maybe someone will decide to write a plugin to do this. (Or, more likely, someone already has and I am just too lazy to find it.)

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I just noticed that a few days ago was the eighth anniversary of this blog. It seems like only yesterday …

An excellent tutorial from G: AdSense Optimization Demo

Two weeks ago was the seventh anniversary of this blog. I meant to do something exciting to celebrate the event but I completely forgot. (Does that make this site one year old in dog years? Or is it the other way around?)

Today marks my 2500th day of blogging. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate than with two lovely collections of elephant jokes. I love elephant jokes.
And while you’re enjoying these elephant jokes, why not make a donation to The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee? What a fine thing to do on a Wednesday afternoon!

Okay, Dean got me into this. The idea is to share five things about yourself that people may not know, then tag five bloggers so they can rinse, lather and repeat.

I was tagged by Speaking Freely, who was tagged by MarketingGuy, who was tagged by Aaron Shear, who was tagged by Avinash Kaushik. The game was started by Jeff Pulver.

I’m going to pass it on to Kelly, Josh, Sunil, Steve, and Mikey.

(It’s been a long, long time since I joined a meme.)

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I have been planning to add an “About” page to this site for about four years. Everybody who’s anybody has an “About” page. People who visit and know not what a blog is must wonder what this site is “About”. I just never seem to get around to it. I have no idea what this site is “About”. And every time I take a crack at it I can never seem to be as pithy as all the other great “About” pages I’ve seen on blogs over the years.

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If you’re wondering why BlogRolling.com never seems to show your site as recently-updated, it’s likely because you’re not pinging it. I’ve been using the BlogRolling sidebar for years and just yesterday I noticed that my own site never seems to appear near the top of the list. MovableType was apparently pinging the BlogRolling servers, but WordPress by default does not. To make sure your blog is pinging the BlogRolling servers, make sure to add http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/ to the “Update Services” list on the “Writing” tab of the “Options” panel.

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There’s a very well-written article at danah.com comparing and contrasting Friendster and MySpace. This should be required reading for any corporate execs looking to make money in the social blogging universe.

What’s at stake here is what is called “subcultural capital” by academics. It is the kind of capital that anyone can get, if you are cool enough to know that it exists and cool enough to participate. It is a counterpart to “cultural capital” which is more like hegemonic capital. That was probably a bit too obscure. Let me give an example. Opera attendance is a form of cultural capital - you are seen as having money and class and even if you think that elongated singing in foreign languages is boring, you attend because that’s what cultured people do. You need the expensive clothes, the language, the body postures, the social connects and the manners to belong. Limitations are economic and social. Rave attendance is the opposite. Anyone can get in, in theory… There are certainly hodgepodged clothes, street language and dance moves, but most folks can blend in with just a little effort. Yet, the major limitation is knowing that the rave exists. “Being in the know” is more powerful than money. You can’t buy your way into knowledge of a rave.

On Tuesday I attended a panel at SXSW titled “Video Blog Business Models“. The description of the panel — from the SXSW website — was “We have the technology, but where is the money? Learn the newest ideas for pulling revenue from the new world of blogged video content.”

It was moderated by (MOD) Chris Nolan, Editor & Founder of Spot-on.com. (I should note that of all the panels I attended at SXSW, she was by far the best moderator.)

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Whoa. I don’t know how I haven’t seen this yet. Google lets you target specific sections of your page as more or less relevant to AdSense. This should be required reading for all bloggers and — hell — should be part of the default WP install …

What is section targeting and how do I implement it?

Not many other people can say this: Today is the five year anniversary of my first blog entry. (This site’s been running for about nine years, but I didn’t start blogging until five years ago today.) It seems like just yesterday … but this is my 2,550th post …

What are the chances that after two+ years of little-to-no posting that anybody will be interested in visiting this site again? I’m guessing pretty slim. In my defense: I’ve been extraordinarily busy. Poor davidgagne.net here was also deluged with about 100 spam comments each day, which is one of the main reasons I finally switched to WordPress. I loved MovableType, but sometimes a man’s gotta bite the bullet. I’ve also learned more than most could hope to care to know about PHP and SQL (and Apache, and Linux, and ASP, and IIS, and …) in the last two+ years, so I’m seriously digging WP.

It looks like I was able to successfully convert my site to WordPress. Maybe now I’ll start posting more often again. :0)

Also: How to Write a Plug-In