Category: site news

cuil.com: not impressed so far

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

via daring fireball and others, there’s apparently a challenger to google’s search supremacy.

i’d love for someone to get traction in this space — google is really difficult to work with. they have that same attitude that aol had years ago: we’re king, and you have to do things our way, and the customer is always wrong.

obviously, it’s an uphill climb.

i tried googling, er, cuiling myself yesterday and got no results for either “jamie howard” or “queerspace”. tried later in the day, and got a message saying that their servers were down.

great start.

i tried again today. i’m near the top in google results for “jamie howard”, and for “queerspace”. i used to be #1 everywhere, but i’m not complaining.

cuil?

i’m on the first page of results for “queerspace”. i’m nowhere to be found for “jamie howard”, at least not on the first few pages.

as the owner of jamiehoward.com, you’d think i’d figure in there somewhere.

maybe they will get better. the search results are certainly prettier, though i’d argue not necessarily better for some other things i searched.

good luck, cuil. hope you aren’t tilting at windmills. change has to start somewhere, and your timing is good.

updated wordpress theme

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

just installed the 4.0 version of scott wallick’s plaintxtblog theme, which in layman’s terms is the file that makes this blog looks like it does. the change should be invisible to you, but the underlying functionality is better for me. i tweak it a bit to make it my own:

» i edit the styles.css file so that everything except the blog titles are in lowercase. pretentious, i know, but a queerspace.com tradition dating to 1998.

» i edit the header.php file to use the optimal title plugin (a better page title for the search engines) update: this plugin was deprecated and the functionality has been incorporated into wordpress. now all you have to do is make this change:

wp_title('»',TRUE,'right')

to the header.php file (take out the php the title at the end and the various slashes, so it looks like “post title » queerspace.com”)

to the style.css file add this to make the “search for” text go away:
.widget_search .screen-reader-text {
display:none;
}

» i delete the <meta name="description"> line so i can use the head meta description plugin (a better page description for the search engines). update: no longer necessary with plaintxt 4.6

now you know.

and now it’s in writing, so the next time i upgrade i’ll remember what to do.

and if you see anything odd or something i’ve forgotten, leave me a comment.

update: i also changed the way that the category dates display by editing “wp-includes/general-template.php” using a tip from wordpress.org. this is an edit to the wordpress files, not the theme, but as this post is serving as a repository for my edits, what the hell. also, updated the footer to include the creative commons license and other info. and also, edited “wp-includes/default-widgets.php” so that “select category” and “select month” are lowercase.

update: also, when you update your wordpress version, you should delete the readme.html file so that your wordpress version isn’t easily accessible.

briefly noted

~ jamie ~ 4 Comments

» the last piece of the kitchen renovation puzzle is almost in place. the final cabinet (the one that replaced the microwave cart) has been assembled, and rafael our super cut the countertop to size. he did an incredible job — you can’t tell which is the uncut side and which is the trimmed side. kudos, rafael. we just need to screw it on, along with one side trim panel, and it’s done. except for replacing the fluorescent lights in the header. that comes much later. pictures to come.

» upgraded to the new version of wordpress, which includes tags. zim, who in a brilliant bit of thinking sees the world as a series of tags, rather than being separated geographically, will be pleased. if that thinking took hold in a widespread way, there’d be hope for us all.

» had a great dinner with our real estate attorney on tuesday night — she’s become a good friend. she says we were lucky to buy our apartment when we did. the mortgage situation is really touchy right now, and if we were trying to get the same deal now it would be difficult or perhaps impossible. thankfully we had good timing.

checking out my google stats

~ jamie ~ 2 Comments

i use google analytics to get aggregated info about the people who come to my site.

aggregated means that i’m not gathering personal info about you, just to clarify. i could care less about you, really. it’s just an interesting snapshot of where site visitors come from, how long they spend when they get here, the pages they like to visit, and so forth.

here are some fun facts about my traffic:

» by far, the most search engine traffic comes from people looking for info about kristen hall. there’s not a lot of kristen hall info here, other than my voluminous mad ravings about how wonderful she is. but if you googled “kristen hall”, odds are you already know that. still, i guess people hopefully click through and, if nothing else, get some affirmation of their opinion. a lot of the visitors spell it wrong, as “kristin hall”, just like i used to.

» i get a good share of hits from people searching for “celeriac disease”. the term is “celiac disease”, but i jokingly referred to it as “celeriac disease”. so i get a bunch of traffic from people who can’t spell, or alternately from a tiny subset of the world population allergic to an obscure root vegetable.

» 15% of my new visits come from an semi-obscure portal page at home.bellsouth.net — i’ve searched the site trying to figure out why to no avail. there must be some reference to this site somewhere, because the hits keep on coming and have been for several years. but i’ll be damned if i know why.

» the other weird post that’s rocketed to the top of google results is my post about benjamin moore paint. i listed the part numbers for the shades of paint that we bought, mostly so when i repainted i’d know what went where. still, that level of specificity seems to attract people looking for information about aura paint. hope i helped, paint lovers.

» the rings and the tattoos are still very popular items as well. amazing to me that people still are such hedwig fanatics, all these years on.

» i get traffic from five continents. i learned in school that there were seven continents (north america, south america, europe, asia, africa, australia, antarctica) but at some point either the rules changed, or google just decided to remap the continents. as powerful as they are, it wouldn’t surprise me. according to google, from what i can tell there are six continents, and i get traffic from five (americas, europe, asia, oceania, africa). maybe there are 5 continents, and they are lumping antarctica in with oceania. who the hell knows. next you’ll be telling me that there are only eight planets. i don’t like that south america is evidently no longer its own continent — zim should rightfully be upset.

» the daily search term list (which of course changes daily) is a nonstop evolution of amusement. here are a few search terms through which people found my site within the last couple of days:

— Lawnmower killed cat (never did such a thing!)
— “standing on cold concrete” (definitely did that!)
— why does my cat poop outside of the litt (i’m assuming they meant litter box and got tired of typing)
— liza minnelli gay fans (finally, some accuracy!)

anyway, the fun never stops. get a blog, and do some aggregate tracking. you’ll be glad you did.

weird firefox smiley at bottom of my page

~ jamie ~ 5 Comments

here’s what the bottom left corner of my site’s pages looks like in firefox on the mac:

macintosh firefox

here’s what it looks like using every other browser:

every other browser

what’s up with that smiley thing? is it a part of the creative commons image that only shows on that specific browser? it’s not on the bottom of any other page i can see on the mac using firefox.

i’m not paranoid or anything — i’d just like an explanation and google isn’t coughing it up.

any ideas?

thestagingarea.com up and running

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

kirk’s had that url — “thestagingarea.com” — for quite a while, and it has gone through various iterations. the latest, and perhaps the best so far, is a wordpress blog.

it’s different from mine, in a good way. there are actual graphics on the page, for one thing. i was jealous of that, for a few minutes, but then kirk pointed out that the text-based spareness of this site matches my personality, and the graphics matches his. in addition, my site has been text-based since 1998, originally because i hated slow-loading graphics-heavy pages that took forever to load over dialup. but now, it’s just part of the history of the site. my trademark, if you will.

so text-based it is.

anyway, back to kirk. it’s a great beginning, and i think he’ll post and keep up with it, so it’s worth bookmarking or adding his rss feed. and he has a crapload of content in the vaults — all of the sites he designed for various broadway and off-broadway shows, including the original hedwig.com site. if he gets all that up and running, it would be very cool.

one note of response to his first real post. he says:

Jamie has also said that I think too much. There will be no argument here; I do think too much. This is why I can’t sleep. This is why when he’s calling me from the other room, I don’t hear him. I admit it, my head is obsessively caught up in thought.

except of course he uses capital letters. show-off.

with me, though, there are vast stretches of time where there’s literally nothing going on in my head. i don’t mean that flippantly or facetiously; i mean that i just don’t think of anything. i don’t hum a song, or do sums, or even think about not thinking, although at some point i become aware that i’m not thinking again, which of course is thinking in itself.

it’s probably better to think too much than to not think enough.

one closing promise, as i reread what i’ve written.

my blog will not become an insufferable dialogue between my blog and kirk’s blog. i’ll keep the cross-commenting to a minimum.

notes regarding the site

~ jamie ~ 2 Comments

first, and most obvious, is the site design. i’m a great fan of scott wallick‘s design philosophy and his wordpress themes that arise from it. i used a modified version of barthelme since i moved the site to wordpress from greymatter, but i thought it was time for a change.

enter plaintxtblog, another scott wallick theme, which is what you are seeing now. i like the three-column design, which allows you to see more sidebar items more quickly. and with minor modification here and there, the theme is working quite nicely for me.

i’ve even left the all-capital letters in the post headings, though i’ve taken care of capital letters everywhere else via the theme’s css. you know, the lack of capital letters is a queerspace tradition since my site went live in 1998, and i can’t change now. but i can make a small concession to modernity via the headings.

scott, paypal coming at ya, as soon as kirk explains how to do it. he has a paypal account. i don’t. i’m like a technological idiot savant in so many ways. i can tear apart website coding like nobody’s business. but the concept of paypal confounds me.

secondly, my host, invision power services, has had some uncharacteristic server problems that they promise will be ironed out today. if you’ve been having trouble accessing the site, the problem should be gone shortly.

finally, i’m all a-twitter now. you can see my latest doings in the sidebar to the left, under “what i’m doing”.

god help me for following trends.

hello, nairobi

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

i recently started using google analytics to see what i could find out about how my site is used.

to start with, let me assure you that there’s no personal info collected or recorded. it’s all just aggregated info, like how many people came from google, and yahoo, and msn, and who uses internet explorer (stop that!) versus firefox versus safari, and which pages are the most popular, and if you have flash installed and which version it is, and so on.

and there’s a section called “referrers” where i can see if a lot of people are coming from a particular site. that’s how i learned that the grey gardens site had linked to my review page.

if i had ads on this site, which i don’t and [probably] never will, it would tell me a lot of stuff about those things, too. but that’s a section of google analytics that means nothing to me.

the most interesting part of google analytics for me is the neat little map of the world i get on the front page. on this map are little dots that correlate to the location of the people who visit my site.

and i don’t get that friggin’ many, about 100 per day to be exact, more or less, so the dots are pretty distinct. i’m sure this map is meaningless to a person who ran a high-traffic site, but every one of my dots means something to me.

like my nairobi dot.

that’s right–there’s someone in kenya who visits my site. and pretty regularly, if the map is to be believed.

hello, nairobi. thanks for stopping by.

if you’re a regular visitor, and want me to notice your particular dot, leave me a comment and consider it done.

odds and ends

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

finally someone actually gets the importance and quality of the movie “shortbus”. the movie had a $21,000+ average per screen in its first weekend, so i have a feeling that the ride on the shortbus is just beginning.

the folks who run the website for grey gardens, the musical were kind enough to link to my original post about the play, when it ran at playwrights horizons. i’ve written a lot subsequently as well–this is a must-see if you are in the city.

i finally get to see “the cave”, steve reich’s piece that

explores the sacred locations of the burial plots of Abraham and Sarah from the perspectives of Arabs, Israelis, and Americans.

kirk worked on this show when it toured jerusalem, and i’ve always wanted to see it. it’s at lincoln center as part of the composer’s 70th birthday celebration. we’re seeing it on saturday, november 4, when there’s a post-show discussion with reich himself. should be fascinating.

i had my very first “i want my apple itv moment when watching the first episode of the new show ugly betty. it’s amazingly good, and i didn’t have the second show on the dvr. if i had an itv, i could just watch it on my tv. as it is, i’ll have to watch on the computer, which isn’t nearly as satisfying. hurry up apple.

kirk and i have booked our flight to paris next january–we’ll be in strasbourg from the 12th to the 14th, and in paris after that until the 21st. and kirk, knowing how i love cheese, found the restaurant with the world’s largest cheeseboard in strasbourg. i am so there. and i’ve posted a list of possible paris dining destinations on egullet. it’s the new post, at the end of the thread. if you have any suggestions, let me know. we have our favorites, but there’s always room for exploration.

further site updates

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i know…the site updates are the most boring posts ever. but i’m going to post them anyway, so put up with me. it’s a long holiday weekend and hurricane ernesto is plowing through, so i’m trapped inside the apartment and should have time to write something trenchant at some point.

i’ve categorized all of the posts, to help you find things that interest you, and to, i suppose, give you a glimpse into the organizational workings of my mind. that’s how i think. scary.

and i’ve edited my .htaccess file to redirect old site pages to new site pages, so you may never see the old site again. and if you do, you’ll find your way here quickly enough. a lot of the old pages aren’t being ported over, and eventually after google catches up to the new site structure, they’ll be deleted anyway.

do you really care about my javascript tic tac toe game? i don’t think you do, really. buh-bye to it, and its ilk.

and i added descriptions to each page’s meta tags via a plugin, so that google and other search engines see what’s on each page. i can’t tell you how much easier it is to do this stuff with wordpress. changing greymatter meant hand-coding every last thing, often in multiple places and on multiple pages. and while that gives you maximum flexibility, it is so much easier to drop a plugin into your wordpress folder on the server, and have the changes roll out across the site.

but i’m glad i used greymatter all those years, because it gave me knowledge of the guts of how things work. and that’s invaluable.

so click around and have a great time…this place will just get more and more better.

and i’ll get more and more bitter. i promise.

pulling the trigger

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

as you can see, if you visit often, i went ahead and switched to wordpress from greymatter.

hence the new look…let me know what you think.

it’s obviously a work in progress, and there’s still a lot of content at the old site that i need to move over. there’s a lot of content, though, that to be honest i probably won’t bother with. javascript games, the end of the internet, webrings, and some other stuff will be available at the old site (there’s a link to “old site” in the sidebar) but not the new one. at least for the time being. i’d imagine at some point it will just all go, and the link to the old site will be deleted.

there’s a lot of cleanup to do, so be patient. overall, it’s a good move–there’s just so much more functionality in the new site, and once everything is done, it’ll be easier for me and better for you.

have fun. explore. give me feedback.

hedging my bets

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

i’ve loved greymatter (the blog software that i use to create the pages on this site) for quite some time. and i’ve extolled its virtues, and been a cheerleader, and stuck by it.

but i’m also a tinkerer, and i’m also a bit paranoid. the main developers of greymatter have abandoned the project, and i’m afraid that the software isn’t going to keep up with the times. there are people who have picked up the pieces and are trying to move on, and i’m helping them in my own very small way when i can, but still.

i need a backup.

so i’ve installed wordpress on my blog, and i’ve imported the old greymatter entries, and it’s up and running. you can check it out, if you like.

i dithered a lot about whether or not to make this move. and then, when researching alternatives, i ran across posts by old greymatter forum people in the wordpress support forums. lots of familiar names. and they all seemed to have switched successfully to wordpress from greymatter.

the blog part of the software is airtight and installation was a breeze, as was the importation of all the old blog entries. it’s basically a carbon copy of this site–all the blog stuff is there and works perfectly, but nearly all of the jamie-specific pages aren’t there yet. and the ones that are there will have some broken links.

it’s a long term project, and i may never switch over completely.

but it’s nice to know i can if i choose to.

site revisions and greymatter news

~ jamie ~ 2 Comments

i spent a good chunk of time in the past couple of days doing some long overdue site maintenance. a lot of it was behind the scenes–adding google analytics tracking info so i can see how the site is used, finally revising some last remaining odd pages to give them valid xhtml, and tweaking the css (the preferences file that gives the pages their uniform look).

you know, technical boring stuff that interests me for some odd reason.

some of the changes are more apparent to all of you, the browsing public. the navigation links on the side have been revamped, regrouped and streamlined. some pages have been combined (the games page and the sounds page, for instance). and i’ve increased the line height of the blog entries’ text to make them more legible. hopefully you’ll more easily see stuff that you never noticed in the previous disorganized mess of a website.

one final technical note–this site uses the open-source software greymatter. it was the progenitor of nearly all blogging software, and its flexibility is still, in my opinion, unmatched. if my blog looks somewhat unlike the standard blog you come across, it’s because greymatter is coded so that you can tweak the appearance of your site to your heart’s content, if you know a little about what you are doing. most other blogging software forces you into certain appearance parameters, and you get all these blogs that generally look pretty similar.

that’s why i was a bit dismayed to learn that the support forums at greymatterforums.com had been taken off the web. apparently the site managers felt that it was “time for greymatter to die” and yanked the treasure trove of helpful posts off the web without warning or full explanation.

perhaps they are right. i used the wealth of info in the forums to greatly modify this site for rss feeds, for spam blocking in comments, for visual issues, and many other things. but certainly those of us who already have their sites set up and feature-complete have little use for the forums, except to occasionally help new users when we could. i’m not sure, though, that new users should be encouraged to use greymatter, especially with all the alternatives out there.

alternatives that are moving forward with active development. at the end, there were not more than 5 or 6 well-informed forum users who posted even infrequently. it’s probably a bit deceptive to make new users think that they are going to get decent support with aging software via a somewhat stagnant forum, and it’s definitely unfair to expect a very few power-users to support an entire community.

i’m happy with greymatter, even though it’s last generation software that in all likelihood is not going to have further development. i like it, it works, and barring some unforeseen events, it’s here to stay on my site. and there’s a new support forum starting, albeit without the historical posts, so maybe there is a bit of a future for the old girl. i’ll stop by occasionally and see how it’s going.

probably, though, it’s r.i.p., greymatter. it’s better to burn out than to fade away.

and thanks, noah, for giving birth to it.

update: shut my mouth. the new forum site is pretty active already, and there’s a core of people proceeding apace on a new version of greymatter. shows you how much my punditry is worth.

finding my voice

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this is the most disorganized schizo blog on the planet.

well, maybe that’s overstating things a bit. i’ve seen a few myspace pages, and they have more than lapped me on the track of incoherence. but most people who do this sort of thing semi-seriously have a theme, and a point of view, and they talk about things consistently and cohesively.

and they play the blog game as well. that is, they find other like blogs and comment on them, and link back to them, and then that person does the same, and everyone logrolls (the nice way to put it) or circle jerks (the non-euphemistic way to put it) themselves to lots of comments and feedback and trackbacks and such.

i just don’t do that, because, to be frank, this is more of a personal diary than a blog for you to read. if you find it interesting, more power to you. read away. but i really find this more of a way for me to be able to look back over time and see what concerned me, or what i found interesting.

when i started the blog part of queerspace.com, in october of 2004, every other blog entry i wrote was political. heat of the moment, with the election and all, i suppose.

now i could care less. or couldn’t care less. i forget which is correct. couldn’t is certainly more logical.

and i’ve been feeling a bit guilty over the past little bit, because a lot of my blog entries have been little more than collections of links that i saw online somewhere, and linked to and commented on a bit. that’s really lazy.

but it accurately reflects my level of involvement at the time, so that’s useful for me.

useful for you? maybe. maybe not.

like i said, read it if you want to. evidently at least a few dozen people do.

which puts you, i suppose, in exclusive company of a sort.

today’s silly links? reviews for kiki and herb, which were nearly uniformly positive glowing raves. ben brantley at the ny times, whose opinion probably matters the most, had the biggest rave of them all.

ny times review of kiki and herb alive on broadway (free registration required)

ny daily news review of kiki and herb alive on broadway

ny post review of kiki and herb alive on broadway

i’m definitely going back, assuming i can get tickets. these reviews, in combination with the extremely limited run, might make well-priced seats scarce.

extensive site changes

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

i just finished a massive set of changes to the site’s appearance. much better, huh?

what, you don’t notice the changes? wondering what they are?

well, maybe that’s because after implementing them, i decided i didn’t like them and changed things back to the way they were previously. so, unless you happened to visit in the 5 minutes they were live on the site, you’ll never know the difference.

and, anyway, they weren’t so massive. i just added the orange rounded-box bar thingy that’s on the right to the navigation links on the left. but that precipitated other numerous tweaks to get everything looking just right.

and then i decided i didn’t like the orange box on the left, so i changed it back, which didn’t take nearly as long, since i remembered how it was before.

it’s my site. it’s my prerogative.

if you have any constructive criticism of the site, feel free to leave it in the comments. keep in mind my design ethic, which is text-based, dial-up friendly (i try to stay away from slow-loading massive graphics files) and optimized for visually-impaired users.

i love to hear from you. yes, you.

not going to find it here

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this site is registered at google.com, so i can get lots of info about my site there. one of the most interesting pages is a list of the top search queries for my site, and where my site ranks in that query. when i need a laugh, i go look at the list. it amazes me what people search for.

here are some of the top search queries for my site. the link for each will click through to the google search.

» paolo nutini lyrics and its corollary, lyrics paolo nutini. there are no paolo nutini lyrics on my site. sorry. i saw him at the new york pops benefit, and i barely even remember what he looked like, let alone what he sang. i remember liking him, though. it’s odd to me that this is far and away the number one search result on my site. it’s even scarier that it’s the number one clickthrough as well. what must his fans think upon arriving at this particular little outpost?

» jamie’s lemon tart. i’m sorry. i don’t have a lemon tart. i must have eaten one and written about it, or at least mentioned “lemon” and “tart” in close proximity. but no recipes around here.

» jamie’s scottish evening. ooooooh la la. i’ll never divulge the secrets of my scottish evening, especially on the internets. seriously, i’ve never been to scotland, though kirk is dying to get me to edinburgh.

» jamie far. poor guy from m.a.s.h. nobody knows how to spell his last name. here’s a link, for you spelling-crippled queerspace arrivistes: jamie farr.

» jamie’s palm beach. this one confuses me a bit. is there a jamie somewhere who owns a beach laden with palms? is there a bar somewhere named “jamie’s palm beach”? is there a side to the city of palm beach that only a certain jamie is aware of?

» who sang da do ron ron recently? darlene love, according to my blog about the pops benefit. but i think she sang it originally, so that’s a bit misleading if you want to know anyone who sang it in the intervening 45 years. i should blog more about the new york pops, evidently.

you get the idea. i guess if i provided actual content instead of insane ramblings, my results would be better.

text-transform: lowercase

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i learn something every day. today i learned a new css property.

css, for the uninitiated, is a way to control the way your site looks. you put all of your styles into a file, and then each page refers to that file. and so if you want to change the look of your site, you change one file, and the changes roll out to your pages.

so today i used “text-transform: lowercase” to permanently ban capital letters from this site. the whole capital letters ban is silly, i know, but i started my site that way back in 1998 and i’m stubborn that way.

lots of times, when i cut and paste quotes from other sources, i laboriously replace all the capital letters. or let it go, when i’m lazy. now i don’t have to worry about it. i can leave the capital letters in place, and my css file will tell your browser to remove them all. invisibly. in the background. with no work needed from me or you.

it’s a small thing. but it’s cool and it saves me some time occasionally. i can even type in all caps if i want, and you’ll never know i’m shouting.

a thank you/shout out to stex on the greymatter forums site, who mentioned this in a post there.

semi-useless tag cloud added

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anyway, if you ask me they are semi-useless. it’s my new tag cloud.

it’s in my sidebar, off to the right over there, right under my rss feed links. the tag cloud is a constantly updated alphabetical list of words and topics that appear frequently in my blog titles via my rss feed. and the more times something appears, the bigger the font. and you can click through and there’s a list of the links to the places that topic appeared on my blog.

and, of course, you get lots of associated google ad sense ads.

apparently, according to my tag cloud, piss is a hot topic on my blog. i don’t remember mentioning piss, but there you are. click on a word that interests you, even if it’s piss.

the thing is free to me, from the (i’m assuming) nice folks at zoomclouds.com, and it takes up space in my sidebar, and it certainly looks cool, and it graphically conveys the information it’s supposed to. and if you click through they make lots of money on the ads, i guess.

everyone tells me that, with the traffic this site gets, i’m a fool not to put google ad sense ads in my sidebar and collect the dough-re-mi every month. i guess i just think it’s a bit tacky, and i think more of you than that.

but the zoomclouds people have no such compunctions, so click away on my tag cloud if you wish.

back to number one

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

i’m back to the number one position on google for jamie howard, ahead of jamie howard the professional wrestler, and jamie howard the swimming machine, and jamie howard the alderman in davenport iowa, and jamie howard the former ceo of excite, and all the rest.

it’s about damn time. enough of this number two and number three nonsense.

in an effort to figure out google and how it works, i signed up for google sitemaps. you can then get a plethora of info about how google sees your site, and all that.

for instance, i learned that the number one topic i have blogged about is kristin hall. if i just turned this site into a series of blogs about kristen hall, i might get some action around here. and certainly she is an interesting topic.

but i wouldn’t subject her to the vagaries of my attention. she deserves better.

the second hottest topic? peeps pie. come on people. that wasn’t even a blog. it was just a picture, with no words involved.

of course, as i’ve mentioned elsewhere, the number of people subscribing to my rss feed rises with each day that passes that i haven’t blogged. howard’s law, i suppose.

which tells me that you all just want me to shut up, or just talk about peeps pie or kristen hall incessantly.

i get the message.

and on a completely unrelated topic, i found my post containing my american idol prediction. back in early march, i predicted elliot would go all the way.

i think i’m sticking to that. before last night, i thought he was gone. but after last night, he’s around for one more week anyhow. he may be a dark horse, behind chris and taylor, but i think he’s the only performer left who has actually improving somewhat, if only marginally. and i think people are going to notice that, and reward it.

update: all those google hits for kristin hall? i was spelling her name wrong. it’s kristen hall. here’s my mea culpa on the matter.