Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Critiques Updates and Girly Mags
Having visited hundreds of blogs over the last week or so, I’m getting a feel for what makes a good blog and what makes a bad blog. Of course content is the most important thing followed by frequent updates. Perhaps this is all that should matter, but without a reasonable visual presentation the eyes seem to have trouble staying on a web page. On the other end of the spectrum are pages that are too cute or have too much visual clutter and noise, drawing all attention away from the words. And finally a judicious use of picture help to hold interest, probably to confirm some impression we get from the words what the author is like.
I know there are blog tools to make picture blogging easy, but I have not subscribed to them so we have to do it the old fashion way with html and FTPing to my host sight. I should thank jaytv.com by the way for letting me do whatever the hell I want there. This is of course in trade for various web design work done for the Canopy Club.
So to break up the unbroken text of my blogging here is a shamelessly vain picture of me showing off my first tattoo which I got last summer. This summer I plan on getting something done on the left shoulder.
BTW, it has been pointed out that some people can't figure exactly what the picture is in the BNL Header. That's me out rollerskating in downtown Urbana, Summer of 2004, taking a picture of myself in the reflection of a main street shop window.
More Karma Whoring
I have started to get BlogHop reviews on this blog, and they are glowing for the most part, so thank you. No comments to BNL directly as of yet, but Blogger.com has had all sorts of server problems this month, so it’s not impossible that Blogger.com is dropping the ball. I would like to acknowledge and thank Frisky070802 on Slashdot who was the first to send feedback and comments back to my Slashdot Journal entries a year and a half ago. Frisky will probably not see this acknowledgement directly however, so this is test to see how wide a circle of friends I now have in getting word back to Frisky at Slashdot.org.
Making Progress
"Funny She Didn't Mention You..." is coming along, it's probably about 1500 words right now, so expect about 5000 words and a new Larry's Life posting by the end of the coming weekend
End with a Joke
I hesitate to share this office story, but it got so many laughs I can’t resist. In talking about piracy and the motivation some people have for downloading videos, I related a delinquent behavior I had engaged in years ago, that being shoplifting girly magazines as a teen. I rationalized this IP theft because they would not have sold the magazines to me directly. A coworker named Dan asked me why I didn’t just have an of age friend buy them for me. I replied that then like now (in my best deadpan voice) I didn’t have any friends, but if I’m hearing you correctly what I need to make friends now is to buy girly magazines for underage teens
