Street signs

I’d use a one-word title for this post, but it might get me kicked off of Blogger and/or force me to bump my PW rating up to NSFW.

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One problem (possibly) gets solved, and another crops up. So soon after finding out I could be getting a real battery for my laptop, my USB drive stops working. Because my last USB drive got lost, and both were my only means of backing up the contents of my old hard drive, and the one before the last one stopped working when the USB connector started sliding in and out and I was never able to get my files off it, if I can’t recover the information on there I have effectively lost everything I had worked on that’s not on the Internet or my desktop dating back at least to April of last year.

Sandsday will still go up as normal, since I work on those strips on my desktop, but there were some updates for the web site that were saved on the USB drive but not uploaded to the site that will now have to wait. I should be able to re-upload my street sign images from my trip to Whidbey Island earlier this month, but I will also have to re-write the applicable section of the street sign gallery, which will be a pain. Especially since my dad could be taking me on a road trip as soon as this weekend, which will be a street sign bonanza.

More distressingly, if I can’t recover what’s on the USB drive (or find my old one) I will have to abandon the 100 Greatest Movies Project and take the preview site offline. I worked on writing up a major chunk of the movies for the Project last summer (at least a third), and I also collaborated with a second on a few, and now all I have is what’s on the web site (i.e. nothing, really), the sample(s) I sent to the second, and the ones written by the second only when we weren’t together. Among the writeups lost are fairly lengthy ones by me that I can’t really palm off to anyone else because they contain analysis of the list itself.

Damn it.

An update, but not really.

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Last weekend I attended a relative’s wedding, and at the time I considered making a post about the experience, but most of my thoughts were gone by the time I got home. I did get street sign pictures from it though. They’ll be up on the web site when Freehostia can get its new file manager to work the way it wants to.

New poll asks whether you think the label list clutters up the sidebar too much. I thought it did, at the expense of Da Blog Poll and other things below it, but some of what I write is so long it might not matter.

Some comments on my street signs, and other webby stuff

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A while back (in the Pre-Morgan-Mar-LiveJournal era) I mentioned Samuel Klein’s street blade gallery, and I e-mailed him about mine, and I never got an e-mail back and I never saw anything pop up on his street blade gallery tag, so I thought it had been ignored and that was that.

Well, today, on a lark, I decided to see if maybe he’d put something up without telling me, and lo and behold he had… but as it contained no Blogger tags (it did contain Technorati tags), I would never have found out by following an RSS feed without subscribing to his site’s general feed. And street signs are about the only aspect of his site I’m interested in.

(And it was only put up on Monday anyway.)

So. I looked into my site’s hit logs. 49 hits so far this month for my street sign gallery alone, 101 in June, 67 in May.

Wait… again, 49 of those hits are coming from the month in which the post was made. The street sign gallery more than doubled that the previous month alone. And I’m looking at a daily average of 408 hits for June (across all pages and including reloads) but only 136 for this month. That includes 1873 hits June 6.

This (scroll down to the comments) accounts for only 148 of the “referrers”, with all the higher ones being either direct hits or coming from the website itself, mostly the webcomic. Again, this is across all page views. So that helps explain the deluge for the web site.

But I last mentioned the street sign gallery on July 17, when I also mentioned Klein’s gallery, and before that it had been ages since I brought it up. So where did 101 hits for the street sign gallery, of all things, come from? The only thing I can think of is that a lot of my referrals come from Google Image Search, and they can’t all be Sandsday.

But it also got me thinking about something else. Subtract any referrers that begin with “morganwick.freehostia.com”, and in July so far, I have a total of 749 hits to my web site, doubtless some of them referring to images, and 15 of them coming from variants of morganwick.blogspot.com. And some of them are probably me. By contrast, I have about 370 hits to Da Blog in the last month and about 640 page views. That’s an average of 25 a day to the web site and 21 page views on Da Blog, with half a hit a day coming from Da Blog to the web site.

It’s not exactly the most popular of sites, but I am thinking of making some changes to capitalize on what little popularity I have. Stay tuned.

(Oh, and after my e-mail contained a lengthy explanation of several signs for someone unfamiliar with Seattle, I find out Mr. Klein had seen many of the signs I had before, just had never taken any pictures of them.)

Hey, it’s a part of the site not named Sandsday getting updated!

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Street Sign Gallery is updated with a new batch of signs, all in the Seattle area. Redmond, Bellevue, and Tukwila (okay, okay, Shoreline and the University of Washington too) all get their moments in the sun, as well as a couple new Seattle pictures.

I mentioned when I started the project that I didn’t know if anyone else was doing this. Well, as it turns out, I did not know the terminology at all. Apparently the standard sign is known as a street blade, and one Samuel Klein has kept up a Street Blade Gallery on his (otherwise rather diverse) blog. Both of us are on the West Coast, so most of our signs are from around here, but both of us are interested in seeing what blades you have around your community. In my case, you can send it to mwmailsea at yahoo dot com.

Warning, Around the Horn geekery ahead:

I think we’re all losers in the mustache contest between Cowlishaw and Blackistone. Cowlishaw should never have shaved the goatee because he really does look like a porn star, while Blackistone just looked ridiculous yesterday, especially with those coke-bottle glasses.

The Drinking Game is updated to reflect the fact Michael Smith has not been on the show in ages and the new “Deal… (long pause) …or no deal?” kick Reali has picked up recently (and which should have been on the list a long time ago).

At the corner of Update Street and Web Site Avenue

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In case you haven’t noticed, the strip is back to normal now. Today, however, I want to add something else to the web site.

The Internet is an amazing place. When I discovered that there were sites dedicated to nothing but obsessing over America’s roads and highways, I became convinced that there was a website for anything on the Internet. So when I couldn’t find a site cataloguing street signs in the same way as roads – something that can show a lot of variety – I decided to make one.

(Can someone tell Freehostia that I’d really love a way to select several files at once for upload rather than have to go through Browse box after Browse box? I’m sure FTP would be one way that’s already in place but I fear complications…)

Also, I made a new addition to the Around the Horn Drinking Game.