Blog News

Da Blog for the rest of this week

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So after I proclaimed how much less stressed dropping the webcomic post for this week was going to make me, I’m realizing I’m as stressed as ever if not more.

Barring a calamity, Thursday should see the long-awaited posting of the final college football rankings and lineal titles. Friday should see the posting of another sports-related post, one which I actually consider is more vital to get out of the way this month. But it’s unlikely I get it out first, so I’m slating it for Friday, though you may see it before then.

The post time on this post is on Tuesday PT, just before midnight. I say that counts. Even if it actually goes up at 2 AM.

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So I don’t have the results of the Golden Bowl, or the final college football rankings, and the NFL Lineal Title hasn’t been updated, neither has the college title really, and the webcomic post is going to be delayed until at LEAST tomorrow (Wednesday), and I should come clean and figure out the reason all these things, plus myriad schoolwork and my job hunting, are late.

I’ve long figured, in my own mind, that checking all my myriad RSS feeds shouldn’t take too long. I mention my RSS reader from time to time on my webcomic posts, and I am of the position that having an RSS feed will greatly accelerate the day I review your comic. I may well be reviewing Sluggy Freelance this week if it had an RSS feed; instead it could take a month or more.

Well, webcomics aren’t the only thing on my RSS feed – I have eight or nine feeds on sports alone and those are just the ones still updating. (One of them has an odd little problem; it seems IE7 can detect the items on there, but isn’t detecting new items, not even slotting them in the old items’ slots.) I have plenty of other feeds as well, covering more topics than you can shake a stick at, and many of them are blogs. Ideally not only would most of them be short, I could read at least some of them at home, and not waste time I could be spending doing stuff that actually requires an Internet connection.

Commonly, however, they often link to longer articles. Or I could get stuck reading a bunch of stuff I’m not interested in, or doing a lot of scrolling through the feed. And on both the posts and the longer articles, I’m often moved to comment, or at least look at the comments, and that can involve as much effort as writing a blog post.

One thing I like about Irregular Webcomic! that’s almost as novel – maybe more, for its impact outside webcomics – as its structure is its RSS feeds. Yes, I said feeds, plural. One feed contains just a link to the comic, with a list of themes it’s in. Another feed contains the comic itself, and a third feed contains the comic and its complete annotation. I don’t have much use of the lesser feeds for a webcomic, but imagine if Blogger allowed readers all these options.

Blogger allows you two choices of feed, “short” (first paragraph or 255 characters, though I suspect strictly the latter, with no paragraph breaks or images) and “full” (entire posts). The choice of feed is a philosophical choice: you could be on the side of making sure people trigger your hit counters and see your ads, or you could make it more convenient for them to read your blog as long as you’re giving them a feed. But believe it or not, some people may prefer a short feed, if they have less interest in the topic and don’t want to commit too much time to reading a bunch of crap they’re not terribly interested in, and scrolling past all of it.

If I had to quibble with any feed’s decision on how much info to put in their feed, it would probably be Sports Media Watch‘s short feeds. I always click on anything SMW puts up, even if it’s something I read already in a place like Awful Announcing and I don’t need to know anything more. But I can imagine how the topic might be just a little too geeky for other people and they don’t want to dwell on it too much. If something doesn’t interest them in the title and first sentence, skip it. (And Paulsen has pretty short posts. AA would benefit from a short feed, for that matter, even though I wouldn’t use it.) Conversely, there are some things I’d rather see in short-feed form that publish as long feeds, yet I can see how people would be interested enough in the topic to want a long feed.

So anyway, that’s been my chief distraction: too many feeds to check. I haven’t been able to follow webcomics without feeds, and I haven’t bothered to fix feeds that aren’t working, and I dread it when I add a new feed, which I do sparingly. And it all monopolizes time from other stuff. Even the semi-frivolous business of Da Blog has fallen by the wayside to the almost completely frivolous business of checking stuff.

I may re-prioritize some of my feeds and re-organize my folders to clear out some of the cruft and most frustrating stuff, and I’m going to try to focus more on more important stuff… but I’ve told myself that before. The problem is that checking feeds is relatively low-intensity, so it marks good rest time, but I just need to reduce the time it takes somehow.

So. If you want to stick it to Microsoft with the exception of your operating system, click here for the Random Internet Discovery, which I may have more to say about later. And I guarantee at least two posts on Wednesday. Of course, that’s contingent on me getting enough sleep now…

(And I have a serious beef with Buzzcomix. It’s one thing to have your site suspended twice in a little over two weeks, but to not even have a channel to let people know what’s going on, especially when the old site had a forum…)

Da Blog’s Predictions for 2009

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Because a lot of sites I visit are putting up predictions for the new year, so am I, and I’ll check back in at year’s end to see how I did:

  • The year in sports is a massive disappointment. The Super Bowl pits the Dolphins against the Vikings. North Carolina, after an undefeated regular season, loses in the Final Four and the national championship pits UCLA against UConn. The game is a laugher. Cleveland beats San Antonio in the NBA Finals; the Knicks just barely miss the playoffs and LeBron James signs a contract extention to stay in Cleveland after winning his first championship. Mike D’Antoni agrees to a buyout soon thereafter to coach LeBron in Cleveland, condemning the Knicks to a decade of mediocrity. The Stanley Cup Playoffs pit the Calgary Flames against the Montreal Canadiens, and America tunes out. So does Canada when it turns into a four-game sweep that’s not that close. Neither the Red Sox nor Yankees make the ALCS, and one of them misses the playoffs as Tampa Bay and Philadelphia square off again in the World Series.
  • Tiger Woods comes back too soon, finishing second in the Masters, and misses most of 2009, raising concerns he may retire. Jimmie Johnson wins yet another Sprint Cup in a laugher, and by the end of the season he’s winning races basically by showing up, with all the teams quitting. Rafael Nadal is the only player to win at least two majors of either gender, and Roger Federer never makes a major final. USC, Cincinnati, and Alabama are the only three undefeated teams by week 4; they stay that way through the end, and USC routs Alabama in the national championship. There are no BCS buster mid-majors. At least one minor league cancels either the 2009 or 2010 season, and at least one MLS team folds. The IRL cuts back drastically on the 2010 season, and doesn’t so much pass NASCAR as NASCAR passes it backwards. By 2012, though, the IRL is back to 2008 levels, and returns to ESPN in 2018. UFC effectively becomes NASCAR’s replacement as one of the four major sports, and shows it wasn’t moving to pay-per-view that killed boxing.
  • The Olympics moves to ESPN and ABC after landing in Chicago. NBC immediately pulls out of the NHL following the 2009-2010 season. ESPN becomes the exclusive cable home of the NHL (beyond NHL Network) after 2011.
  • The Saints challenge for the NFC South, and the Lions are at least respectable. Brett Favre retires and the Jets become the new Lions. Matt Cassel bolts from New England to join the Jaguars, who instantly become a Super Bowl contender. Tom Brady comes back a clearly different player, and the Pats begin a slow slide into mediocrity. The Cowboys self-destruct and don’t even challenge for the playoffs. The Titans trade Vince Young to Houston in the offseason.
  • Barack Obama finds himself frazzled by the vexing economic crisis and various foreign crises. Troops are out of Iraq by June, but by August Iraq is effectively ruled by several cabals of warlords. Obama uses the money freed up by exiting Iraq to institute his own version of the New Deal, but it doesn’t work very well. Meanwhile little actual “change” happens, even from the politics of the last eight years, and when Obama calls in the military to break up a food riot in November, many in his own party compare him to Bush, and the “netroots” begin forming their own nascent political movement for 2012.
  • By 2012, that movement has gained enough steam to attract attention (and support) from both major parties. However, the economic crisis has only gotten worse and the US has effectively become a vassal state of China… and the Republicans, as a result, prove far more resilient than expected after adopting a bizarre fascist-anarchist policy, a strange kitbashing of the politics of Ron Paul and George W. Bush. Before 2020, World War III has erupted, and America is Nazi Germany after the GOP win the 2012 elections, the last to be held under the Constitution of 1776. The 2016 Olympics become America’s 1936 Munich Games, and come complete with a past-his-prime Michael Phelps being dragged back to the pool. The world comes out of the war with the economy back on track, but set back to the Middle Ages if not before. China, India, and Japan become the new “modern” world powers with Depression-era technology, set back from reaching 1950s-era technology by the ravages to the environment. The Amazon becomes a desert; Canada and Russia become the world’s new breadbasket.
  • The Internet undergoes its latest metamorphosis. By the end of the year, it is as good at watching video as the average television. In the short term, it only benefits from the deepening economic crisis. When the Obama administration passes a universal broadband bill, it sparks an Internet revolution, and blogs become the new MySpace, since you can at least theoretically make money off them. Internet advertising finally becomes viable, if only because nothing else is.
  • Webcomics undergo an explosion during this time. A Penny Arcade TV series is commissioned for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block by year’s end. By 2010, a Girl Genius movie is in development, and rumors of an Order of the Stick movie persist as well. Sandsday becomes the biggest new thing in webcomics, and by year’s end I’m fighting off TV series offers of my own.
  • Da Blog attracts two huge followings in particular: people looking for webcomics criticism, who singlehandedly make it ten times more popular than Websnark ever was, rendering my getting a real job unnecessary, and people looking for straight-dope political analysis. Da Blog plays a significant role in attracting new audiences to politics, healing the rifts of our political landscape, and shaping the aforementioned nascent political movement.

And that just left me incredibly drained and depressed. I think it’s better if I don’t try to predict what happens, and just try and enjoy the ride. You should try it some time.

Final Post of 2008: Year In Review

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Because I just got a new idea and I’m breaking up my minor bowls into two posts, you’re actually getting THREE posts each today and tomorrow!

Wow.

Wow.

Can you believe that just happened?

I mean… this was a year in which, after eight years of Bush, a Democrat was elected President in resounding fashion. And in so doing became the first black president in the nation’s history… after being completely unheard of four years ago (and arguably, not much better two years later). And running a campaign that was not only the culmination of a four-year trend of people’s participation in political campaigns, but was almost a people’s movement on par with anything coming out of the sixties. Almost literally, Barack Obama was no longer a candidate or even a person; he was a cause.

Speaking of his race, this was a year when – out of nowhere – after years of both groups being in the wilderness, it became virtually guaranteed from the start that either a black or a woman would garner a major-party nomination for President.

And both of those produced, by far, one of the most entertaining presidential campaigns ever.

This was a year that ushered us into what almost everyone is calling not a mere recession, but our worst crisis of the sort since the Great Depression… and it has a shot to be even worse than that, and upend everything we know about American society.

This was a year that produced so many great sports moments that ESPN had little to do but sit there, awestruck, and produce one single special, lacking any of the formatting of past specials, that proclaimed it simply “the Greatest Year in Sports”, including an Olympics that produced too many moments to count, from the Opening Ceremonies to Michael Phelps to Usain Bolt and plenty more you probably didn’t see. No “Top 10 Games” special as in years past, and I should have included the Ryder Cup in my own list. Probably at , bumping out or . Seriously, I could have easily made it a top 20, and that may have been the problem.

And most of all, this was a year that produced a lot of turmoil in my own life… when I launched my own webcomic and finally found a voice on Da Blog, when I found myself at a crossroads that will only begin to be resolved as we enter the new year.

It’s kind of hard to imagine that such a chaotic year is finally coming to an end.

I had seen 2006 as a fairly pivotal year, but that was because of my interests: the ten-year-old UPN and WB networks finally collapsed into the CW (with its sloppy seconds joining a hastily-formed network that now, shockingly, is in far better position than the CW), the NFL started a new primetime paradigm with NBC, ESPN, and its own network, and the Democrats took both houses of Congress and set the stage for the retaking of the White House.

This was far bigger than that. This was my generation’s 1968.

Depending on how much Bush’s legacy holds up, this could prove to be the true beginning of the “twenty-first century”, much like World War I was the true beginning of the 20th (and the end of the Cold War was arguably its end). In my own life, it seems like I’ve been 20 forever (are you sure I was only 19 when the Iowa caucuses happened, let alone when I launched Sandsday?), and I’m still going to be 20 for almost five more months! It’s like the previous 20 years was just a prelude to this year forward in my life.

Here’s to 2008, in all its wild wackiness, in all aspects of the game.

2009 has a heck of an act to follow.

It’s going to be a mite awkward for it to sink in that it is 2009.

Update time

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Okay, so maybe I’m not posting on another webcomic tonight (Tuesday). In fact it’ll probably not be out until Thursday at the earliest. As I’ve mentioned, several popular webcomics aren’t updating because of the holiday, so I picked out a webcomic for this week fairly late.

I will have two posts both tomorrow and Thursday to make up for it.

I’m pretty sure this is the post I intended to post on Thursday but forgot.

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One of the things Robert A. Howard accosted me for in his comment-rant a little over a week ago was my tendency to squee like a fangirl at any links whatsoever.

Now, the main reason I post whenever I get linked, aside from being convinced that this is the link that will bring me everlasting fame and I want to commemorate the moment, is to alert potential advertisers of traffic bumps, so they can bump up their bids accordingly. However, I’m not sure it’s particularly useful for that purpose. Most people probably use Project Wonderful’s “campaign” feature to place their bids, which automatically scale to match current traffic, and PW also provides its own tools to alert bidders of important links, albeit from a select list of traffic generators. Find out more here, although I’m not even sure if this system still works. (Not to say that you can’t get on to Da Blog bidding by hand – I did so successfully on what was really a test bid on a couple of webcomics advertising for Sandsday, though I think I only showed up on one. If that makes any sense.)

So in a new Da Blog Poll that’s been running since Sunday and will continue for a couple of weeks, I want to ask: do you find the acknowledgements of traffic bumps useful or annoying? Do you think they’re useful for advertising even if they are a little annoying to anyone else, or are they useless even for advertising because the acknowledgement tends to lag quite a bit behind the bump itself? You can find the poll in the sidebar, and the comment section of this post will allow you to sound off beyond just the two options on the sidebar.

Quick post

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I had a post in mind for Thursday, but I never could quite remember what it was.

I could have easily decided to take today off because of the holiday. But my streak will continue dammit!

I do have something planned for tomorrow though…

We wish you a merry blog-day…

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On this day two years ago, I made the very first post in the history of Da Blog. I remember it clearly. The post was written inside a bus stop shelter in cold conditions, and I shivered as I typed those first words about myself. I had a few ideas of where I was going to take Da Blog, but few of them were very clear in my head. Some jerk, probably coveting my laptop, kept needling me while I tried to work. I told myself that one day, I would be writing posts in nigh-luxourious conditions and would look back on that first, bus-stop-penned post, with laughter and chuckles.

I’m writing this post… well, the main reasons I’m not writing this in a bus stop shelter again are 1) the Storm of the Century hitting Seattle making it even worse than last time and downright treacherous for a laptop, 2) I’m writing this Sunday night after burning up my laptop battery on my last Flex Scheduling Watch of the year, and 3) as I’ve mentioned a few times, the public wi-fi I used two years ago has almost been abandoned.

But hey, no one’s making me fearful for my safety, so that’s progress!

Now, at the time, the main reason for the weird conditions was that I was on winter break. I was still living in the university dorms at the time during the regular class year. So the instant that I moved back to campus I was already writing in a hundred times more luxourious conditions than I was before (and on my desktop). But that February, I was basically kicked out of the dorms and sent home. Since then I have used various means to improvise to get any internet connection at all. I’ve stolen two different connections from neighbors. I made mad dashes of half a block to squeeze out a little bit of Internet time and back. I went to the library for a while. I’ve even taken advantage of an offer from my dad to use the Internet at the place where he works.

Since this summer, I’ve made at least a token effort to get a real job, and even gotten some initial interviews. But nothing has panned out, and because I haven’t been able to get a real job I haven’t been able to move elsewhere or get an Internet connection I don’t need to steal. So it’s been Improvization City for the better part of two years. No doubt the tanking economy (we wish you a merry recession-day!) has played a part in my lack of a job – certainly it would seem fatal when combined with my general lack of experience.

But there’s also the fact that I’ve been treating Da Blog as more of a job… even though I still don’t have the readers to justify it. Or any revenue streams besides advertising – but that’s one more revenue stream than I had a year ago.

The past year has been one of finding my voice on Da Blog. Over the course of this year, I launched Sandsday, the Random Internet Discovery, started doing regular webcomic reviews, started forming my opinions on the state of politics today, started doing college football schedules and added pages on the web site for the college football rankings, and so, so much more. I think it’s been at least June since I’ve failed to post on a weekday. Given that volume of postings, you may think it way overdue if you’ve noticed that the Blog Archive on the sidebar has switched to breaking down posts by week. It’s easy to forget that a year ago, I was making twelve to twenty posts in an entire month. This is the 374th post I’ve posted in 2008, and already the 28th this month. I posted 155 times prior to 2008, which means I’ve well over doubled the output of my first year in my second.

(I was remiss in not marking my 500th post, in part because all my counts I get from Blogger include posts I’ve abandoned. Post #500, oddly, was this one announcing a move to CAPTCHA for all comments.)

With the move to a more regular posting schedule, and the addition of more quality content, people have started to notice. A year ago, I got excited at 25 visits in a single day. These days… well, there’s still quite a few times when I get fewer than 25, but generally, especially on weekdays, at least 25 is the norm, and less than ten is a disappointment. From March through November, readership on Da Blog has increased every single month. This month is already over 1.5 times last December, and while it only has 682 visits so far through around 6 PM PT Sunday, it can still easily top last month’s mark of 923 visits. The 1,000 frontier remains within reach. And last December, I was excited to get around 300 hits in a month, a mark I haven’t fallen below since May. And some surprisingly heavy hitters have showed up. Okay, so when you’re talking about webcomic names like David Morgan-Mar and Robert A. Howard commenting on (and linking to) Da Blog posts, you’re talking maybe T-list “celebrities”, but I’m a Z-lister at best, so anyone with their own site and any kind of following taking notice is going to leave me awestruck.

(My post with my predictions of SportsCenter’s “Top 10 Games” proved to be surprisingly popular on searches, so look for me to potentially repeat it next year and in future years.)

Even with football season over, I’ve got still more plans for Da Blog, and for the web site. I’m going to be running a “mail call” feature to mark the first anniversary of Sandsday in about a month’s time (I hope), so if you have any questions about the strip, leave a comment on this post, the open thread, or mwmailsea at yahoo dot com. Howard rightly pointed out that my webcomic posts have fallen into a rut of Ctrl+Alt+Del, Order of the Stick, and Irregular Webcomic! over and over again, and in something I had been planning on already, I’m going to aim to change that starting tomorrow. I still hope to complete at least my Democratic platform examination before the inauguration. As I vowed last year, I still plan to focus on my studies, but I’ll only be taking two classes – although I still hope to add a job on top of that. And I still have a boatload of new projects I hope to have coming down the pike in the new year.

What of my advertising revenue, as much of a trickle as it may still be? I started adding advertising in August and I already have four dollars. Woo-hoo! But what do I do with it? As much as it sounds frivolous, given all my other problems, I’m going to start thinking of registering “morganwick.com” as a place to stow my various projects (including, potentially, Da Blog). And before my latest term with Freehostia runs out in August, I need to start thinking about potentially getting a new hosting provider to go along with the new domain. If I can afford it, I need to look for a hosting provider that provides the most bang for the buck, especially where PHP support and MySQL support is concerned. Ideally, I need more MySQL databases for the College Football Rankings and some new webcomic ideas I have percolating in my head. I also need to think about upgrading my SiteMeter account, pending what happens when they launch the new service for real – I need to start looking back more than just 100 visitors to see where they’re coming from.

Year Two of Da Blog was a momentous one, for itself and for me. Let’s see if Year Three takes us on just as exhilirating a ride – and if I end it posting in slightly better conditions than now.

Some quick notes

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This post was originally planned for tomorrow, which is when the College Football Rankings will likely be delayed until. The main reason is because someone gave me another reason to post today.

Robert A. Howard somewhat belatedly commented on my post on Tangents, and mentioned that he “definitely [would] mention [Da B]log over at Tangents.” Once that comes down the pike it should result in some sort of traffic bump, although between the hiatus and then the move to the new site I suspect Tangents has bled some readers recently.

After reading that comment, I think John Solomon may have been on to something in his characterization of Howard as a suck-up. I hope he doesn’t make too many changes just because I say so, and I hope he doesn’t define his writing style entirely on what other people say it should be, but I hope he knows what’s the blog he wants to write. Not that he should entirely shut himself off from the criticism of others – then he’s basically Tim Buckley, and no one wants to be that – but I think most people want to read “Tangents by Robert A. Howard,” not “Tangents by Eric Burns(-White), John Solomon, Morgan Wick, and a gazillion others”.

I’m trying to take it easy with this post. I slated quite a few things to put on Da Blog during the break, not least of them being a resumption of my platform reviews and another political feature to run during the summer, which I would work on now so they wouldn’t become a repeat of the platform reviews later, and so that I could work on several posts at once. But with my limited Internet access time, most of my time has been dominated by what I’m doing for Da Blog now. I haven’t even been able to look for any jobs, even for just during the break.

It doesn’t help that I don’t have the services of the local public library available during the winter break (don’t ask why), unlike in summer, and Seattle just got hit with the Cold Snap of the Century right AFTER it wouldn’t have mattered so much to me, so sitting outside and using the Internet, either stealing it from someplace else or using the city of Seattle’s on-again-off-again public connection, is a good way to get frostbite. I also don’t have the services of running just outside the house briefly anyway; the only connection left that’s a block or so from my house is far more inconsistent than what I’ve used before. (A nearby business has repeatedly offered to allow me to sit inside, but for at least two reasons I doubt I would like its atmosphere.) I burned my one real shot at using the Internet at a place I would have to pay for in a context where it netted me about an hour and a half, most of it not used on anything productive. I’m using the Internet four nights a week at a place where the only reason I don’t pay for it is because my dad works here, and it’s still technically mooching off another place’s connection.

And Da Blog and Sandsday are the closest things I have to any sort of income… I had been hoping to use the winter break as a time to wind down and relax before redoubling my efforts to get schoolwork done in the new quarter, but that doesn’t seem to be happening.