Category Archives: blogging

Busiest. Day. Ever.

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Just taking a few moments this morning to thank all of you who read Get Off My Lawn for making yesterday, the most active day ever on the site – You almost doubled its previous best day (which was last years launch day for the iPhone 4 – so, yes, I’m seeing the pattern here).

I started blogging as a way to vent off the ideas rattling around in my head that were too impolite to say out loud. Over time, it’s become my personal soap box to opine about any topic that’s caught my interest. Surprisingly, you’ve stuck with me even without any overarching rhyme or reason for what topics are taken up around here. All I can say to each of you, is thank you for being interested. I’d blog even if nobody was reading, but you guys make it much, much more interesting.

We know you have choices in reading curmudgeonly rants and Get Off My Lawn appreciates your business.

The problem with blogging…

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I love writing. In a world that didn’t have bills to pay, that’s probably what I’d spend my time doing. As it is, I scratch that itch here as often as I can. The other side of the blogging coin, is that you tend to get sucked into reading way more content than you actually write. That’s fine, because looking at other’s work teaches you alot. Good writing makes you think. Great writing forces you to refine and improve how you do it yourself. But the internet is a big place and the sheer volume of available voices can get overwhelming.

There’s not alot of rhyme or reason for the blogs I read on a regular basis. Some are written by old friends others I’ve stumbled across by accident. Their content is everything from cooking tips to, well, what many would consider to be descriptions of seriously disturbed personal lives. They’re all good for different reasons. The more I write, the more I realize just how difficult it is to keep churning out good, readable material on a consistant basis. And some of these people are posting 1000-word pieces every day. I’m a touch jealous of that.

So the problem with blogging isn’t so much that there’s nothing to write about, it’s that if you’re not careful, you can spend all of your time reading and not nearly enough writing for yourself. In the grand scheme, I suppose that’s not such a bad problem to have.

Authority: 1

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I’m pleased to announce that http://www.jeffreytharp.com is now registered with Technorati. If you’re blogging, there’s a fair chance you’re familiar with the site. If you’re not, the gist is that Technorati racks, stacks, and compares your blog based on a system of algorithms that are far beyond my meager abilities to understand and spits out your “authority” among bloggers. That is to say, it gives you a number you can compare against other blogs on similar topics and lets you compare your relative importance in the blogosphere. The scale is between a no-name, nobody of 1 and the elite-of-elite 1000.

Current jeffreytharp.com Technorati Authority: 1. This is one of those moments where it’s ok to be optimistic, because there’s absolutely no way to get lower than 1 on this scale. Onward and upward!

The unknown unknowns…

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I like to think of myself as someone who stays relatively close to the front of the tech curve, but it seems I’m in for a bit of an education as I try to drag this little blog o’ mine screaming into the second decade of the 21st century. I started off the post-dinner education by doing a simple search for something like “blog tag best practices” (Yes, I’m well aware I’m that much of a dork). That led me to Technorati and blogmarking, which led me back to WordPress, which led me to linking the blog to Facebook and Twitter, which led me and so on and so forth. This particular post isn’t so much informative or documentary as it is a test to see if I actually configured everything correctly. If you’re seeing this as a result of Facebook or Twitter, I suppose I’m on the right track. I’m not further along on my great quest to manage my tags or make the look and feel of the site more cohesive, but I’m one step closer to success in my other current crusade to making all my social media integrated. I’m apparently still way out in left field somewhere, but with a little self-education, I hope I’m getting closer to at least learning a bit more about the unknown unknowns. It’s hard to believe that once upon a time, blogging was as simple as tossing some words on an e-form and hitting the “publish” button.

In the cloud…

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I’ve been working on it for a while now, but I think it’s safe to say that I’ve finally managed to merge almost all of my communications tools into the Google Apps environment. That means that with the exception of the WordPress platform that actually hosts the blog, I can manage every aspect of http://www.jeffreytharp.com from my Google dashboard. Sure, that doesn’t seem like a big deal, but remember, I’m not a gearhead when it comes to tech. For the most part, I can’t tell you why things work, but I’m pretty good at telling when things work well and picking apart where they need to work better. With this last update of the apps dashboard, I was finally able to sync the iPhone with my hosted email/address book without using a clunky and inelegant work around that involved regularly porting my actual address book to a dummy Gmail address I had to set up just for OTA syncing. Now that they’ve fixed the glitch, I’m pleased with the near 100% integration and the ability to essentially run my life and my public voice from a single point of contact. Maybe someday I’ll take another look at Blogger and see if I can round out my reliance on the Google universe. But for the time being, I’m happy with WordPress and it seems like the place to stay until I find some strongly compelling reason to relocate. Maybe I can convince myself to take on the reorganization and facelift in the near future and close out this latest round of productivity. Until then, you can find me in the cloud.

Chaos Theory?

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I can tell by the gently worded reminder from WordPress that it’s time to renew my domain mapping fee, that this little endeavor is slipping towards its one year anniversary. It’s been said that time flies when you’re having fun. Apparently it also flies when you spend most of you free time plotting ways to extract yourself from situations less than good. That’s not to say that it hasn’t been a good year overall. Me and mine all remain on the correct side of the dirt, so really, everything else is just gravy. Still, though, it doesn’t feel like a year since I started poking around at this thing. I’ve been toying around with the idea of a facelift for the site. Maybe revamping the tags, lists, and sidebars. I wish I had spent a little more time learning the controls before diving right into with a new host. There are alot of the layout that I’m not quite pleased with, but just haven’t taken the time to make right.

One of the biggest issues I’m currently having with blogging is what feels like a lack of focus. Sure, I’m writing whatever happens to be on my mind at the time, but aside from “work sucks, trying to change it” and “people suck, trying to avoid them” there isn’t much of a thread that unifies the whole. Categories and tags are haphazardly applied (when I remember to list them at all) and it feels a bit like every post is adding that much more chaos to the mix. Was that a long way of saying I’d like my place in the internet to be as well-ordered as my place in the real world? Probably. OCD clearly doesn’t make a distinction between the real world and the electronic one. In a perfect world, I’d have my message calendar all mapped out months in advance and know exactly when I wanted to write about which topics. Not a chance of that happening any time in the near future, so I’ll content myself with coming up with a way to make it all a little more coherent.

You may see some changes in the next couple of days/weeks or you might not. It mostly depends on whether the dust building up on every flat surface of the house or the disorganized musings of my curmudgeonly mind win the prize as most in need of a good going after. Of course it also depends on how much time Maggie gives me before trying to climb up on the desk… Like she’s doing now.

2010 in review…

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The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

Featured image

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,500 times in 2010. That’s about 6 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 150 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 303 posts. There were 28 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 9mb. That’s about 2 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was June 24th with 58 views. The most popular post that day was Finding a place in line….

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, jdtharp.blogspot.com, Google Reader, en.wordpress.com, and autoinsurance.any-info.net.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for teamwork sucks, get off my lawn, jeffrey tharp, jeffreytharp.com, and why teamwork sucks.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Finding a place in line… June 2010

2

About February 2010

3

Disclaimer February 2010

4

Contact February 2010

5

At your own risk… May 2010
2 comments

300…

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Under other circumstances, I’d trot out something pithy and do my best to make a big deal out of hitting my 300th post. In fairness, that’s not not just here at http://www.jeffreytharp.com, but also includes posts I had made over at Blogger. It doesn’t include the now archived posts from long ago Myspace blog. There were probably another 200 of those, but we’re sticking with the “serious” work I’ve down in the past couple of years for purposes of counting.

Actually, 300 doesn’t seem like that many until you really sit doen and think about what goes into writing even one of these short bits – It’s a minimum half hour and climbs north of an hour for one of the more epic rants, so lets say all told it’s taken something more than 150 hours. Still not impressed? Sit down at your trusty keyboard and write nonstop for six days and then tell me what 150 hours feels like. Sure, they’re not all award winners by any stretch, but it’s a pretty impressive record of what’s been going on and the things that have caught my attention over the last three or four years. It’s no Gutenberg Bible or anything, but I’m mighty proud of alot of what’s been said here. At some point we should get back into a grove where the content writes itself. We’ll reevaluate at post 600.

Red letters…

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When I was teaching, I always had a red pen within arms reach. You never know when you’re going to have to decimate a book report or bleed all over an essay test. Once I left that life behind, the red pens mostly went into retirement… but they’re making a come back. My desk at the house is currently covered in red-inked post-it notes… red being the indication that it’s something that either needs to get worked into the blog or the book that I keep threatening to write. Most of them are just daily observations or one-off experiences that seemed noteworthy at the time. It’s not so much that I set out to watch people as it is that the quirks of office geography allow me the opportunity to see more than be seen. Add that to my natural tendency to observe the world around me and it’s almost impossible not to notice things as they happen. Most of these post its will probably never be more than red letters on yellow paper, but every now and then one of them pays off. In case you’re wondering, today isn’t one of those days.

Some people can sit down and write final copy off the top of their heads. I’m not one of those people, unfortunately. Generally my better posts start life as a few notes, then get a first draft, then get obliterated in the second draft, and then get a few additional tweaks before seeing the light of day. Sure, it’s been a four day weekend, and there has been plenty of theoretical time to draft up a bunch of these, but all that time was consumed by my new need to chase down Nazi riflemen through the streets of Berlin. Most of my hobbies tend towards the time consuming and I tend a little towards the obsessive… maybe that new game system wasn’t the best idea I’ve ever had, but it sure is fun. Then again, it’s already paid for itself by generating its own post it notes dripping with red ink. Now if I could just find a way to quit sleeping, maybe I’d have the time to get everything written up and posted.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics…

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It feels like I’ve been blogging forever… It especially feels that way when I have to flail around looking for something new to write about. Looking at the data, though, I can see that I’ve been going at it at one place or another since 2005. I guess time files when you’re hostile and willing to share it with the world. In fairness, five years in internet time basically is forever, so I guess I should consider that some kind of milestone.

Some weeks and months have been better than others. My best ever single day = 58 unique views (this was the iPhone 4 release day incidentally). Best month ever (June 2010), 388 unique hits. The statistic that I’m most proud of isn’t a hit count per se. It’s simply the phase most often used in search engines that brings people to the blog: Teamwork Sucks. Given that October is the one year anniversary of that particular post, I take a perverse pride that it still has legs. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and Google “teamwork sucks” and you’ll find that I’m #7. It’s like I’ve really made a difference in the world. We’re going to disregard the fact that Google’s link doesn’t take you to the actual post… It’s the thought (and that fact that it gets you to the blog at all) that counts.

Since Get Off My Lawn seems to be something that is here to stay for the foreseeable future, there are a few changes that I’m hoping to get to in the near future. I want to get a little more focused in my writing… 21 categories and 131 tags is probably something that I can cut down with a little effort. Bringing a little structure and order to the back room of this operation strikes me as being a very good idea.