Warning! This blog may vanish for a while

I'm seriously considering doing a server change soon, so if the blog vanishes for several days, that would explain why.

Blogger brings the jump break to blogging

So Blogger has decided that they're going to implement the jump break to blogging.

It's a good idea. I guess.

Except I just tried it in this post, and it failed. It works in the actual Blogger blogs on a blogspot domain, but apparently not on other domains.

Some random thoughts

• I've biked three times to work this week, at 10 miles per one-way trip, which works out to 60 miles on my bike. That's 100 kilometres. That's pretty good, I think.
• I purged about 80 people from my Facebook friends list yesterday (which amounted to abut a third of my total friends). It's nothing personal. My newsfeed was becoming unmanageable and cluttered, filled with quizzes, contests, and other crap that I needed to cull. Not to mention Facebook seemed to promote my more obscure friends to my newsfeed page at the expense of, you know, my family. So I cut back on people, and now my newsfeed is far easier to follow.
  
• UFC's title history page has what I can only assume is a really bizarre error on it, and that's the declaration that Brock Lesnar beat Randy Couture "to become an interim UFC Heavyweight champion." It's compounded by the further declaration that at UFC 100, "The two interim Heavyweight title holders, Brock Lesnar and Frank Mir, will fight to determine the undisputed UFC heavyweight champion." Um, no. Randy and Brock were the actual UFC champions, not the interim champions. The UFC had a linear, undisputed champion for four years at that point, and the title only became split again when Randy walked out and Big Nog beat Tim Sylvia to become the interim champion. When Randy came back, he came back with THE BELT, not an interim championship. It's mindboggling that UFC would mess up their own title history like this. Not to mention, the page hasn't been updated in a few months.
  

Testing a Windows Live post

Nothing to see here. I was just updating my Windows Live Movie Maker program and it gave me the option to install this Windows Live Writer program that can be used to update blogs, so I thought I’d give it a try.

My initial impression is that it has a lot more options for formatting than the standard Blogger template. Let’s see how it actually looks on my blog.

Edit: Looks fine. I guess my only question is why I'd want to open up a separate program to write a blog entry when I'm in my browser 99.995% of the time when I'm on my computer anyway and can blog straight from there?

On vacation!

Headed out on vacation for a couple of weeks. Posting will be pretty light to non-existent.

It's 5:22 a.m., and I'm sitting in my office drinking coffee

And I just felt like sharing that. Cuz that's what social media is all about.

Well, now you've gone and done it

I'm enabling moderation on the comments effective immediately, after some profanity-strewn comments were made overnight on an old post.

Sorry, but a few rotten apples spoiled the bunch.

I'm alive

I'm still here. Just had a busy week and nothing struck my fancy enough to blog about it. Going camping this weekend, so I might have some photos to share next week.

I'm still alive

Time for one of my semi-regular, "Sorry for not posting so much recently" posts. Hey, life gets busy. When the Legislature is in session, I don't have a lot of free time, and when I do, it's not usually spent thinking up witty things to post about.

Heck, I haven't even been updating my Twitter feed with any regularity, so all my social media outlets have been faltering.

Test post from Windows sidebar Blogger Buddy

As a newbie to Vista, I'm looking for stuff to put in the Sidebar. All I have so far is the weather (plus 5 in Edmonton).

So I thought I'd try the Blogger buddy to see if I make any use of it.

Progress

Last January, I got 182 hits on this page all month.

I'm over 275 hits today and counting.

Changed my Twitter handle

There's a long and complicated reason why I had the old Twitter handle that I did, but I decided to go with my real name to make it easier for people to find me. Hopefully, by the time this is published, I'll have the Twitter sidebar working again on the blog.

I'm all a-Twitter

So, despite my initial reservations about Twitter as a valuable form of social media, I have decided that as a micro-blogging interface, it's pretty good for quick venting or whatnot on matters that don't actually warrant an entire blog post here.

In other words, if actual posts here seem spartan, check my Twitter feed (see sidebar on right), which is updated far more regularly.

How easy is it to get a job in Australia?

Sorry, but I've been too dumbfounded by what's been going on in Ottawa to post. And I'd tell you what I think of it all, but I don't like to use such vile language on my blog. I have standards, you know.

November: New Best. Month. Ever.

So ... a 10-fold increase in my traffic year-over-year makes me pretty happy. Not bad for my little humble corner of the Internet. Click graphic for larger image.

Surely a sign of the Apocalypse

The Google search string, "what's cool on the interweb" resulted in a hit on this site.

Hey, don't I have a blog?

Sorry for the dearth of posting this week. It was a very busy week at work, and I didn't have a lot of time to be trolling the Internet looking for fun things upon which to comment.

October: Best. Month. Ever.

Your humble servant's blog had its best month ever in October, smashing my previous hits and page view records, on the strength of approximately 10 billion hits related to Kimbo Slice and Ken Shamrock. Nonetheless, I'm not complaining.

(Interesting that Site Meter credited me with 2,787 hits in October, and 4,059 page views, while SiteCounter gave me 3,167 hits in October, and 4,417 page views. No wonder I like SiteCounter better ...)

What's nice, too, is that by being on Blogger and having my pages getting properly indexed (thanks in part to Google Analytics), I'm now getting a fair number of hits based on archived content, as well as being in the top 2 or 3 search results on some fairly unique and niche search strings (like "Relient K Trading Spaces").

I'm a twit ... I mean, I'm on Twitter

As if succumbing to the Empire of Facebook wasn't bad enough, I'm now on Twitter. And I really don't know why. As far as I can tell, Twitter is like the Facebook status update and ... er, it's like the Facebook status update. But apparently Twitter is very important, as it's all the rage in social media circles. So, I'm on Twitter. Prepare to be bored silly by my lack of updates, which are now in the sidebar of my blog.

(What's really scary is that I have FOUR PEOPLE following my tweets, and I've updated three times since signing up a month ago.)

I am a man of my word

I promised (threatened, surely - ed.) Sandy Fleischer that I'd mention him on my blog just so he would get a Google Alert.

Yes, it's a gigantic in-joke, and no one will get it except him.

Everyone else can carry on their business.

(And, Sandy, great job today. I really enjoyed the seminar. Thanks!)

SiteMeter: We're sorry!

The ongoing saga of today's unbelievably botched SiteMeter upgrade continues with the company's apology to its rapidly dwindling customer base.

The apology is classic:

Based on some performance issues we were experiencing along with feedback from the community it appears we have pushed our new site live prematurely.

That's certainly understating the reaction from bloggers.

Meet the new SiteMeter. Same as the old SiteMeter.

So much for the heavily touted upgrade today. Look what's posted now.

Good Afternoon,

We have received and heard your feedback concerning the latest changes to the website. We will implementing a rollback to the website immediately. We will also be responding to each of your support requests as soon as possible. If you have any questions please let us know.

Sincerely,

SiteMeter Support Team

After doing some checking on the Internet, the outrage over the upgrade is everywhere.

I'm back!

I'm back from my work-related road trip, which included a great helicopter tour on Thursday. Definitely one of the highlights of my entire life.

Regular updates to resume in the coming week.

Away (again) for a few days

Just a short note to let my two regular readers know that I'm away on a work-related road trip until the end of the week. The itinerary is pretty packed, so there will be no posting between now and the weekend.

Er ... no relation

From the Department of Self-Evident Headlines

Feds Say Angry, Suicidal Pilots And Truckers Aren't a Good Idea

... you don't say ...

Testing the ScribeFire posting system

I upgraded to the release candidate of Firefox 3.0 today, and while it disabled most of my add-ons, I found a really cool one called ScribeFire, which lets me blog pretty much anything from anywhere on the Net using a push-button on my browser toolbar. This is my first test post from ScribeFire. Let's see how it looks.

Web 2.0 has been good to me

It's been a few months now since I moved The Newsroom over to the Blogger interface, which allowed for syndicated feeds, permalinks, and better indexing of the blog via Google.

The result, as you can see from the accompanying stats graph, has been a noticeable uptick in my hits and page views. To be sure, a lot of that was traffic generated by Wrestlemania, Ric Flair's retirement, and more recently, the Starfield concert accident I've been blogging about this weekend. But on the whole, my average daily hit count has gone from pathetic single digits to slightly less pathetic double digits.


I'm not going to be winning any blogging traffic awards, but it's mildly satisfying to see that I've generated a small base of regular readers despite no longer having a platform in the pages of the Edmonton Sun from which to generate free name-awareness traffic on this site. (That said, I do get a kick out of seeing the sunpub.com domain show up on my SiteMeter stats generator every once in a while.)

NEW! Shared items

The keen-eyed among you will have noticed that I now have a "shared items" applet along the right-hand side of the page. I have several dozen blog feeds in my Google Reader (an amazing application), and from time to time, I'll be marking items there that I think my readership (all 4 of you) might be interested in reading as well. Or not.

The items can be clicked one at a time, or you can click the "read more" link to read all the items in my list.

Currently, there's some MMA news, a good article on the death of Christian rock pioneer Larry Norman, and and older link to the day I got cut from the Edmonton Sun.