I got an e-mail from a friend who’s in the process of switching over to Movable Type, and he asked if I had any recommendations for plugins or tweaks to the core system. Here’s a look at what I’m currently using:
Geekery
Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.
C-List Blogging
According to Dave Pollard’s breakdown, I’m a ‘C-List Blogger’.
Extrapolating some work I did last year, only about 20,000 blogs (a mere 0.4% of all active blogs) have a sizeable audience (more than 10 regular visitors and more than 150 hits per average day), and readership in a typical day is only a little more than three million people, each spending an average of about 20 minutes flitting among 15 blog pages.
Using Shirky’s Power Law, and adding in RSS subscriptions to the hit count totals, that would break today’s blogosphere audience down roughly as follows:
| Total Hits/Day |
Average Hits/Day per Blog |
Minimum Hits/Day per Blog |
Average Aggregate Reader Attention/Day per Blog |
|
| 100 A-list bloggers | 15 million | 150,000 | 15,000 | 1700 hrs |
| 2,000 B-list bloggers | 5 million | 2,500 | 1,000 | 62 hrs |
| 18,000 C-list bloggers | 9 million | 500 | 150 | 13 hrs |
| 80,000 up-and-coming bloggers | 8 million |
100 | 50 | 2.5 hrs |
| 5 million remaining active bloggers | 15 million | 3 | 0 | – |
According to StatCounter, right now I get an average of 968 unique visitors per day — but according to FeedBurner, I have another 319 people watching my site through one of my available RSS feeds (8 subscribed to my comments-only feed, 30 to my excerpts-only feed, 225 to my full-post feed, and 59 to my full-posts-plus-comments feed), which puts me at 1,287 readers per day, placing me on the low end of the ‘B-List’ category.
Of course, the one major caveat to this is that many of those 968 daily visitors are just hits from Google searches, and in order to keep my ego in check, StatCounter is only registering an average of 70 returning visitors per day. Refiguring my numbers that way, that gives me 389 regular daily readers, just under the average in the ‘C-List’ category.
However you want to break it down, though, I think it’s pretty damn cool that I’ve got in the neighborhood of 400 people keeping an eye on my ramblings from time to time.
Now, who are all of you people? ;)
(via Jacqueline)
“Medina” by Outback from the album Dance the Devil Away (1991, 6:26).
Theatre Plans
The Seattle Times has announced the 5th Ave. Theatre‘s 2005-2006 season. Lots of good stuff coming up, including The King and I, but the one that’s really catching my eye is 
Sweeney Todd.
I’ve seen Sweeney Todd on stage once before, years ago in Anchorage, and just recently was thrilled to see it heavily referenced in Kevin Smith’s Jersey Girl. Should be fun to get a chance to see it again, it’s just the sort of twisted stuff I get a kick out of.
A bigger stretch for Armstrong and his audiences is a planned 5th Avenue mounting (Oct. 25-Nov. 13) of composer Sondheim and writer Hugh Wheeler’s macabre, musically daring epic about a barber’s bloody one-man crusade against the injustices of Victorian England.
“The show is so layered and amazing in its writing, themes and score,” says Armstrong, who’ll direct. ” ‘Sweeney Todd’ was on Broadway recently in a chamber version, but we’ll have a full orchestra for this. And big theater voices to handle the songs.”
“Suck (Double Dipped and Plastered)” by Pigface from the album Feels Like Heaven, Sounds Like Shit (1996, 6:17).
Brad! Janet! Professor Snape!
This week, at Frank N. Furter’s School of Wizardry and Witchcraft…
Found here. Blame them, not me.
I just thought it was funny.
You Ashcroft!
You’re an Ashcroft! No, you’re the Ashcroft!
Imagine hearing that exchange in a movie — you’d think that Hollywood had come up with a crazy new insult. Well, it turns out that some airline passengers watching the Oscar-nominated film “Sideways” on foreign flights are, in fact, hearing “Ashcroft” as a substitute for a certain seven-letter epithet commonly used to denote a human orifice.
The Post’s Monte Reel, based in Buenos Aires, tells us he heard the former attorney general’s name substituted at least twice in “Sideways” dialogue when he watched the film earlier this week on an Aerolineas Argentinas flight to Lima, Peru. The movie was shown in English and the dubbing was done “in the actual voices of the actors,” Reel reports. Star Thomas Haden Church utters the A-word.
(via MeFi)
“Time for Me” by Fiction 8 from the album Cyberl@b (1998, 3:59).
Yeah, I’m clueless about these things…
Okay. So.
Theoretically speaking…
Suppose there was a certain science fiction television show that I was interested in watching (ahem). Also suppose that not only do I not presently subscribe to cable, but I have no intention of doing so, as the amount of time I’d spend watching television in no way justifies the cost.
Now, in theory, it’s supposed to be possible for me to go out onto the ‘net somewhere to find digitized copies of the episodes that I could download and then watch on my computer.
How in the world would I go about this? Where would I look?
Would I need any special software (Mac OS X software, please)?
Any and all advice, hints, or pointers would be greatly appreciated.
“Skin (Keith Litman)” by Charlotte from the album DJ Mix 2000 (1998, 4:00).
Battlestar Galactica Episode 1
This is incredibly cool: The Sci-Fi Channel has posted the first episode of Battlestar Galactica season one (not the miniseries that’s currently 
available on DVD, but the currently-running TV series) on their website, free, uncut, and without commercials.
Just go to the Battlestar Galactica site and click on the banner at the top of the page. You’ll need RealPlayer, unfortunately, but that’s the only downside I can see.
I know what I’m watching when I get home from work tonight.
(via /.)
“Black Flys pres. Club Flys 1 (full mix)” by Various Artists from the album Black Flys pres. Club Flys 1 (full mix) (1997, 1:13:16).
Now with Markdown
I’ve just added John Gruber‘s excellent text-processing plugin Markdown to the site, and enabled it for comments as well as for my own use when writing posts.
In short, this means that any of you that are familiar with Markdown’s syntax can now use that when entering your comments, and they will appear on the site properly formatted.
Those of you unfamiliar with Markdown can just type normally, using HTML if you want.
Those of you unfamiliar with HTML can just type your little hearts out. :)
A very brief summary of Markdown’s most common syntax patterns follows behind the cut…
Hunter S. Thompson
Seeing all the many varied reports of Hunter S. Thompson‘s unfortunate demise reminds me that I’ve actually never read any of his work.
I’m a big fan of the Terry Gilliam/Johnny Depp film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and I also have a great 3 of the book. I even used to have a hardbound copy of Fear and Loathing — unfortunately, the only times I opened it were during one ill-considered period where it was a convenient (and seemingly appropriate) place to hide the sheet of acid I was in the process of selling. I may still have the book buried somewhere in my boxes, but I’m not entirely sure.
So, then, a question for those more familiar with Thompson’s work than I am: while Fear and Loathing seems to be practically the only book that ever gets mentioned when eulogizing Thompson, I’m sure he wrote more than that one tome. Any recommendations? Should I pick Fear and Loathing up (or dig through my boxes to see if I can find it), or are there other books that I should search out instead/in addition to that one?
“Say Hello” by Anderson, Laurie from the album United States Live (1984, 5:01).
Jim Steinman
A few years ago, the radio at work was tuned into one of the Anchorage “adult contemporary” stations — brainless background work-safe music that I wasn’t really paying much attention to. One song came on that caught my ear, so I stopped to take a closer listen to it. I had no idea what it was or who was singing, but the more I listened to it, the more a certain suspicion grew.
So I called up the radio station.
“Mix 103.1, what can I do for you?”
“I just need to know what the song you just played was — but before you tell me, I want you to check something out for me. By any chance was that song written or produced by Jim Steinman?”
“What? I haven’t got a clue.”
“Could you check?”
“Um…sure, hold on.” The DJ must have thought that I was nuts. A moment later, he got back on the phone. “Actually, yeah, you’re right. Written and produced by Jim Steinman. How did you know that?”
I laughed. “It just sounded like him. He’s the guy who wrote and produced both of Meat Loaf‘s big albums, Bat out of Hell and Bat out of Hell II: Back into Hell. Whatever that song was, it sounded like a Meat Loaf song, only it was someone else singing, so I figured it was probably Steinman.”
“Not bad.”
“Thanks. So who was it?”
“Celine Dion. It’s All Coming Back To Me Now.”
“Oh. Crap, I just liked a Celine Dion song?”
(Sigh.)
So, yeah. There’s one Celine Dion song that I do have to admit to liking. In my defense, though, it has nothing to do with Celine — it’s all about Jim Steinman. Overproduced, bombastic, and very often tongue-in-cheek rock and roll. I love it when Meatloaf’s singing it, and I even like it when Celine’s singing it.
Just another addition to my many guilty pleasures.
(This confession inspired by a MeFi pointer to this list of parody Steinman song titles, which isn’t really as amusing as I’d hoped it would be.)
“You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth (Hot Summer Night)” by Meat Loaf from the album Bat Out of Hell (1977, 5:05).