April In Review or How Elin Nordegren Boosted My Ego Without Actually Knowing Me
First, a graphic!
[[GRAPHIC LOST TO THE INTERNET]]
How ’bout that, eh? Almost 18,000 hits in one month. How did this come about?
I blame Mike Sanders and his Google Persuader. GP is a neat little game where you take the top ten searches from Google for the week and use them all in a sentence. One week, Elin Nordegren happened to be there. A model and new girlfriend of golfer Tiger Woods, Ms. Nordegren is a hottie who everyone wanted to see. And, I happened to be one of very few sites to even mention her name.
Searches were few until that one faithful day, April 10th, when Ms. Nordegren showed up at the Masters to cheer her new amour on. Almost 4,300 hits later it was the 11th. What a day. And it would continue for the next few, every now and then flaring up with the last real bump coming April 15th.
But on the 17th there was another surge, but this one wasn’t a cheat, no, I earned this puppy.
Glenn Reynolds linked to some comments I made towards someone else’s comments about the pro-Israel rally in Washington DC earlier this month. People who normally flock to his site turned to mine for these comments and the hits surged.
And then there was a sudden decline and I’m now getting about 100 or so hits a day.
Jason is a blogging fiend. There are at least four people that he is responsble for getting hooked into having one of these things (myself included). If you’re looking for someone to blame for the explosion of pretty pointless blogs (mine included) you should look no further then him. He is evil. Send him hate mail by the dozens. You can write to him here.
I am completely in awe of his ability to convince people to waste their time. Now if only he would use his power for good instead of evil. (or at least convince his girlfriend to start a blog. She’s a lot smarter than him with more interesting opinions.). Go check out his latest conquest ‘Will’s Rambles’. The link is to the right.
A couple weeks back Mike P. wrote me asking for a little HTML help and I wrote him this big ass e-mail with all sorts of info in it to get him started. Then Jeremy asked and today Will and I just forwarded them the same mail. Now, instead of doing that, I’m going to post all of the basics and then some here on J’s Notes for everyone to enjoy. This is in no way thurough, but it’s a start.
This is an edited and expanded version of the e-mail I sent Mike on April 17th:
Start with knowing cut and paste. Highlight something, hit “Ctrl + C” and that cuts it. then, find where you want to paste it and hit “Ctrl + V”. Well lookie there…
My first recomendation is to get your website on your computer and do all edits there first. That way you can stop and look at what you’ve done and not risk ruining the whole site. The best way to do this is, in Blogger, hit “Template”. Highlight everything in that box, that’s the HTML for your page, and cut and paste it into Notebook. Save that page somewhere on your harddrive as myblog.htm and now this is what you’ll edit. Do all of your edits in Notebook and be sure to save to this file. View it like you would any other website on your harddrive, open up the folder, click on it, it pops up, looks pretty, don’t it? Don’t worry about the Blogger gibberish, leave it there, that’ll fix itself once you put it back on blogger, it’s what reads your posts. For the love of God, leave it alone or you may be in a world of hurt.
Now you will have a link “Mail Me” that will let viewers send you e-mail. You can change the “Mail Me” part, but always always always be sure you have the closing tag (</a>) with any links. Actually, it’s good to have closing tags with everything but line breaks (<br> or <p>) (and some people will say have it with line breaks as well, but I don’t. So there.)
To make links is roughly the same. say you wanted to link to my site (hint hint):
Now folks will see “Jason Kenney” and it will link to me. Yea!
NOTE Always, always, always remember the http:// part of a link that is not hosted on your server. If you do not have that, it will look for the page where your page is. What do I mean by that?
If you want to add buttons to the side like I have for some links, well, with blogspot you can not host images of your own (though, if you have space provided by your providor you can host the pictures there and reference them). But say you wanted to link to Elkboy like I do (erlend larsen’s site).
First you need to find the url by clicking on the link of course. http://elkboy.cjb.net
Then you need to find out the URL for the image. Right click on the image on J’s Notes and click on “properties”. There’s the address. Highlight it, cut and past it where you want the image to be. http://home.no.net/jolt43/elkboy/blog/elkboy.gif
Now you have a button! You need that border=0 thing, otherwise there will be a line around the picture for the link. Border=0 keeps it nice and clean.
Want to change the alignment of things? EASY!
There are a couple different ways to center something. I recomend:
<center>stuff you want centered</center>
will look like: stuff you want centered
though, you can also use:
<div align=”center”>stuff you want centered</div>
will look like:
stuff you want centered
But that sometimes puts a space before and after itself, I don’t know why, it just does.
Want something aligned to the right? Best way is:
<div align=”right”>stuff to the right</div>
will look like:
stuff to the right
And there ya go.
Hmmm…. I can’t think of much else in the way of tags. Blogger will do bold (<b></b>) and underline (<u></u>) and italics (<i></i>) for ya. If for some reason you want to strike through something, use:
<strike>stuff struck through</strike>
will look like:
stuff struck through
If you want a horizontal bar:
<hr>
will look like:
And you can set the width of that with the width=”x%” tags, so, if we wanted it to be 50%:
<hr width=”50%”>
will look like:
And you can set the alignment with the align=”x” tag:
But, if you wanted EVERY link on your page to open in a new window you could place the following tag in between your head (<head></head>) tags:
<base target=”_blank”>
But ONLY do this if you want EVERY link to open in a new page. Some folks don’t like when you force an open in a new page.
I think that’s it, if I think of anything new I’ll be sure to let you all know. Or, if you have any comments or questions, let me know.
04.30.02 UPDATE 1337 EST Aligning images or having the text wrap around them (same thing) works like aligning anything else, simply add align=”x” in the image tags, so:
You are an AKMA. You stand out from the crowd because of deeply held beliefs in the unknown. You ponder endlessly and treat everyone, even fucknozzles, with respect. WWAD (what would AKMA do) guides your actions. Take the What Blogging Archetype Are You test at GAZM.org
Here’s my problem with this test: I’m all the above. If I answer one way, I’m AKMA, if I answer another I’m Andrew Sullivan, and yet another, I’m Rebecca Blood, just depends on my mood, really. I guess AKMA’s the current winner because, well, that’s what my first result was, so I’ll stick with that.
Yesterday when reading the ‘blah, blah, blah and blog‘ Wired article, something Evan said struck me right between the eyes; “[…] If you write everyday, your writing improves, your thinking improves.”
The year 2000 saw the rebirth of a very old web idea, repackaged in some new technology, and unleashed as the weblog (or “blog” for short). The recipe for a weblog is simple: make a web page, a single page, and put microcontent (short blurbs and blips) on it. Then update it again and again, all day, every day, with the newest stuff always at the top.
Now I’m not one to normally do this (“this” being posting this on my blog though I generally will talk about things a lot, just part of my problem where I can say something and have it make sense but when I sit to write it, blargh) but…
It is funny that I give much more credence to journalists over bloggers. I am not a journalist and I have always been highly skeptical of what I read in the newspaper. But I do believe they subscribe to a “search for truth” ethic well above the average person. – Mike Sanders
Eh, I have to disagree here. To a certain extent.
As Mike stated in his post on Keep Trying, “The increase in blogging makes available many more points of view. But the quick nature of blogging tends to make those opinions less thought out. So there is an increase of quantity with a decrease of quality, compared to say, journalism.” But this statement can be made about the web in general with the plethora of news sites out there who are still fighting to be considered legitimate news sources.
But whether the quality of a blogger’s work is comparable to that of a journalist all depends on what the blogger is trying to do. Are they attempting to report like any other journalist? Most blogs are there for opinions and journals, they’re more like the OpEd page of the newspaper. It’s a great way to see the point of view of folks on the inside of the situations you read about in the news. Whether it’s a Palenstinian talking about the events in the Middle East of a New Yorker right after the events of September 11th, you should expect an upclose and more personal view of these events, not what is news.
What journalists have to strive for is to sit outside and above it all and simply report the facts of the matter. This is the ideal, but that doesn’t really happen.
All journalists write for a paper (or station, or website, or magazine…) whos purpose is ultimately to make money. So these papers must strive to delight their market. If their market is mostly Arab-Americans, for example, then the paper would be stupid to publish articles that may possibly slant in favor of Israel, no matter what the facts are.
Does this present a better picture of events than a blog attempting to report these events would? Possibly, but that’s probably because it has more resources than anything else. The article will still be slanted because of the writer’s opinions and the editor’s opinions and the publisher’s opinion. When the article finally sees print, it has everyones’ fingerprints on it and may distort or leave out facts based on it’s own beliefs and agenda. Your news blogger will make the same mistakes only using the limited resources they have at hand (whether that be their own first hand experience, those of people around them or just what they dig up off of other sites). The agenda of your everyday blogger is simply to convey their emotions and thoughts at that particular moment. And while the facts may not be accurate, the emotions are as real as anything happening out there.
All in all, it just depends on what you want to read.
My good friend Saren said some very deep, thought provoking things on the J’s Notes Board that I think everyone should take pause and think about. Print it out and keep it in your pocket so, in a time of need, you can pull it out and think about its meaning and maybe share with others, bringing joy into their lives moreso than your presence may.
