Category: blogging

Widgets

Check it out, nerd boy is messing around with the layout on the page again.  I had this goofy idea to add a music playlist to the sideboard.  Just a few things that I’ve been in the mood for recently.  I already forget where the idea came from (blame old age).  Did I see it on someone else’s page?  I think so.

Anyway, I went over to Spotify and started a new playlist and added a couple of Robert Fripp and Steven Wilson things because that’s where my head has been lately.  I added a couple of Rush tunes too because RIP Professor.  Then I went looking for a widget…

…and I couldn’t find one.  Google to the rescue.  While I was looking I found an Instagram widget too.  I have a love/hate relationship with The ‘Gram.  I love the idea of it, but I hate the shitty interface and the shitty algorithm and the shitty owned-by-Facebook.  Oh what the hell, thought the social media whore, and I added the Instagram widget and a text widget with a Spotify tagger that linked to my new playlist.  I then added a few more songs to the playlist.  Prog and Blues, mostly.  Not the most palatable of combinations, but screw you guys it’s my brain I don’t care, whatever.

You can see both things over there on the right somewhere.  You might have to scroll down a little.   >>>>>>>>

I also added a Flickr widget which didn’t work, and a twitter widget which reminded me that my twitter feed is almost entirely links back to this page.  Can you say redundant?  I can, and often do.  I removed them both and moved on with my life.

Also, I totally forgot that you can’t actually play Spotify on an embedded playlist.  It links you back to Spotify itself (I think it tried opening the player app before proceeding to the web player) and I think you need to be signed in to hear anything.  Whatever.  It’s only there because I’m a nerd and like doing nerdy things.

What this means is that any minute now I’m probably going to be changing my whole page theme.  You have been warned.

Hypocrisy Continued

Call this one hypocrisy continued, or maybe SEO kinda works.

I’m referencing something like three older posts here, but to sum up:  I honestly do not care about how many hits this page gets, but I started using a couple of simple Search Engine Optimization techniques recently and it seems like it works.  Also, my job title is programmer/analyst and I do enjoy getting wrapped up in statistics, even when they are meaningless and show that I’m a hypocrite.

As previously mentioned more than a couple of (dozen, probably) times, when I first started blogging (on Google’s Blogger, 2008-2012) I was posting multiple times a day.  I then, for absolutely no reason, moved over to wordpress.com (2012-2016) and continued my ridiculous posting habits.  Next I moved to medium.com (2016-2017) and I think the frequency of posts started dropping before opening up a new wordpress.com account (2017-present).  At first I was posting a lot but it dwindled considerably over time until last June 1st when I decided I was going to post every damn day again, for literally no reason.  That has turned into multiple times a day, just like it was in the beginning.

While I was using the original wordpress account I started tagging posts.  I don’t remember why or when exactly but it seemed like a good idea at the time.  At some point, possibly when I started this account, I started using post categories as well.  As my interest dwindled between lets say September 2017 and May 2019 I stopped tagging and categorizing and just posted.  After reading a reddit post on SEO a couple of weeks ago I went back to categories and tags.

Just focusing on the current wordpress account, when I look at the numbers from the start (March 2017) there was a pretty small but steady stream of hits for the first few months.  As I started losing interest, the hits went down considerably.  The numbers in the Spring of 2019 were down something like 75% from the numbers in Spring 2017 (and lets not forget, 0.25 * 4 = 1, m’kay?  We aren’t talking about lots of hits here.  Not even close).

Last June when I started posting regularly (and writing longer posts, not just throwing up random pictures) the numbers went up again.  By the end of the summer they were back to where they were at the start.  Something odd happened in October though.  I had one post (I don’t remember what it was, but it was just a random picture) got a ton of hits.  There was one day where my numbers skyrocketed (again, for me skyrocketing doesn’t mean the same thing as it does for let’s say Mashable, or the New York Times, or any real site that isn’t just some stupid fat putz mouthing off).  The counts for October 2019 were the highest they had been since the account was created.

Two days ago January 2020 passed October 2019.  There are still 2+ days to go this month and I’m already quite a bit over that previous high.  Again, before you start thinking ol’ Robbie should monetize or any bullshit like that, we’re only slightly above single digit numbers here, m’kay?  Never lose site of that.  It’s pretty important.

So there I was, looking at the Stats and Insights page (wordpress.com users know what I’m talking about) and seeing the current month as my most viewed month in almost three years.  Cool!  Then I thought to myself, I wonder how the numbers on the first wordpress.com account looked.  I logged out and tried to log back in as the original user.  I couldn’t remember the original user’s email address (I don’t use my main personal email address for any of my wordpress.com accounts).  I had to dig through my email to try and find the right user name (I don’t use my main email address, but I do forward all emails from the burner accounts to my main email, so they were there for me to dig out).  Once I found it I had to trudge through the depths of my pea brain’s memory to find the password.  I found that too, eventually.  No need to reset it.

Two things surprised me.  First, despite not having touched that account since 2016 it still gets occasional hits.  Not a lot, just a couple each month.  I didn’t expect that though it does make sense as I can see some posts that were ported from that page to this one still get hit here.  Whatever.  Second, the numbers from 2012-2016 weren’t all that different from my numbers over the last seven months.  On average they were higher back then, but not too much higher.  There were outliers though.  January 2020 is the highest hit count for any month on the current account.  There were 4-5 months on the old account where the hits spiked in a gigantic way.  We’re talking triple the hits we’re seeing today.  More than triple.

The moral of the story is, sure it’s fun to see the numbers on this page growing a little… but don’t get cocky, kid.

QED.

Two Instances of Hypocrisy

I’m a hypocrite.  It’s official.  Pull up a chair and I’ll bore you to tears with two stories of hypocritical hypocrisy.

First: When CBS released it’s streaming service I said no.  No way.  Even as a lifelong Star Trek fanatic I couldn’t do it.  I waited until the first season of Discovery came to iTunes and I watched it there.  I did the same thing with season two.  In fact, I just watched season two, episode four while eating my dinner tonight.

But… Picard.  How can I possibly live in a world where there is a Star Trek TV series about Jean Luc Picard without actually seeing it the second it comes out?  I can’t do it, I just can’t do it.  I promised myself I wouldn’t watch the trailer because it would make me want to subscribe.  It didn’t work.  I subscribed and then watched the trailer.  Hypocrite.  Hypocrisy to the max.

Second: I posted something not long ago about how the number of visitors to this page had doubled when I started posting every day (1×2=2).  I said I didn’t really care if anyone visited the page at all because that’s not why I do this.  I do this to yell at the universe.  It’s not Facebook, I’m here with the expectation that no one is paying attention and I like it that way.

Then last week I read a post on reddit where a user in the blogging subreddit mentioned that their traffic increased by a factor of 10 after they started employing some simple SEO techniques.  They started tagging everything and using categories, things like that.  Blah, said I.  I bet if I did the same thing it wouldn’t change anything.  For the last couple of weeks I’ve been tagging the crap out of stuff and I started using categories again for the first time in ages.

Well… ummmm… traffic hasn’t increased by a factor of 10, but it sure has increased.  Ummm… woops.  Hello to all you new folks who have stumbled on my hypocritically hypocritical stupidity.  Thanks for stopping by.  Donald Trump is a fascist… anyone still left?  Okay.

I like interacting with people on Facebook.  I kinda like interacting with people on Twitter, but I usually don’t.  My twitter is about 1/4 bitching about that fascist, Trump, 3/4 links back to this page, and a few random Bruins and Red Sox posts for flavor.  Tumblr… hehe, just kidding.  This page isn’t for anything like that though.  This is a blathering idiot blathering.  If you’re cool with that, fine.  I’m thinking about looking into turning off comments because 99% of them are spam and the wordpress.com spam blocker catches them all.

Whatever.  Get off my lawn, you nasty kids!  The hypocrite is hypocriting, or something.

Addendum: Good at hypocrisy, bad at SEO.  After all that I forgot to add tags to this post.  You can’t see me laughing at my own dumb ass self, but trust that I am.  Also, I think I need to add a television category.  Should I go through the previous 11,555 post (that number is actually accurate) and search for references to television so that I can add them to the category?  No.  The answer to that is a solid, hard, definite no.

Go Away

Go away.  I’m  (probably temporarily) done here.  New posts (for the time being at least) are here.  So don’t keep hanging around here, there won’t be anything new (for now).

I feel like such a nerd.  I should just stop this stupid blogging garbage all together.

Getting Tired of This

November 2008 to December 2012.  Four years.  That’s how long I used Blogger before I got tired of it and wanted something different.

December 2012 to August 2016.  Almost four years.  That’s how long I’ve used WordPress.com and I’m really starting to get tired of it and want something new.

I want something different, but I don’t know what, and I’m starting to think there is nothing out there that is going to get me excited about all of this again.  I tried ghost.org today and their editor absolutely RULES.  Unfortunately it’s a paid service and their cheapest tier is $29/month.  Yeah, thanks but no thanks.  I want a personal blog, not a full blown business site.  Give me a break.  

I like medium.com a lot.  It’s just… I don’t know.  It’s more like creating a magazine than just a goofy ideas blog.  For some reason it seems really wrong to me to just post a photo, even though they look so good on medium.  I feel like anything smaller than an essay that takes 5+ minutes to read is missing the point.  I hate to say it, but if I want free hosting and a bit of social interaction, and I’m through with both blogger and WordPress.com, then tumblr might be the only viable option left.  I’ll be damned though if I’m going to put any more of my eggs in a yahoo basket.  Or should I say, a Verizon basket.  Ugh.  I am already up to my eyeballs in Flickr.  Marisa Meyer, I had such faith in you.  Now look at things.  What a mess.  No, I’m not moving my stuff over to tumblr.  That ship has very much sailed.

What else is there?  What other options do I have?  I don’t want to write a platform myself, I just want to post goofy shit.  Do I need to go back in time to the late 90s and use live journal?  What was the other one, typepad?  I don’t know what to do.  Maybe I should just give it up.  The whole idea of a personal blog is ancient history anyway.  This sucks.

Private Posts

Last night I imported my old private, invitation only, blogger page into this wordpress.com page.  Unfortunately everything came in as public.  Whoops.  There was a full day when about 1000 posts containing kid pics and kid names were all there for the viewing.  As of a few minutes ago, I have updated all of those posts to be private.  I am the only one who can see them.  I would like to password protect them so I can let people who can see them on blogger see them here, but I don’t see a way to bulk update to a password.  I’ll research a little and see what I can get.

Myspace Blogs Live Again?

The first place I ever tried blogging was on myspace. Interestingly, it was also the place that I met my wife. You might say that myspace changed my life for the better. Infinitely better.

But I digress…

When the old myspace died it was replaced by the horrible piece of garbage that is the new myspace. Blogs from old myspace were not ported into the new myspace. It was just another reason to hate their redesign. I thought my old posts were gone forever. For some reason tonight I did a little research in Google and found out that you can request your old posts. When you make the request it tells you it will notify you when your blog is ready for download and that it might take THREE DAYS before you hear back.

I don’t think I’ll be able to import the old posts into WordPress.com. I wonder though, can I copy the text into a new post and then edit the date and time so that it appears as though I entered it 100 years ago? I’m not sure I want to repost all of it. I’m not sure what’s in there, apart from a whole bunch of posts about the Lowell Lockmonsters. There will be some wonderful stuff about the early days of my relationship with the love of my life. It’s all worth keeping just for anything posted from April 2007 on.

I’ll let you know.

Cross Post from Medium

I am trying to see if I can cross posts between wordpress.com and medium.com. Medium has a nice import function that will pull a single post from an outside source via a url. I tried it with a couple of posts from here and they’ve worked.

Now to try it in the other direction. I wrote a post in medium. Can I use the embed code to post it here as well? (I’m guessing no)

Guitars

Addendum:
That would be a no.