July 6th, 2010, 2 Comments »
As you may have noticed, I’ve blogged less often on this site, but, I think, more contemplatively. Your mileage on that may vary, but it seems like a natural evolution of my online creative expression. If you’ll pardon the phrase.
But what of all the random stuff I used to link to?
A Boring History of Curating Ephemera
A little history. Way back when I started this blog, I wrote a lot of short posts, kind of mimicking (and routinely referencing) Boing Boing. These often pointed to bits of Web ephemera that I encountered in my work or personal time online.
There are links that I want to share, but I don’t care to write a full blog post about. Things like a semi-amusing nerd joke, an unlikely tattoo or a risque advertisement.
I eventually started serving up periodic lists of links instead of dedicating blog posts to them. Then I tried a link blog (the RSS feed still seems to be around) for a while, but Ma.gnolia’s implosion and my own waning interest put an end to that.
Then Twitter came along, and it seemed like a very natural form for sharing these web souvenirs. However, Twitter does a very poor job of archiving old tweets, and making them searchable (for example, I’ve tweeted way more than three times about the Canucks over the past three years). Occasionally, I actually want to find something I shared six months ago, and Twitter is no help. So, I have the sense that there’s no permanent record of this silly curation I do.
I started a Tumblr blog in which to store all this stuff. You can find it here:
http://darrenbarefoot.tumblr.com
There’s pretty much no original thinking there, just a river of stuff I find and probably tweet about. If you’re immersed in the web, you’ll have seen most of this stuff.
I’m still tweeting all these items–I’m just also going to push most of them to this site. It may prove of no interest or use to anyone but me, but I just thought I’d mention it. I also make no guarantees of its longevity–I reserve the right to abandon it at any time. If I stick with it for a couple of weeks, I might embed a view of it in the sidebar of this site.
Tumblr is Highly Presentational
This also, finally, provides me an opportunity to mess around with Tumblr. I’ve spent some time with it here and there, but I’ve never actually launched a site or anything. It’s remarkably stripped down. There’s no interaction without a Tumblr account, and even then they’re limited. There’s no native statistics package at all, and adding Google Analytics is a little clunky. There’s not even the identity widget that comes with Blogger sites. In short, it’s a really presentational form. I’m not sure what the obvious benefits are–but maybe they’ll make themselves apparent in time.
But it is searchable (at least by me), and I rather like the theme I picked. If there are any Tumblr users out there, I’m all-ears for tips. Check out my latest attempt at capturing the web’s most gossamer bits, and let me know what you think.
2 Comments »
November 11th, 2008, 17 Comments »
We’ve finally gotten around to launching the newest version of this website. It’s about nine years old, and I think this is version 4.0. There are still plenty of bugs to squash (and the Jobs section is going to be ‘coming soon’ for a while), but all the basics are in. I also need to think about what the best stuff to include in the sidebars of the site is. I welcome any suggestions on that front.
I didn’t have a lot of grand plans for the redesign. Mostly I just was tired of the old design, and thought it was high time for a new one. Plus, I wanted to broaden the main column space a bit, make the site widget-ready, implement threaded comments, get all the static pages into WordPress and tweak sundry other bits and pieces.
One Mashed-Up Header
I am particularly pleased about the way the header graphic came together. Regular readers may recall that, back in March, I ran a competition on Pixish (now defunct, sadly) to get a new header graphic designed. It looked like this:
That was designed by a guy named Sam, who lived in Brighton. It combined a photo that Roland took of a film lot directional sign (that really said ‘DB’–no Photoshopping required) with a photo of me that Phillip took at BarCamp.
I handed the header graphic to Tzaddi, who tweaked it and built out the rest of the site’s aesthetic. In early previews of the site, people weren’t keen on that photo, so we replaced it with one that Scott Beale took at Gnomedex.
The header is the happy result of an ad hoc collaboration between five people and powered by Creative Commons. Plus sixty4media did the installation and upgrading of WordPress, so I suppose that’s seven people.
Feedback Welcome
I welcome any and all feedback. I’m pretty happy with the aesthetics at this stage, but I’m open to suggestions. If you spot anything that’s funky aside from the obvious, feel free to leave a comment. And do let me know if you have an opinion on what belongs in a site’s sidebars.
17 Comments »
November 7th, 2008, 6 Comments »
Hence, activity around here is going to be light for the next few days.
6 Comments »
March 23rd, 2008, 3 Comments »
As an SEO experiment, I started tagging (in addition to the categories at left) my blog posts about, I don’t know, 15 months ago. It’s impossible to measure precisely, but I don’t think it’s had a significant effect. Last month tag-based pages only got 823 page views, and a mere 123 visitors came from Technorati. There may be unknown ancillary SEO benefits to tagging, but now I just enjoy inventing peculiar descriptors for my posts (see, for example, .
Thanks to Ultimate Tag Warrior, here’s a quick tag cloud of the 200 most popular tags on this site. Keep in mind that this only reflects, maybe, one-eighth of all the posts on this site. There’s no frickin’ way I’m going back and manually tagging the other 4000-odd posts.
I’ve tried to be disciplined about not tagging entries with the same terms as I categorize them, but clearly I sometimes fail. I guess what happens is that I start writing about something, tagging each entry. Eventually I decide that it merits its own category, so I upgrade it. I might go back and remove the tags for malta, gozo, vancouver, travel, video, morocco and marketing to make the thing more useful.
3 Comments »
December 7th, 2007, 8 Comments »
Yesterday, Julie accused me of never having seen The Sound of Music. I took immediate offense, and challenged her to a Sound of Music trivia throwdown. These were the questions we asked each other (entirely without the web, I might add):
- What was the name of the Captain’s new lover?
- What was the name of the eldest daughter’s beau?
- What’s the betraying beau’s job?
- What were the names of all the kids?
- Where did the family escape to at the end of the film?
- What were the children’s play clothes made out of?
- What animal was featured in the puppet show the children created?
We came out about even. How’d you do?
Incidentally, the title of this post comes from a line from the duet “Sixteen Going on Seventeen”. The whole line goes:
Oh crap. I just searched for the original line, and found my own post from four years ago. I was going to write about the very same thing–the interesting etymology of the term ‘roué’. Clearly I have been blogging too long.
8 Comments »
September 19th, 2007, 1 Comment »
About five months ago, after listening to endless tag advocacy from various smart people, I started a little experiment on my blog. I installed the WordPress extension Ultimate Tag Warrior, and started tagging my blog posts. You can see the tags in the footer of each post, after “Tag Testing Project”.
I tagged my posts impulsively, without much regard for selecting the best possible terms for search engine optimization. It’s been all folksonomy, all the time. For example, this post about the cat catching a big bug got tagged “cat, insect, locust, prey”. This post about a Dolph Lundgren masterpiece got tagged “bad movie, dolph lundgren, gnomedex, killer cds”.
Tags are supposed to provide SEO benefits. Have they? Let’s compare two ‘normal’ (meaning no traffic spikes) months with similar traffic numbers, one from before I started tagging and one after:
March, 2007:
56.07% of traffic comes from search engines
137 referrals from Technorati
July, 2007:
50.73% of traffic comes from search engines
82 referrals from Technorati
Huh, those seem to be going in the wrong direction. Thus far, tags seem to be having a negligible impact on my traffic levels. Maybe I’m implementing them wrong?
In any case, after the jump there’s a tag cloud of my 200 most commonly-used tags. It please me that ‘pants’ made the list.
Read more…
1 Comment »
