Web site news

I personally would have preferred a Pats-Packers Super Bowl…

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I mean, that would have basically guaranteed the best rating in Super Bowl history, right? A quest for perfection combined with the most popular and revered QB in America who might have a chance to end his career Elway-style with a Super Bowl win? Over a team a significant proportion of the country does not like because they think Tom Brady is too much of a celebrity, Bill Belichick is too inhumanly cold, and the whole team cheats. (As recently as Christmas I got a comment attacking me for my Patriots Run to 19-0, which has been updated by the way. Belatedly.)

Last time you can rely on Da Blog to tell you there’s a new strip up

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I’ve posted the new navigational interface. Now you can look at any comic in the short 3-strip history of Sandsday. Of course, it’s going to get a little hard as time goes on, so tomorrow I’m probably going to add a way to punch in a number and be taken to that comic. I do not intend to announce that change – it’ll be up by the time the fourth strip is up.

Building a brighter future… today!

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Okay, in my last post I said I would have a new comic at 11 PM every night. And this is a lot closer to midnight. Well, you see, I’m busy designing a whole navigational interface for the comic (now called “Sandsday”) and I was hoping to get it up tonight. It might still get put up later tonight, and it’ll be up tomorrow night at the latest. But for the moment, if you didn’t see yesterday’s first strip, you’re out of luck.

Drumroll please…

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…and this is what I was hinting about earlier.

Okay, it’s not exactly anything impressive right now. In fact at one point I was considering hosting it on Da Blog until I realized there wasn’t much point to that and hosting it on the web site allowed more potential functionality.

New episodes will appear each night probably around 11 PM PT, with some leeway. Although I had originally intended for the “web site news” tag to refer to every single change I made to the web site, part of the reason I’m not hosting this on Da Blog is that I don’t want it to take over Da Blog. Therefore I won’t post every time I put up a new episode. They’ll be going up like clockwork every night sometime after 11, so you know where and when.

Why I haven’t put up the results of the Golden Bowl (and a few other news and notes)

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Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t posted the results of the first Golden Bowl between LSU and USC, and it’s for the same reason I decided to drop the SuperPower Rankings. The Golden Bowl tournament turned out to be a lot less fun than I had hoped.

For almost every game, I had to pore over the numbers and probably reached a lot of wrong conclusions. I found myself breathing sighs of relief when the two people who voted on the second and third rounds agreed. It wasn’t as time consuming as the SuperPower Rankings but it left me with a sense of dread entering each round.

I had been planning on having a grandiose, John-Facenda-esque description of the Golden Bowl, but I barely managed to work up the knowledge or desire to write any description at all throughout the tournament. I have a feeling I would have fallen well short. Not only is a college football playoff far from an original idea, but others are doing much of what I intended to do a lot better than I would have.

That said, unlike the SuperPower Rankings, I’m still doing this next year. I like the Golden Bowl name, I’m hoping Da Blog grows enough in the next year that I won’t have to break ties at all, and I feel that a lot of simulated playoffs or proposed brackets blindly follow the BCS standings. I’ve heard it argued that a plus-one system would have ignored Georgia or USC in favor of Virginia Tech or Oklahoma; what that ignores is that a plus one would have forced the pollsters to pay more attention to the top four the way they pay attention to the top two now, which likely means Georgia would have gotten past V-Tech or the Sooners, since they arguably had a stronger case for a national title shot than either. (Yes, I know V-Tech was my number 1 seed.) A true simulated playoffs that follows close to what the reality probably would be should follow the NCAA guidelines.

So, this ends the brief spurt of productivity from Da Blog from football. Sure, we’re a few steps away from the Super Bowl – the Patriots just blew past their 17th team, as reflected on the site – but that’s a fairly small part of what we do around here.

No, don’t run away! Come back! I know a lot of you are here for the football, so what can I do to get you to stick around?

Well, let’s start with my 100 Greatest Movies Project, which has been described in the past on the off chance you came here before it was cool. If you happen to be a fan of the movies, and not just the standard popcorn fare but all the classics from Hollywood’s golden age to the present day, I could use you to explain to the masses why they better recognize. If you want to write tributes and descriptions for Hollywood’s greatest films, let me know in the comments or at mwmailsea at yahoo dot com.

But I have another plan to induce the teeming masses to come here. And stay here. I have plans for a new regular feature that I have high hopes for, one that could potentially attract a much larger audience than what I’ve achieved so far. One that could start as soon as tonight.
What is it? Well, let’s just say you can expect to see a lot of this sometime soon:

The final college football rankings of 2007 (and other musings)

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I’ve kept track of who won my College Football Rankings for three years, counting this year. The first year, the title went to Texas, as my rankings correctly predicted the winner of the national title game. The second year, it went to Louisville as the Big East got disrespected.

This year, West Virginia’s beatdown of Oklahoma threatened to topple them, but for two out of three years, the BCS and my rankings agree on who is the true national champion: LSU.

Longtime readers know that I have, on occasion, remarked on the standing of professional sports leagues and their market penetration, this being an example. I’ve realized that I haven’t had any words on Seattle’s long-time-coming MLS team, which will result in an uneven distribution of teams between Eastern and Western conferences. Seattle bypassed Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, Phoenix, and former MLS home Tampa Bay to put the league’s 15th team in the #14 media market. But being a Seattleite myself, and especially being the son of a soccer fanatic, I’m actually a little surprised MLS didn’t come here sooner – this area is one of soccer’s few homes to truly devoted fans, and MLS is sure to carve a niche should the Sonics move. It’s like having a hockey team in Buffalo – there aren’t going to be a lot of people, but boy will they be devoted. The only possible objection I’d have is that MLS didn’t try to re-establish itself in the South, especially with the WNBA putting a team in Atlanta. But I’m sure they’ll do that in a matter of years to put the league at a nice, round 16 teams.

By the 2000 definition, Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, and Miami are the only larger metro areas without an MLS team. I erred on my earlier post on the Atlanta WNBA team, where I said that Seattle had been the largest metro area with a WNBA team but no MLS team; not only does that honor also go to Detroit, but Detroit wasn’t even dethroned by Atlanta. Phoenix would have inherited that crown had I been right.

Happy Blog-day to meeeeee!

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One year ago today – December 22, 2006 – I huddled up in the shadow of a bus stop, cracked open a laptop, and wrote the very first post in the history of Da Blog.
At right is how it looked that first day. As you can see, it didn’t look much different from how it looks today. Of course, the sidebar was a lot smaller and less cluttered than it is today, but if you look around, both of the elements on it are still on the sidebar and will probably stay there for some time in the foreseeable future.
For weeks I was the only person to see Da Blog. Slowly, the audience grew, and more and more people discovered what I had to say about… well… just about anything. Once, I got excited to see even one or two people read Da Blog in a single day. Last Monday, a whopping 25 visits were registered by SiteMeter. December 10 saw an incredible 45 visits.
Okay, so that isn’t really all that much, SiteMeter counts my own recent visits, and none of you vote on my polls enough to properly justify them. Still, it’s a great leap forward from even the summer. I’ve gone from just barely topping 100 visits a month in August and September to getting 100 visits in just the past week, and two straight months of over 300 visits. December has already topped November and it isn’t even over yet; the 400 mark, once unfathomable, now looks like a certainty.
I suspect a big reason for the boom has been Da Blog’s increasing emphasis on sports, especially football. (Specifically, I’ve noticed a lot of referrals from Google searches relating to the SNF Flex Scheduling watch. I’m the number 1 hit for “who will be flexed in week 17 of sunday night football”. If you’ve come in for the answer for that question, I’ll be live-blogging the Week 16 football day from my computer tomorrow.) With the college season proper over and the NFL season winding down, expect Da Blog to de-emphasize that in the first part of the new year. I hope to get back to taking care of my other projects, such as the 100 Greatest Movies Project. Later in the year, I’ll have a new way of covering the elections. And if anyone has any other non-sports interests they’d like to see represented, that would be hunky dory as well. During the past year, I also launched a web site, which will continue to grow and change in the coming year, including the addition of several new sections.
I’m going to be starting 2008 in two new classes and hope to get better focused on my classes, something my football-related projects have been distracting me from, and also work to make sure I don’t find myself kicked out of any classes, and thus kicked out of the university entirely. But I also hope to spend time in the second year of Da Blog to make it as memorable as the first.

New SuperPower Rankings

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Some notes:

  • I guarantee that the Lions will remind people of why people liked them so much and why they were 6-2 against the Chiefs.
  • I actually would have picked the Dolphins against the Patriots had they lost because the irony would have been irresistable. Now, though, I don’t think they have a prayer.
  • The Redskins have a two-game winning streak, which poses a problem, because I told myself that if the Redskins continued their Chicago success I would say they would have an inspired run to the playoffs. But they’re playing the Vikings, a team you just don’t dismiss out of hand. Ultimately I’m picking the Redskins in the Upset Special.
  • How do you choose between the collapsing Cardinals and the absolute mess known as the Atlanta Falcons?