Return of the Weird Searchers!

Hurrah! After more than a year of not being able to get searches beyond stuff related to resumes for marriage in the Asian subcontinent, the strange search terms have reappeared!

Oh joy, oh joy!

So I check my search terms every once in a while just to see if something hinkey comes along. And today I was rewarded with this gem:

Oh, how I’ve missed these beauts! Lookit that! Ain’t it just grand?

I have no idea who might be a whore as a hobby, but hey, everyone needs a hobby right? Might as well enjoy it, right? And if you can get paid for it to boot, well – show me the downside to this one?

Of course, it might just be someone who’s a whore for hobbies. But admitting you have a problem is the first step, don’t you know. So there you have it! I’ve been sought out by someone who’s a hobby whore or a hobbyist whore, whichever.

Also note the “what are two paragraphs” entry there. I’d say two paragraphs are … well, two paragraphs. One paragraph more than one. A pair. One paragraph and another paragraph. Maybe it’s just me, but did you really need the great Oracle Google for that?

Well, wasn’t this fun?

Have a great weekend everyone, and if you’re interested, my #fridayflash piece is up on my fiction blog. Stop by if you’ve a mind to.

-JDT-

All original content © 2009 DarcKnyt
ALL rights reserved.

One Satisfied TW

Oh, I’ve experienced traffic whore Nirvana.

I’ve made no bones about being a sleeze-bag for hits and comments. Love ‘em. Can’t get enough of ‘em. And yesterday, I actually sat back and breathed a long, satisfied sigh.

I somehow got my post promoted to the front page of WordPress.com.  What resulted was an orgy of hits on my post which left me dizzy with glee and wonder. Hundreds of hits, literally (yes, I really mean literally – I ended up with more than 730 hits), and comments from new visitors. Awesome!

I’m not sure how this happened. I got an email saying it happened, but no explanation on how. I’d like to know, because this is a handy way of getting my blogging rocks off. And I’d like to promote blogs my friends keep too, and give them some blogger endorphin release if possible. Alas the method eludes me yet.

Thank you to everyone who stopped by to visit. I really mean that. I appreciate the time you took to read what I wrote. If you left a comment, double-thanks! That’s what blogging is about for me in a lot of ways. Interaction with others. That, and hit count. I’m all about the hit count.

So thanks everyone. It made my day. Literally.

God bless and if you’ve never been here before, feel free to come back whenever you’d like. We’d love to have you.

And thanks to all of you who are regular readers and commenters. I consider many of you friends, people I look forward to hearing from every day. Your presence here keeps this blog alive and kicking, and I wouldn’t do it without you.

Okay, maybe I would but it’d be boring.

See you all tomorrow, I hope.

-JDT-

All original content © 2009 DarcKnyt
ALL rights reserved.

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Picture This

When I first started using Zemanta, which is a nice way of gathering resources and links in a blog post, I also allowed it to provide me with pictures to use for my post.  (If you don’t know, people like pictures.  You’ll get more hits on your blog if you use ‘em than if you don’t.  Word to your head, yo.)  And that was fine.

Then I found out I could do cooler things and maybe find better pictures, which don’t require caption editing, if I used the great oracle Google or similar to find my pictures.  So I started doing that.  And things were fine.

Then I discovered a Polaroid Picture add-on for Windows Live Writer.  It allowed me to pick my own picture, insert it into my post, tilt it right or left if I wanted, and add my own caption, and some other special effects too.  And things were wonderful.

Then something changed.  Every picture I found on the Internet, no matter what the dimensions of the picture were, became a postage stamp-sized tile on my blog post.  I could resize the picture of course, but only at my peril.  The pixelation indicated this wasn’t viable after all, not if I wanted the picture to be recognizable and, in some cases, have the text be legible.

What do to?  What to DO?!

I’ve done what I can to pick the appropriate size.  I even went so far as to check with other search engines to see if the one I used did something to the images when they saved.  Nothin’.  Always tiny.

What to do?  What to DO?!

Well, I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now.  I have no clue where to find the nice, clear, large images I can shrink to the perfect size anymore.  Maybe my search terms have gone stale.  Maybe I’m not being creative enough.  Maybe this is Internet censorship at work.  Maybe it’s a conspiracy to stop me from getting the hits I so desperately need and deserve.  Maybe there’s someone trying to keep me from getting popular and they’ve sabotaged my ability to download perfect pictures.  Whatever the case (and none of those are the case), I just can’t get the good sized pictures I once had.

So, do the posts suffer because they don’t have a picture?  Do I need one?  Do you enjoy the posts as much without them?

Sound off, let me know.  Don’t wanna work harder than I have to, y’know?

-JDT-

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The Banning Bane

Have you ever banned someone from your blog or website?

I’ve never had to do it, but my beloved has on more than one occasion. She has a particular post which draws a lot of traffic, and with a lot of traffic come trolls.  She gets people who think it’s their sworn Internet duty to revile, insult and demean the poster and other commentators because they either don’t like what was said, or don’t like the comments associated with the post.

I’ve been banned from deviantART pages in the past, too.  Don’t know how I earned that particular distinction, but I did.  And frankly, I was glad of it.  I didn’t care much for what and who was happening at the time, so being banned didn’t exactly break my heart.  I didn’t care, actually.  And the banning wasn’t by deviantART, it was by one of the users (the users can block people from being able to comment on their pages or work if they so choose).

But I don’t think I’ve been the cause of someone being banned, and I don’t believe I’ve ever been banned from a site.  And I know I’ve never banned anyone from this site – or any other site I operate – for any reason.  I just … don’t worry that much about it.  “It” being what people on the Internet have to say, about me or anything I post.

Nevertheless, this is my blog, my domain, my house as it were.  I can prevent anyone from saying anything I choose, can stop anyone from being able to step in here and say things.  This isn’t an open forum where anything goes.  There are no rights to free speech here.  If I don’t like someone or what they say, do or believe, I’ve full authority and privilege to tell them to kiss my hairy fat behind and block them from access to my blog.  Their rights to say whatever they want whenever they want stop at my blog’s front door.  Period.

I’ve never exercised the privilege though.  I’m not sure I will, either.  But are there circumstances under which you would?  Is there a set of conditions you’ve set up, even if they’re only in the back of your mind, which when met will trigger bannage?  What’s the “hot button” for you?  Where do you draw that imaginary line, if it exists for you?  Is that the measure of last resort, or are you ready to do it when you feel it’s warranted no matter how small the offense might seem to others?

-JDT-

All original content © 2009 DarcKnyt
ALL rights reserved.

Give ‘em What They Want

So, a little while back, I got to complaining about those folks who pop onto my blog here in search of information on b10-data sheets.  (Yes, that’s code, so this post doesn’t show up in the searches; from now on, I’ll refer to it as “BD”.)

If you missed that post somehow, the gist of it is this: I get a lot of traffic for folks seeking information on BDs.  I don’t know why.  One time, I asked how someone constructs one, what it was, etc., because I was applying for a job with a company as a writer of some kind (tech writer, I think).  They wanted writing samples, and all I had was some of my fiction … which probably isn’t appropriate to the task.  I needed to put some together, and one of the suggestions the company offered in their posting was a BD.  Okay, I thought, what the heck is that and how do I write one?

Well, I put out a call for some input here on my blog and got a couple of helpful pointers.  Next thing I know, I’m getting hits for BDs … not just professional ones, but personal ones used for marriage proposals.  Now, I’m not going to do any sort of cultural commentary here about why you have to submit a resume to propose marriage.  To each their own.  But I got tired of having so many search terms come up that way and that post be so popular for one lousy statement, which didn’t provide what they needed.

In jest, I got off my rump and did a Google search.  I compiled as much information as I could find, included the links to relevant sites, and made all manner of disclaimers.  In short, I caved and gave the masses what they wanted.  The traffic on my blog went up over the next couple of weeks, and anywhere from a third to a half of my hits now are from people searching out BD information.

All well and good, but I’m tired of catering to that crowd on a blog that’s not about that, never was, never wanted to be.  So I thought about moving it.  I didn’t do it last weekend for laziness’s sake.  But yesterday, I finally made the plunge.  I used to keep a free web site over on a defunct host called FreeWebs.  They’ve since become Webs.com, and they’ve done a lot to improve the joint.  So I went over, decided against using my existing account to host the BD stuff, and started a new site.  I copied all the information over, with all the links, re-did all the specifics so we have live links instead of text code, and voila! – a new BD-specific site lives.

The nice thing is, I could register the site with Google, Yahoo, and include SEO site tags.  I put the description in.  And I enabled (finally! stupid thing) the stats counter.  Then, I went over to my BD main page, put in a notice of site change, and now, I’m watching for the hits to gradually move over there.  (This may not happen until I don’t physically have the information on this site anymore.)  And, for a traffic whore like me, this is going to sting … seeing all that traffic, all those hits, go somewhere else and watching my little bouncing hit-counter ball drop?  Oh yeah. Hard to do.

So, that’s my big news for the weekend.  It took me about half an hour to do it all told; the site builder there is really terrific and easy to use.  It’s not going to have the power or flexibility of a pay site, but for free?

Hey, I’m all about the cheap and free, baby.

So go check it out and let me know what you think.  Here’s the link.

-JDT-

All original content © 2009 DarcKnyt
ALL rights reserved.