Keeping New Readers

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Problogger has a short series of posts with tips on how to keep readers who have stumbled across your site via a search engine hit or some other method. Interesting stuff, though nothing groundbreaking, and as it turns out, I do most of what he recommends already.

In Part One:

(Anybody surprised by those last two? I know I’m not…)

In Part Two:

  • Good individual page design: I think I’m pretty solid here. My individual pages match my main page, with some slight tweaks here and there to better fit their status as more focused pages than the main page is.
  • Make your message clear: I’m not so strong here, but then, I don’t really have a single focus for the site.
  • Provide pathways into your blog: Suggestions here include obvious links to the home page, an about page, and archives, all of which I have prominently displayed at the top of each page.

In Part Three:

  • Links to other relevant entries: Another one I think I’m pretty solid with, thanks to the category links beneath the title and the ‘Related Entries’ section of the sidebar.
  • E-mail this entry to a friend: This one I don’t have set up. I’ve seen it other places, but never figured it would have that much use. Maybe I should re-think that one.
  • Promote via newsletter: This one I’m not even interested in trying to maintain. I’m bad enough about keeping up with things (including, at times, this site), trying to maintain a newsletter of any sort would die a quick death. Again, though, as I don’t have a specific focus for the site, that’s probably less of a concern for me.

In Part Four:

  • Promote your RSS feed: Sometimes I wonder if I should do more here — while I have the ‘Feeds’ link in the site menubar, there may be people who don’t recognize the significance of that. Perhaps renaming that to (the dull but obvious term) RSS would be a good idea. I’m not sure if there’s much need or demand for me to start enabling RSS feeds for every post on my site, though I consider it from time to time.
  • Search this site: Again, we’re good here — the search box is nice, obvious, and ‘above the fold’ on every page.
  • Break up longer posts into multiple posts: My only difficulty with this one is that I never plan long posts, they just sort of happen…and then they tend to be stream-of-consciousness enough that it would be difficult to break them apart. I don’t think I’ll concern myself with this one too much.
  • Be interactive: While I don’t always respond to every comment left, I do keep track of any comments left here, and do my best to respond as much as possible (time, energy, and available brainpower dependent, of course).

Not a bad set of tips, all in all. Maybe I’ll tinker with a couple more things here and there.

(via Neuvo)

iTunes “Acperiance 1” by Hardfloor from the album Harthouse: The Point of No Return Chapter 1 (1993, 8:58).

Battlestar Galactica Season 1…done!

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Up until this week, I never got the whole thing with people downloading and watching shows on their computer. I’ve got such a low opinion of the majority of TV shows that I just couldn’t see spending the time and resources on such a project.

Then I got bit by the Battlestar bug.

Suddenly, I can see the appeal. Three days ago, I got curious enough about the currently-running Battlestar Galactica series to ask for help on finding the episodes so that I could watch them. Now, as of just a few minutes ago, I’ve watched all that there is — and, amusingly enough, I’ve actually watched more than has been broadcast here in the US. All thirteen episodes were broadcast in Britain a few months ago, and those are the copies available on the ‘net. So, while the broadcasts on the Sci-Fi Network are only up through episode eight, I’ve just finished off the entire season.

End result? This is really good stuff. They’ve done an incredible job of re-imagining the show, and even better, have managed to keep up an extremely high level of quality throughout the show. Since the broadcasts here in the US still have another five weeks to go before they hit the season finale, I won’t go into any details or spoilers, but those of you who might be watching the show as its broadcast are in for quite a treat.

The DVD of the miniseries is now very high on my “to buy” list, and I’ll be picking up the DVD set for the miniseries as soon as it comes out — while I’ll admit that the quality of the shows I downloaded was far better than I expected, it still won’t compare to full DVD resolution and (I hope) full 5.1 surround. Battlestar may not be getting any ratings points from me during its broadcast run (though they wouldn’t in any case, as I don’t subscribe to cable), but they’ll definitely be getting my money for the DVDs. Hopefully they’re gathering enough eyeballs during their broadcast run to keep the show on the air and at its current level of excellence for a good long time to come.

(Yes, I know that this is a sticky situation legally, and in all honesty, if I did subscribe to cable, I probably would have been quite content watching the episodes as they broadcast and contributing to the ratings. However, I continue to hold fast to my belief that cable television is, on the whole, an incredible waste of money. As stated above, though, once the DVD sets are available, they’re going into my collection.)

iTunes “Track 06” by Grover from the album One With the Universe (1998, 7:00).

Halle Berry wins Razzie…and respect

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Kudos to Halle Berry for actually showing up to accept her Razzie award for Catwoman!

Halle Berry staged an Oscar-worthy parody of her Academy Awards meltdown at last night’s 25th annual Razzie awards in Los Angeles. Breaking with tradition, the Catwoman star showed up in person to collect her award as the worst actress of 2004.

Explaining her decision to attend the event, Berry said: “My mother told me that if you couldn’t be a good loser then there’s no way you could be a good winner.”

Berry famously broke down at the podium upon winning the 2002 best actress Oscar for her role in Monster’s Ball. She mimicked that moment again last night, faking sobs on stage for a full minute while clutching her Academy Award in one hand and her Razzie (actually a spray-painted golf ball) in the other.

But her speech, when it finally came, went out of its way to spread the blame for Catwoman’s failure. “I want to thank Warner Brothers for casting me in this piece of shit,” she announced to tumultuous laughter. She added: “I’d like to thank the rest of the cast. To give a really bad performance like mine you need to have really bad actors.”

I’m impressed. Good for her!

iTunes “Feel the Fury” by Merlin from the album Just Say Anything (1991, 4:44).

Just stop talking

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Many years ago, I went to a summer camp in which one of the activities was horseback riding. This ended up being a less-than-successful experience for me, though, as as soon as I got up in the saddle the horse reared up, dumping me rather unceremoniously on the ground as I slid off the saddle and over the horse’s rear end.

Last night, as I was talking to Alicia, Laurie and Robert outside the Vogue as I was preparing to leave, I started to try to relate this story after Alicia mentioned that she has four horses at her place out in Snohomish.

So what words actually managed to fall out of my mouth?

“I was on a horse once…it got me off. (pause) It threw me off…aw, dammit….”

And much laughter ensued, along with Laurie’s observation that, “So this must have been bareback, I suppose?”

Some days, I really should just keep my mouth shut.

iTunes “Smear Body” by Nitzer Ebb from the album That Total Age (1987, 5:49).

MT-Blogroll

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I’ve just updated and revised my blogroll over to the right. Instead of relying on an external service to manage my blogroll, I’m now using a new plugin from Arvind Satyanarayan called MT-Blogroll that implements blogroll management directly into the Movable Type interface.

So far, I’m definitely liking it — it allows for categorization of links, descriptions, and XFN data (though I’m not currently using the latter two items), has a bookmarklet for quickly adding links, and seems to work just like it should. The one downside is that I’ll no longer be able to display recently-updated weblogs in bold, but I can live with losing that for being able to manage everything centrally on my own server.

I’ve also updated my list of currently running Movable Type tweaks to include MT Blogroll (and one other tweak that I’d forgotten in the initial post).

iTunes “Twisted Secrets Vol. 2 (full mix)” by Various Artists from the album Twisted Secrets Vol. 2 (full mix) (1997, 1:04:33).

…ask what you can do for your country.

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One night, George W. Bush is tossing restlessly in his White House bed. He awakens to see George Washington standing by him. Bush asks him, “George, what’s the best thing I can do to help the country?”

“Set an honest and honorable example, just as I did,” Washington advises, and then fades away.

The second night, Bush sees the ghost of Thomas Jefferson moving through the darkened bedroom. Bush calls out, “Tom, please! What is the best thing I can do to help the country?”

“Respect the Constitution, as I did,” Jefferson advises, and dims from sight.

The third night sleep is still not in the cards for Bush. He awakens to see the ghost of FDR hovering over his bed. Bush whispers, “Franklin, what is the best thing I can do to help the country?”

“Help the less fortunate, just as I did,” FDR replies and fades into the mist.

Bush isn’t sleeping well the fourth night when he sees another figure moving in the shadows. It is the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. Bush pleads, “Abe, what is the best thing I can do right now to help the country?”

Lincoln replies, “Go see a play.”

(via Dad)

iTunes “Into the Trap” by London Symphony Orchestra, The/Williams, John from the album Star Wars Trilogy: The Original Soundtrack Anthology (1983, 2:39).

My Movable Type tweaks

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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:

C-List Blogging

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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)

iTunes “Medina” by Outback from the album Dance the Devil Away (1991, 6:26).

Theatre Plans

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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.”

iTunes “Suck (Double Dipped and Plastered)” by Pigface from the album Feels Like Heaven, Sounds Like Shit (1996, 6:17).

Flickr being bought by…everybody?

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For the past few days, rumors have been flying around that Yahoo is buying Flickr.

Whatever the truth of the matter, never let it be said that Flickr isn’t handling the rumors with good grace and a sense of humor. While the general public won’t see anything different, logged-in users are seeing a new logo on the page. Even funnier, the filename for the graphic is gossipgossipgossip.gif.

Here’s a quick look at just what we’ve got, then:

Flickr Gossip

iTunes “Rat Poison” by Prodigy, The from the album Voodoo People (1995, 5:31).