Quick fix eye-candy comic to placate you ….

from xkcd

Ho hummmmmm…… It’s high time I did another post in this sleepy little blog that only eight really cool people read regularly. There are over six billion people in the world, and 1 billion of them have internet. But there aren’t that many really cool people in the world, unfortunately. The other six that aren’t subscribers yet don’t know about me and I don’t know about them. (The number six is a mathematical estimate, based on my statistical analysis of general surfing behaviour courtesy of google.) I have no business writing how to increase your fan base, being how mine is so small. Duh.

That doesn’t stop those other guys. “Increasing your blog readership” is the subject of every other blog for bux article on the internet which is just a rehash or straight plagiarism of other blog for bux articles on the internet and most of those guys are wannabes with only 10 readers and five of them are their drinking buddies and their mom. They’ll talk about this or that, but it’s even simpler. What I’ve found — the unblemished truth: To get a see Angelina Jolie Naked!!!! lot of reads you need to pander to the most base in human nature, pimp it up with tittie pix, and alter your writing style to stuff keywords — which I regard as an insult to freedom. I refuse to do i!t. I will not be bought — hence my small but very awesome fan base. My words are just like they came out of my brain.

And what are the results?

From the looks of things, the “good” posts here only get read by my eight smart and cool fans; yet here and elsewhere, I get oodles and gobs of reads on a post that I threw together in 10 minutes if it has soap opera in it.

Soooooo……. If you’re some slack-jawed drooling twit looking for the tittie pix, tough, I lied. You’ve sorta been dorkrolled, if you will.

And if you’re looking for a tech read, there are a number of good evergreen posts here, and projection analysis show that there is a 99.99% probability that you haven’t read all of them yet; in fact there is a 99.9% probability that you haven’t read any of them yet, and there is a 99% probability that you won’t read any of them now. But just in case……. Might I direct you to the site map, or the search box (Right Sidebar) or the category links. (Left Sidebar, upper) Those things are standard blogvigation controls to help you find what interests you. They are not some weird “unique to this blog” interface that you have to learn before you can find anything here. Yet my actual recorded stats show that 99.99% of visitors ignore them and view only the most recent post, and there is a 84.9% chance that the most recent is not the best one –I guarantee you this one ISN’T!– and that probability increases the more posts the blog accumulates, as long as it stays on track.

Now kick my butt with comments, and maybe I’ll write something good next time. Meanwhile I’m gonna plot visitors to my about page and laugh. Don’t you know that 63.8% of statistics are made up on the spot?

Tech Republic ran this news item giving particulars about who lies most on their resumes and what things they lie about. IT came in third place. Job responsibilities was the most “lied about” item on resumes.

But as a veteran filling out job application forms, I have to wonder what really is considered a lie. For example, these forms that try to fit you into neat little boxes, is it a lie if you fit 90% in the box? what about 80% what if you don’t even know how much you conform to some vague language describing a responsibility.

Here’s an example:

Managing a network in a small company is very different from managing a network in a large one. At one job I had, I figured out and set up all the cabling and KVM switches for our small office LAN and trained my office mate how to use Samba so he could stop recabling the printer every time he wanted to print something. I also showed my boss how to forward a port on his router so we could run a local server on our workstations. That was the extent of my “network management.” That’s all we needed. There were rarely any problems with it. One time a switch failed and after much hair pulling I got them to replace it. Anytime there was a problem they came to me. Would it be a lie if I put this down on my resume? What do you think?

another offering from our friends at xkcd.  Ha!  I wish I could say

“sudo clean your frakkin’ room!” to my offspring! “sudo” is as close to a magic spell as it gets.

This is a prototype expression of thanks in the form of Linky LUV in appreciation of my fans over on Hub Pages It randomly displays one of their widgets right here in an IFRAME. If you don’t like the looks of the one you see, refresh the page and it will give you a different one. Thanks HubPages fans!

Since July I have been dropping way way less Entrecards. I made it a point to only drop on sites I was visiting for some other reason, (like I was really interested in the post) which meant I stuck around long enough to not be counted as a bouncer. What did it do? Well admittedly, my visitors dropped off somewhat. But that kind of drop and run traffic I don’t need. I predict that Google will start penalizing sites with a high bounce rate even more than they already do, if, in fact, they do at all. After all, a bunch of mutual drop and runs is no different than a stumble club other than the fact that it’s implicit and it’s open ended. The focus becomes mutual back scratching, rather than rewarding quality, and if Google hopes that good sites bubble to the top, they better start doing something about “I’ll bounce off you if you’ll bounce off me” nonsense. The effect is the same: questionable quality sites who engage in this practice get a lot of this circle-jerk kind of traffic while the ones with ethics who refuse to do it get less.

I was never a power dropper; I find power dropping offensive, and I wish Entrecard would throttle it. But some days I used to drop on up to 100 blogs, usually when I was seriously depressed, It took a long time — time I really don’t have. I won’t say I never dropped and ran myself. Some blogs are just vapid, stupid, or not anything I am interested in, and I tried to remember not to visit them any more but I didn’t have it all in a spreadsheet, so some times I would forget. Well now my curiosity is slaked. Chain dropping is just not a good use of my time. Too low a signal to noise ratio.

Anyway, the net result is that my average advertising price has only dropped a little, my bounce rate has dropped 20 percentage points, and I still get about half the drops I used to, which I presume is people who actually read the blog. I have more time for stuff I enjoy, and that, my friends, is priceless.

DORK 4 PREZ

The other day I got to thinking, why shouldn’t I be the President?
Maybe I could be president of the blogosphere….. OK….. Since I’m now a politician I have act like one and promise you GREAT things. Your weenie will grow so big you’ll have to coil it up like a lasso. A suckling pig in every pot! (bleah!) You will lose 40 KG by eating cotton candy. All the celebs you love will be pursuing you! Your HDTV will grow so big you won’t be able to get it out of your house. Your blog subscriptions will positively explode! Am I getting the hang of political promises or what?

Voila! the contest is born. Here’s how it works:

1. Vote for me with your blog domain. Anyone can vote and get blogrolled, EC member or not!! Voting puts you in the database.
2. After you vote, take the code for the widget, customize it so that your domain is the referrer, and put it on your blog or website. Any domain (other than the referrer themself) who votes for me from a widget with your domain as referrer is credited to you as a referral. At the end of the time whichever domain refers the most votes wins the 2000 EC minimum, (plus any donations we might get.) Any blog or website can have the widget! If a non EC domain wins, I will dispose of the prize according to your wishes.

And I repeat, everyone who votes gets on the Dork 4 Prez blogroll. So everyone wins. Check back once in a while. You can see the blogroll growing as the contest progresses.

Here is the voting widget:

Here’s the HTML for you to copy, customize, & paste to your blog:
<iframe src="http://www.colleenweb.com/vote_script.php?ref=YOURDOMAIN.COM" height="200" width="250" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe><b/>

Donate to the campaign
Donate EC to the campaign if you would like. For each 10 EC you donate you will get 1 referral. Leave me a message in EC to let me know which domain should get the credit. All donations will be added to the grand prize. Sailor over at Nice2All has already pledged 3000 EC
Fine Print:
I need at least 2000 votes total in order to award the prize.

It is a very good idea, and often overlooked, to create a table comment when creating a table. Months later when you’ve forgotten what eggs_x_chickens was for, the comment will be extremely useful. It is especially useful if multiple people will be accessing the database, but you should go to the effort to do it even if the table is for your private consumption.

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The dork is featured again in Issue #4 (August 1) of Information Security Short Takes that I was in last month. This blog features a monthly blog carnival potpourri webzine of useful selection of security related articles. I know, I know, nobody wants to hear about security. It’s boring as all get out, and it’ll probably not happen to you. Except that it is happening, to more and more of us each year. Knowledge is power in this game. Know how it works, what to do and what not to do, and diminish your chance of being ripped off.
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Akismet is an awesome spam filter plugin no wordpress blogger should be without. It’s point ‘n’ click installable if you happen to use wordpress, but they claim that hacks exist for 20 other blogging platforms and they do provide an API. Hacks don’t mean evil programs, they just mean ways to enable you to use the software that aren’t quite as slick as for wordpress. Today Akismet flagged 54 spam — all on the Eleven Signs post. (BTW Eleven Signs is my LEAST original post. All the ideas in it had been blogged elsewhere; I just picked my eleven faves and did them up in my own style. ) Previously I had been getting maybe 5-7 spam a day and they were random. I was unperturbed about the jump in spam because Akismet does the right thing.
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If you like stumbleupon for discovering websites and blogs, you are gonna love stumbleaudio for discovering new artists and tracks.   Warning: it is a flash site but the interface is well-done and intuitive.

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