Tag: blog

Search confusion

Today I noticed some really strange ways of finding my blog. I really wonder if it’s something they were looking for or is it was some weird messages to me. What can you say about these searches:

lila mill wordpress sorry i bored xd

lila mill hi i am a visitor xd

lila mill i love porn

second life blogs

“rediscover second life”

First search. Hm, who aren’t bored sometimes, but why add the my name to the search term? Are you inviting me to play? And what’s the game?

Second search seems like someone says hi to me. Hi there anonymous visitor. Waves to you. Hm, I usually like when people visiting says hi, so I guess I got what I wished for. Do I know you?

Third search is a puzzle. Does the search refer to the visitor. That the visitor likes porn? Or is he/she trying to get the prude Lila to faint? Smiling. If that’s the case, then you have to try a bit harder 😛

Fourth search is quite popular actually. I’ve seen it a lot before so obviously it’s quite popular to read second life blogs.

Fifths search could mean anything. I did have a blog posts with that exact title though, so maybe it was an old reader wanting to find it again.

Anyway, I really do love to have visitors, except for the 400 visitors/stalkers I got some months back. So perhaps I should say, I love to have nice visitors:)

Should I be worried?

When I looked through the stats from the visits of my blog I noticed a few things. Apart from the usual visitors that looked for Ann’s forum I noticed something really surprising. I had a visitor from Linden Lab (*waves to the Linden*). How could it be that one of the Lindens was visiting my blog? My first thought was if I had done something wrong. The second thought was, perhaps I already know this Linden in his/hers alt incarnation and this was the first time he/she visited the blog from work. Hmm, who could it be?

Why your blog should be your book’s first draft

In this article, the author suggests that for an unpublished writer, a blog is a good place to post the first draft of a book. The author lists seven reasons why this is a good idea. It was an interesting read and it gave me food for thought, but I’m not sure I agree. Still, it’s certainly something to consider.

What do you think? Is it worth a try? Bad idea? What? Tell me what you think.

The dynamics of the web

I had pretty much closed down this blog for several reasons. One was the computer crash. Another was that I pretty much had lost interest in SL so I didn’t have much to write about. Of course my readers lost interest in my blog because of no new material for weeks.

Then the other day, I stumbled up on something from the past that was SL related so I thought I would post that. In just a very short one I had the first comment on the post and the hits were starting to grow enormously. I wondered why that was. How could anyone know so fast? That I had written something again and what it was about.

I can see a few explanations. 1) A coincindence. Well that’s always a possibility, but on the other hand, that’s never happened before. Only the “spinders” find posts that fast. 2) The first one to find it was someone who had been watching my blog closely for months. It’s a flattering thought, but judging from my tracker info that wasn’t the case. 3) Trackback. I made a trackback back to motherFIC’s blog so, whoever is behind that blog knew I had posted my blog post. If that’s the explanation, then the owner of that blog either knows someone that’s part of SLU or he himself is a part of it.

Anyway, that’s not my problem and for others to worry about. What’s clear is that after that first person visiting, then the information of my “dangerous” blog post spread like a virus through plurk. Remind me not to sign up there btw;).

Microblogging

Apparently, microblogging is getting more and more popular these days. As far as I can tell, the theory behind it is that people are busy, they don’t have time to sit down and write a long blog post. In a way, that makes sense. On the other hand, who says you need to blog ten times a day? A while back I read about some people doing ‘slow blogging’ – quality blogging, not quanity. That too, makes sense.

Being the sad, lonely misfit that I am, I don’t have that much to say, when it comes to ‘what are you doing?’. If I were to really microblog, it would be mainly things like ‘I’m sitting here at the computer’ ‘Just got back from a walk’, ‘Had dinner. It was delicious’. Boring. Pathetic.

That reminds me of an even newer thing – nanoblogging. One word at a time. Brilliant? Trendy? Cool? Poetic? Maybe, but pretentious and snobbish are words that spring to mind. Meaningless too. In my book. But maybe it’s something you get used to.

All this hasn’t stopped me from getting no fewer than five (I think) microblogs (not nanoblogs) and I’m doing my best to keep up. At least I will, as long as it feels fun.

What do you think? Should I give nanoblogging a chance too? Here is a nanoblog site (I haven’t tried it, but I found it when I did a Dogpile search.)

More about tumblelogs

Now that I’ve tried Soup, I can say that for me it works like a cooler version of FriendFeed (or Multiply – but without the annoying ads). It collects posts from other sites, which can be convenient if you have friends and family who would like to keep up with what you’re doing. Of course, it’s also possible to use it like any tumblelog. I haven’t had mine for long, but I’ll keep exploring it and see what else it can do.

Tumblr (for me) is a great ‘scrapbook’ – in my case a photoblog (though like I mentioned before, I also like to post links and other shorter entries). To be honest, it took me a while to figure out how to use it, but when I did, I fell in love with it. It’s so – creative and do-it-yourself, compared to more evolved blogging platforms like WordPress or LiveJournal. I still haven’t tried Publr or Plurk. In fact, I still haven’t figured out exactly what Plurk is and what use I might have for it, if any.

Tumblelogs

I recently read a blog post about what microblogging is. It mentioned Twitter and Jaiku. From what I’ve read, those belong to one type of microblog. There’s at least one other type, the tumblelog. A tumblelog is sort of a scrapbook, where ‘ordinary’ blogs are diaries/journals or even a sort of homepage (which in itself can be a lot of things, for instance a sort of business card).

I have a tumblelog on Tumblr, which I use mainly as a photoblog, but where I also post links and other shorter posts that I wouldn’t put on a ‘traditional’ blog. There are also others of roughly the same type, like Publr and Plurk (which is also a kind of social network, but then so are all to some extent). There’s also something called Soup, which is more or less a similar thing.

Blog sites

Next lesson in my computer/internet school. This time I thought I’d cover blogging sites. When I first heard of blogging it seemed alien to me. Then I tried it and couldn’t make it work, but eventually, I got the bug. Now I can’t imagine not blogging when I feel inspired. Of course, blogging requires a blog site, or software and a website and most of all a blog platform.

My favorite blog platform is WordPress. Yay! I absolutely adore WordPress. WordPress.org and WordPress.com.

The difference is that WordPress.com is a sort of web hotel, where you get your WP blog hosted for free. It does mean you get fewer choices in blog themes, plugins, widgets etc. You might also have trouble directing your domain name to your WP blog. Domain name – well, properly that should be covered in a separate post, one about homepages, webspace and, well, domain names. I’m not going to do that though. This is it. Blogs and homepages covered in one single blog post.

The reason for that is that today, most people hardly know what a homepage is and have trouble creating one. Even as late as a year ago, I was stubbornly sticking to my homepage and wanted to program it myself, using an editor, naturally. I’m not that good with html programming. Then it hit me – why should I do all the ground work, when my ‘thing’ is writing, primarily, and to some extent, photography?

I have come to the conclusion, that while I would love to make a blog theme 100 % as I like it, there are so many themes out there, that I can be pretty content with one someone else made.

Anyway, back to the domain name. It doesn’t have to be that expensive, if you want one. There’s no reason why you should need one, but if you do want one, it’s easy to get and won’t cost you too much. Unfortunately, there’s a catch. When isn’t there? It could be a bit tricky, configuring it. I’m afraid I can’t help you there, but there should be help available online.

You can also get a domain name for free. It won’t be a ‘real’ domain name, but it will shorten your URL and make it easier to remember. Uni.cc and cjb.net are the ones I’ve tried. Both work fine.

For a homepage, you’ll need webspace and if you don’t mind ads, you can get some for free. If not, there should be web hotels that have reasonable prices. My family and I are lucky enough to have found one that doesn’t charge much but offers a lot of space.

You’ll also need a web editor. There are some available online for free. I can’t tell you how good they are, because I haven’t tried them, but I’ve been told they’re quite good. Finally, you’ll need an ftp program, unless your webspace offers a web based file upload option.

Let’s get back to blogging. You’ll still need webspace if you decide to get your blog software from WordPress.org and if you like, a domain name. The upside is you get to choose any theme you like and you can get plugins and widgets.

The main advantage of both WP types is the ease of updating, editing etc. It’s a breeze compared to editing in a web editor. That’s why I decided in favor of a blog, rather than an old-fashioned homepage.

Homepage or dodo?

Soon it won’t be any use, having a homepage. No one visits homepages anymore.

First WebRing started charging for their services. If you didn’t pay you could only have something like five rings – I had over eighty, and I still didn’t get that many hits. You also wouldn’t be able to manage more than three rings – I used to have about ten or so.

There are a couple of other places that provide rings, but that doesn’t help much. Top lists are something else you can join to, presumably, get mor hits. Guess what – no visitors from there either.

My sister and I have made our own personal web pages, and some other, larger sites. One of the latter gets a few more hits, but not even that adds up to a whole lot. We even pay for web hotels and domain names. Ok, we’re doing all this because we think it’s fun and we still think it’s fun, even without any visitors. Of course, we might as well play with our little homepages on our own little computers, without paying anything extra to keep them online for no one to visit.

Some of you might say ‘so update more often’ – but I do, especially my blog, which is a part of my homepage. Besides, I see no reason to add metatags like sex, girls etc. There’s nothing about that sort of thing on my homepage. I also don’t provide files for illegal download. Not legal downloads either.

But what do I expect? People don’t even know the difference between homepage, blog and profile page. My sister teaches high school students and some of them think that the little symbol that says Internet on the computer desktop actually means the Internet, not the WEB BROWSER Microsoft Internet Explorer. Hello? These are almost grown up students who are taking computer related subjects in school.

Here is my own little mini computer school:

Homepage:- personal page that you design – either with a WYSIWIG editor or if you know html programming (web design) a text editor. You can put your homepage on some free web space – like the one that you get with your internet connection (not everyone gets that) or a free web space provider. Or you could pay to keep your site on a web hotel. Ours costs about 10 dollars per year and for that you get quite a lot of space. The domain names cost a bit more, say 20 to 30 dollars per year.

Blog – a sort of online diary or something more creative. Usually updated more often than a web page.

Profile page: a brief presentation you can fill in when you join an online community. You can upload a photo of yourself and fill in some info about yourself. The page is made up of pre-written modules with a space for your own input. You can usually pick a couple of background themes, but all the profiles look roughly the same.

In my experience some guys know all kinds of programming languages, including flash for animations that slow a web page down, but they have no idea what to put on a homepage. Those of them who do have a home page, usually just put their CV there. These guys clearly have no hobbies or interests. Others, along with quite a few girls, have things to say, but don’t know that much about web design.

Not that it matters. Whatever you know or don’t know, no one will visit your site or leave a message in your guestbook. No one knows what a homepage is anyway..