Blog

Site updates and anything else related to the technology of blogging and my site(s).

Caught by the Zeitgeist

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I’ve been having a blast recently watching the effects of current trends on my little corner of the ‘net here at djwudi.com. Last October I ran across a website claiming to be a protest against the latest installment in the Lord of the Rings trilogy of films, ‘The Two Towers’, equating its title to the WTC attacks of Sep. 11th. Seeing this as something ridiculous and fairly laughable, I posted about it.

Over the past week and a half or so, as the release date for LotR:TTT has grown closer and closer, that entry on my site has suddenly been getting a highly unusual amount of interest. While I figure my primary regular readership consists of somewhere around ten people (mostly family and friends, but I know I’ve picked up a few other readers over the past few months), I do get a fair amount of one-time visitors finding my site through search engines, so when a comment popped up on that post on Dec. 9th, I wasn’t all too surprised. But then another comment appeared. And another. And another! What the heck?

I wondered at first if I’d been linked to from another, more high-profile site, but that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. After going through my referral logs, it seems that this is all just due to people finding that page through searches, primarily from Google. At the time of this writing, Googling for “two towers protest” returns my page as the third primary link, and according to my site statistics for the past week, that has become the third most popular page on my site (197 hits during the week of 12/8-12/14, just behind my index page at 220 hits, and the index page for The Long Letter at 279 hits)!

Fun to watch, certainly. Not sure if I’ve picked up any more regular visitors or not from all this, and while it didn’t really lead to any discussion per se (more a lot of somewhat amusing self-righteous indignation and rambling, for the most part), it is kind of cool to see one page on my site with eighteen seperate comments posted, mostly from people that aren’t regulars (that I know of, at least).

Y’all come back now, ya heah?! ;)

More on FOAF

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A couple days ago I was babbling about having finally created my FOAF file.

Today, Phil pointed out something I’d actually looked for the other day, but hadn’t managed to find: a web-based FOAF explorer that loads and parses FOAF files. If my babble of the other day was only somewhat comprehensible, seeing what can be done with these FOAF thingy-ma-bobs might make it a bit more clear.

Friend of a Friend

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My FoaF file is now available!

If you don’t know what this means, no worries. Go on with your life. :)

If you don’t know what this means, and are up for some geekspeak, or if you do know what this means and are up for some geekspeak, read on….

Read more

Recommended reading?

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This could be interesting — Mark Pilgrim has set up a Recommended Reading script that analyses your web page, and then suggests other sites that you might find worth reading. I ran it on The Long Letter, and came up with a an interesting list of sites to check. About half I already read, but I may need to add the other half to my newsreader.

T minus 2 hours and counting

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Happy Halloween!

November is almost upon us. As I’ve mentioned a couple times previously, this means that rather than the usual babble about whatever random things cross my brain, either ‘net- or life-inspired, my blog may very well be somewhat neglected.

Instead, I’ll be turning off my PC, closing down my web browsers and newsreaders, leaving my instant messaging programs off, and focusing on diving into the wierd and wonderful world of becoming…

(Drum roll, please.)

…a Novelist.

I’ll be posting my progress as I go, so feel free to stop by and keep track of how I’m doing. Hopefully, it will at least be interesting. ;)

Kung-Tunes upgrade

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Just upgraded to Kung-Tunes 1.9.0. There’s now a bit less information displayed for the currently playing track, but it displays a history of the last few tracks I’ve listened to. Cool stuff!

Small updates

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Finally grabbed some time to do some small updates to the site I’d been meaning to do for a while now. There have been a few updates to Untitled as I prepare for NaNoWriMo, I’ve (finally) posted a new picture to WudiVisions, and I re-enabled the smiley hack that’s been broken since the upgrade to MovableType 2.5.

‘Bout damn time! ;)

A reminder

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Just a quick reminder — NaNoWriMo kicks off in just over a week. For the month of November, posts to The Long Letter may be pretty sparse, as I’ll be spending the majority of my free time from work either fighting my way through my NaNoWriMo attempt, or huddled in a corner, rocking back and forth and quietly gibbering to myself when I actually realize what I’ve gotten myself into.

Also, a quick word of warning from the NaNoWriMo website:

You are an arteest, and no longer have time for things like cooking and grocery shopping and laundry. Start demanding favors and treats from friends and loved ones now. That way they’ll be fully acclimated to the new you once November rolls around.

Valid RSS

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Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby have just created an RSS Validator. I’ve run my feeds through, and can now ensure that I offer valid RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds for use with newsreaders/aggregators.

I even managed to get my own little addition to the feeds going without breaking them — yay!

Admittedly, I can’t honestly say I really know or understand the difference between RSS 1.0 and 2.0. But hey. They’re both there.