chuggnutt.com

Finally caught up with my 2008 year in review! You can read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 if you haven't already.

November

November was really a pretty uneventful month. The kids were in school, I was entering my third month of my new job and we were all getting back into the swing of things.

I hit up the annual Deschutes Brewery Garage Sale and walked away with a couple of T-shirts, and a case of the 2008 Abyss.

We had a nice Thanksgiving at our house, and even though I had cooking chores it was the easiest Thanksgiving meal I've prepared in recent memory. It was a fully traditional dinner, with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, candied yams, and so on; everything just clicked I guess, and I wasn't running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to get everything done.

Which is a nice was to start a long holiday weekend.

December

The month started out right, by getting a new computer to replace our old, slowly dying one. It was a really good Black Friday deal from Dell, and so far I'm liking it just fine.

The first Saturday we went downtown to watch the Bend Christmas Parade, and like Halloween, this was the warmest Christmas Parade day we've had in a long time; I believe it reached 60 degrees or something wild like that.

Our company Christmas party was the best such party I've experienced in years—have I said already that Smart Solutions is a good company to work for?—and I walked away with a new Blu-Ray player as a raffle prize. No, I'm not kidding.

My birthday popped up again this year (funny how that keeps happening) and I celebrated 36 revolutions around the sun.

Christmas was great, as always. The best part of having kids is re-capturing the Christmas excitement we all used to feel when we were kids. Santa was good to us this year, bringing sleds for the kids even, and since it was a white Christmas (rare in Central Oregon!), we were able to get a bit of sledding in at my parents' house—first time in years.

And finally, New Year's Eve. I've written recently about how we planned to have a (smallish) New Year's party, but unfortunately the kids got sick and we changed plans, and had a much quieter evening with a couple of friends. We celebrated 2008 and rang in 2009 with beer and champagne and good company, and here we are.

Previous installments: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

September

The beginning of the month was the latter half of Labor Day weekend, with my brother and sister-in-law still in town for another day or so. More beer drinking ensued.

On the third, I officially started my new job with Smart Solutions; I had been interviewing/talking with them for a few weeks before finally accepting, and as my first day coincided with the second day of school (and my last job ended right about when school let out in June), it was a lot like I'd "merely" taken the summer off.

Much of the rest of the month was uneventful as we discovered and fell into the new patterns of kids being back to school and my new job, but we definitely started to breathe easier and loosen up on the budget restrictions somewhat.

We made it downtown to Deschutes Brewery's Jubelale launch party in the later half of the month for dinner and tasting of this year's seasonal. I walked out with a free poster of the 2008 Jubelale label, signed by the artist.

And, we (finally) visited Three Creeks Brewing in Sisters at the end of the month for lunch and to check out the beer (and so I could write about it). It has good food and decent beers, and is definitely a win for Sisters (but not someplace we can get to very often).

October

One of my big goals at the beginning of 2008 was to attend the Great American Beer Festival in October. Seriously. Since it was going to be The Year for me as a Beer Blogger, I was all set. Unfortunately, my hours were cut, I lost my job, and then finally got a new job a month before, all of which kind of derailed those plans.

Early October revealed one of the perks of accepting a job with Smart Solutions: they sent me on a three-day business trip to Simi Valley, California (along with three co-workers) to attend SEO training. Maybe this seems ho-hum to many, but for me this was my first such business trip and, well, it was a big deal.

Mid-month, we went to Deschutes Brewery's Fresh Hop Beer Tasting at their Mountain Room. Besides the Chocolate Beer Pairing Dinner (which was free to me), this was the first Deschutes event I've attended; it was a much more informal event than the Chocolate Pairing dinner, and the beer was flowing like water. Very cool, and worth doing again.

The final weekend of October we decided to take a trip out of town, and ended up visiting Hood River to pick apples. No kidding! We wanted a get-away weekend without any real schedule, and so checked out the Hood River Fruit Loop without any expectations. We left Saturday morning, made it to Hood River by lunchtime and found a great little orchard/BBQ place to eat. The rest of the afternoon was spent visiting various other orchards around the area, picking or buying apples (and pears), and generally having a good time. We ultimately ended up with about 25 pounds or so of fruit.

We capped the day with some drinks at Full Sail Brewing in downtown Hood River before driving into Portland to spend the night; it was a brief visit though, so I didn't write about it. (Next time.) In Portland the next morning we visited our friends Justin and Raegan and their baby (whom we'd seen back in June also), and went out to breakfast with them.

Ironically, Justin was also coming down to Bend the next day on a work-related trip, so we went out to dinner that Monday night and got to visit even more.

Then, of course, Halloween capped the month; it was the warmest Halloween in recent memory, where we didn't have to bundle up before going out trick-or-treating. The kids hauled away more candy than ever, probably because we were able to last longer without suffering frostbite.

You can catch up on the previous three installments here, here, and here.

July

It was a fairly uneventful month, low-key and budget-conscious. We enjoyed the Fourth of July by going to the annual Pet Parade downtown, and then checked out the action in Drake Park before hitting up the Library book sale and the free day at the Deschutes Historical Society (with ice cream even!). I posted some pictures here.

The following weekend we hit up the Bend Summer Festival, which is always my favorite of Bend's seasonal 'fests. It's always a fun time, and despite the temptation to spend a lot of money, there's plenty of free or cheap fun to be had (like at the kids activity center, which is always free—not the inflatable slides and bouncy castles, but the area sponsored by Working Wonders Children's Museum).

I didn't make it to the Oregon Brewers Festival this year, which was too bad since I received an invite to a media preview that would have been very, very cool if I could have made it. Another year.

August

We checked out the Deschutes County Fair on the First, taking advantage of the family free day. It's always a balance between the free stuff—checking out the animals, and the exhibits, which is my favorite part of the fair—and the gouging prices of, well, anything that costs money. Like the rides. And the food. It makes it tough to justify going every year.

Midway through the month we had to travel to Florida suddenly, on family business that there's never a good time for. We were gone for about a week overall. Aside from the family affairs, I was again struck by how much I don't really care for Florida. It's hot, and humid, and flat, and did I mention hot and humid? And a lot of a strip-mall kind of vibe... too suburban, maybe.

No, I can tolerate visiting Florida occasionally... but there's no way I could ever live there.

August is when job search results started coming in... ironically, I got several calls while we were in Florida and unavailable.

The end of the month, going into Labor Day weekend, was great: my brother and sister-in-law came up for a surprise visit from San Diego. They stayed with us the whole time, and it turned into a weekend-long party (albeit a kid friendly one). Lots of beer was consumed and it was the perfect way to end the month.

Continuing my retrospective of 2008. You can catch up on Part 1 (January and February) and Part 2 (March and April) if you haven't already.

May

By and large, May was rather uneventful but it did see a continuation on the job search front; I hadn't yet ramped up to it but I did have the first of several interviews with a company that seemed promising. It ultimately didn't work out, unfortunately, but it was definitely a good experience.

Memorial Day weekend we had a garage sale and cleared out a good portion of stuff that had been accumulating over the years. We went all-in on it, running an ad in the Bulletin as well as on craigslist; set up everything neatly displayed on tables in the driveway and the garage, and wouldn't you know it—rain. I don't remember if it rained on the first or the second day, though. It may have been the second, since we hustled and we were able to get everything pulled in to the garage and out of the weather.

At the end of the month, another beer blogging score: I received free tickets to Deschutes Brewery's Chocolate Beer Pairing Dinner. This was our first event at the Brewery (aside from their annual garage sale), and we were pretty well blown away. The food, the beer, the company—all were excellent.

It was another notable blogging milestone, which I'm realizing more and more (as I write these) that 2008 was a hell of a good year for blogging (for me).

June

Naturally, the big news of note in June was that it was the month that I was laid off and officially became unemployed. As luck would have it, it coincided fairly neatly with the final week of school, so it turned out that I would have the summer off with the kids, and we could save money on childcare as a result.

Of course, since finding out my hours were cut, we cut spending way back and worked from a budget, which only got much tighter in mid-June. Saving money was the theme of the summer—along with "Job Search"—which you may have deduced after the fact when I wrote about free summertime activities on Hack Bend.

However, it was our tenth anniversary in 2008, and we had been planning a trip for months, and decided we weren't going to abandon those plans despite being unemployed. That's how the second half of June found my wife and I spending a weekend in Las Vegas, splurging and staying at the Venetian in one of their Medici Suites.

We gambled (eh), we saw Wayne Brady, and my brother and sister-in-law even drove up from San Diego to see us (whom we hadn't seen in almost three years). It was hot—damn hot—but ultimately it was a good time.

The final weekend in June we ended up taking another trip to Portland and then to the Oregon Coast (we apparently traveled a lot in 2008!); lest you think this was yet another splurge, we actually had several agendas that coincided nicely: an eye doctor appointment for the kids (their specialist is in Lake Oswego); I had a job interview with an internet company; and we were able to visit my best friend and his and his wife's new baby.

Since we had to be in Portland for the day anyway, we made a weekend out of it. You may remember I wrote about the trip in detail, and even posted pictures.

Of course, while in Newport we squeezed in a visit to the Rogue Brewery that I could write about. Of course, the really cool find was their Rogue Spirits Distillery; we still have some of that yummy Hazelnut Spiced Rum in the pantry.

...Now I need to go drink some.

I've already looked at the first two months of last year and what went on; now March and April.

March

I was interviewed by Peter Sachs of the Bulletin for a(nother) article on blogging. It was a front page article, and even though I didn't have my picture in the paper this time around, I was the first blogger named and quoted. My blogging 15 minutes or something.

I took the week of Spring Break off to coincide with the kids being home from school. The first part of the vacation was pretty low key; but the final weekend we again took a trip over the mountains, this time to visit and stay with good friends in McMinnville.

It was a pretty cool trip. We went and visited A.C. Gilbert's Discovery Village in Salem—A.C. Gilbert is the guy who invented the Erector Set, among a ton of other things—and the Discovery Village is a fantastic children's museum. I highly recommend it if you're visiting Salem.

We made a quick detour to Eola Hills Winery that day as well—that area is the heart of Oregon wine country, after all. They have a nice gift shop and a great tasting bar. Unfortunately it wasn't Sunday, because they offer amazing-sounding Sunday brunches (with wine, naturally).

During that weekend, I managed to visit Golden Valley Brewery in McMinnville and was suitably impressed—it's a cool place (check out the beer sampler in my review!) and they've got some tasty beer.

Ironically, the weekend we were away was the opening weekend of Trader Joe's here in Bend—I'm only noting this here because almost the entire trip my wife was complaining that we were missing the Grand Opening. No, really—we got home late-ish afternoon on Sunday, and my wife went to Trader Joe's just to see what it was like.

Trader Joe's. That's how we roll, yo.

And, the beginning of the end—for my job, that is. I found out midway through March that my hours were going to be cut back to half-time in "the near future." Unfortunately, this year was not the year to be working for a home builder. But they were extremely open and fair about the time cut, and what else can you do? I started looking around for full-time employment.

April

The month of April marked the six year anniversary of blogging for me—on April 22nd, specifically. We had a "blogger bash" get-together with a dozen or so folks showing up to the Summit Saloon in Downtown Bend—not as big a group as in February, certainly, but a lot of fun regardless. Afterwards, we (my wife, Simone, and I) had drinks with Kina at the Astro Lounge and made a night out of it.

At the beginning of the month (on the 3rd) I got a behind-the-scenes private tour of Deschutes Brewery with Jason Randles, who does marketing for the Brewery and whom I met through my Brew Site blog. See how this blogging thing is opening doors?

And then, similar to being interviewed by the Bulletin in the previous month, I was asked—in my capacity as a blogger—to be on a media panel at the Deschutes County offices along with other real members of the local media. The panel was supplementing media communications training for County employees, and as I wrote, "it was interesting and enlightening, and definitely something I'd do again if asked."

We took yet another trip over the mountains, again to McMinnville—our friends' (the same ones we visited the previous month) daughter was turning one, so we went up for the weekend and the birthday party. We stayed with them again, and I believe it was this trip (at their house) that we discovered Rock Band, and what a freakin' blast that game is.

And remember the notice that my hours were going to be cut back to half time? It happened in April. I don't remember exactly when, but it was sometime around the middle of the month, I think. But maybe earlier; I had an interview for a position with Deschutes County near the beginning of the month as I started testing the waters for other employment.

Thus began the countdown.

2008 was a pretty eventful year, overall, and I wanted to go back through and put things in perspective.

As I started writing this yesterday, my initial thought was to fit three months per post, but so far the first two months have grown longer than I expected. So it may end up being a six-post retrospective! At the same time it's interesting to go back through my blogs, email, pictures, etc., to piece together the various things that happened throughout the year. I keep running across something else to note—and I'm only two months in!

January

Even though my posting here on chuggnutt.com has really slacked off over the past couple of years (due mostly to the time and effort I've been putting into my other blogs), I did manage to get this site redesigned and activated on the first of January. Unfortunately, except for a few tweaks here and there, the state the site was in on 1/1 remained about the same throughout the year.

On the 15th I attended the Abyss launch party at Deschutes Brewery, which was exciting both for the fact that I was there as a blogger, taking some (crappy) pictures and writing about it afterward; and because I really love The Abyss and I was able to score a case of it on opening night (I wasn't taking any chances that it would sell out).

The second half of the month, I drank a lot of cheap beer for a Theme Week on The Brew Site. It sounds frivolous but believe it or not it was the first time that beer blogging actually felt like work; I was drinking two (sometimes three) cans of American Macro beer a day for about a week and a half, and writing up two (sometimes three) reviews of those beers each day for a week's time. So, yeah, like work.

On the other hand, it was kind of fun hunting down those big cans of cheap beer around town.

January was the month when I finally jumped about the twitter bandwagon. I don't know that it's all that important a milestone for 2008 (or my life in general), but everyone else seems to be ga-ga over it, so there you go.

And, a parenting milestone: January marks the first time that I had to stay home from work with a sick kid. This may not seem like a big deal, but until my wife went back to work the previous September, she was the at-home parent who dealt with such issues. Of course I've taken care of the kids myself many times—what makes this time standout is that it was the first time we had to deal with it as "working parents"; when my wife went back to work full time this was a big unknown to us.

February

The highlight of the month was the trip to Portland we took during the long President's Day weekend. We went shopping, then to OMSI and checked out the cool dinosaur exhibit they were running, and had lunch at the Lucky Lab—I wrote about it, of course. I also wheedled a trip to John's Marketplace and scored a bunch of specialty beer.

On the 21st there was a blogger meetup at the Blacksmith Restaurant. It was the first "real" Bend blogger meetup in ages, and my first visit to the Blacksmith since they renovated and re-opened as a premier beer bar. I didn't get to stay for the entire time, but even for the short time I attended I was incredibly impressed with how the number of local bloggers has grown. Something like 30 people ultimately ended up coming.

On The Brew Site I did another Theme Week devoted to Canned Beers. In and of itself this isn't really all that notable except for one thing: I interviewed a the lead PR guy for a brewery noted for their canned beers in an "official" capacity. For basically doing this blogging thing in my free time, that's taking it to the next level.

Oh, and it was a leap year, so February had 29 days. Nothing big happened that I remember on the 29th, I just wanted to point it out.

I just flipped the switch on the new design for the site, and very surprisingly, things mostly went off without a hitch.

There's still some unfinished things I need to, uh, finish, and I haven't ported the design over to all the pages in the site yet... so you'll still see the old green layout pop up from time to time, depending on where you go. And I'll be fine tuning over the next couple of days too. A good rule of thumb is, expect it to be broken... til I fix it.

The main point of the redesign is to focus on the primary experience: reading the stuff I write. Without all the unnecessary crap elements getting in the way. There's some of the advertising stuff going on too, because I'm not that pure.

Assuming you're not just reading this in your favorite RSS reader, and are actually visiting the site, tell me what you think.

My goodness, I've certainly been neglecting this site. Most of my blogging energy has focused on The Brew Site and Hack Bend, but I've also been neglecting other areas of this site—the projects page in particular needed cleaning up, and I needed to catch up on PHP code fixes for my HTML2Text class and Word Stemmer class that people had sent me over the past year or so.

So I spent some time yesterday doing just that. There's really not much to see if you're simply here for the blogging portion of the site, but in case you were here looking for my PHP code or were one of the people who were nice enough to email me fixes for the bugs, I've gotten that stuff updated (and thanks to the suggesters).

In the meantime I'll see what I can do about the writing portion of the site—ie, the blog. I certainly have no intention of retiring it but that's sure what appears to be happening... so no no, not gonna happen, I shall start making more effort to write regularly here again. And perhaps tweak the site design around a bit. I mean, it's only been...

...holy hell, it's been five years? How on earth did I let that anniversary pass by without comment or celebration or something? Back on April 22nd, this was...

Whoa.

Yes, it's that introspective time again. Since I've done these for the last two years already, I thought it would be interesting to put it all together in a table format to compare years.

I did this same thing last January, and thought it was good fodder for looking back on 2006: my favorite posts over the last year. I noticed that I wrote less here as I stepped up my writing on The Brew Site and Hack Bend, and I wonder: if quantity went down, did quality go up? :)

• Mouse fire!
• NYTimes on Bend (late review)
• 10 ways Dick Cheney can kill you
• Anagram map of Downtown Bend
• Smoke alarm batteries
• Blogday, Earth Day, and a lawn rant
• Growing Up in Central Oregon: Introduction
• Growing Up in Central Oregon: Water in the Desert
• The Dirty Screech (mostly for that photo I found...)
• The truth about vampires
• These Santas are so wrong

Yes, it was exactly four years ago today that I started this blog. I don't have much to say right now, I just wanted to mark the occasion.

Though I should probably do something special for it. The first part of my day will be hauling manure around, topdressing the yard, so I guess I'll have to come up with something better for later. ;)

I never did get any comments on my poll the other day...

Is this thing on? :)

Since I'm tired of waiting on Simone for a new site design :), I thought I'd start playing around with it myself. It's just high time things got refreshed around here. So, I thought I'd run my early attempts by everyone, and ask a few questions.

The big change is converting the site to a stylesheet-driven design rather than a table-based one. I also want the clutter reduced, and to remove unnecessary features.

You can see a bit of what I'm doing on the project page and the archive page. So far the primary changes you'll see are on the sidebar, I haven't really re-worked the header much yet (but I will).

So, the questions:

• What do you think of the new design elements?
• Should I keep or drop the calendar at the top of the sidebar?
• I'm thinking of changing the header to some sort of revolving photo background. Thoughts?
• Any features I don't have that people would like to see?
• General comments/ideas?

Don't pull any punches, either. I can take it! :)

It's time for another edition of the Chuggnutt Zeitgeist, in the spirit of Google and since I did one last year. Interesting stuff, if you're into blogs and stats and such. On to it!

• Number of blog entries: 244. Last year: 306.
• Approximate total number of words: 39,810. Last year: 45,537
• Average words per blog entry: 163.2. Last year: 148.8
  
  It only looks like I wrote less than last year, but you know what? I was also writing on The Brew Site. I'm doing a Zeitgeist post over there too, but the quick numbers are 222 posts and 38,371 words... which combined, yields 466 posts and 78,181 words. Surpassed!
  
  
• Total visitors: 633,110. This is unfiltered, so it includes bots, spiders, RSS readers, etc. Last year: 242,433
• Average visitors per day: 1,734. Last year: 687
• Total real visitors (approximate): 430,505. This is the actual number, with most of the bots and such filtered out.
• Average real visitors per day: 1,179
  
  This year I made the attempt to show actual visitors to the site, not just the automated stuff out there. To that end I filtered out anything identifying itself as a spider, known RSS feed slurpers/readers, bots, crawlers, and non-browser agents. I didn't get everything out, but this is a pretty decent snapshot. Note this doesn't speak to unique visitors; the stat package I'm using doesn't classify that and I'm not using Sitemeter or anything that supposedly tracks unique visitors. I imagine a good part of the total visitors are repeat visits, so I won't hazard a guess as to how many unique hits are there.
  
  
• The most active month was October, by a long shot, because of the Burger King mask post—people were hammering this post looking for a Burger King Halloween costume. Not surprisingly, this post has also garnered the most comments: 673
• There were three days on which traffic spiked considerably: April 30, with 9,152 visitors; July 20, with 7,575 visitors; and August 18, with 8,915 visitors. Unsurprisingly, those appear to be times when I was FARKed—that is, someone linked to one of my pictures from the FARK forums.
• Ten most popular blog entries:
  1. The Burger King creeps me out: 28,910
  2. Houston's glass public toilet: 9,610
  3. My Burger King mask post is on fire!: 9,511
  4. Goofy Burger King job flyer: 5,234
  5. The Donald Trump/Bend urban legend: 4,879
  6. Leonard Nimoy's Bilbo Baggins: 4,862
  7. Super Wal-Mart: 4,619
  8. Central Oregon's biggest baby?: 3,821
  9. Leeroy Jenkins!: 3,781
  10. Never ending fall: 3,017
• Total number of comments (not counting spam): 1,556
• Most popular searches on this site:
  • burger king: 34
  • burger king mask [variants]: 24
  • i want to buy the burger king mask: 5
  • Beaubien [variants]: 28
  • z21: 27
  • ktvz: 8
  • html2text: 24
  • trump: 10 (plus 3 variants)
  • donald trump: 6
  • donald trump bend: 3
  • donald trump bend oregon rumor: 3
  • (Total Trump related: 25)
  • fantastic 4 cash card [variants]: 14
  • fantastic 4 [variants]: 16
  • bend oregon [variant]: 14
  • bend: 12
  • php: 12
  • blog: 12
  • amazon: 11
  • lovecraft: 10
• Ten most popular search engine searches landing here:
  1. burger king mask: 5,295
  2. boba fett: 3,086
  3. pdb reader: 1,972
  4. free palm ebooks: 1,805
  5. darth maul: 1,534
  6. kermit the frog: 1,376
  7. leeroy jenkins: 1,221
  8. www.amazon.com/burgerking: 1,210
  9. super walmart: 973
  10. palm reader: 877
• Top five search engines:
  1. Google: 72,180
  2. Yahoo: 20,629
  3. MSN: 4,042
  4. AskJeeves: 1,259
  5. AOL Search: 1,061
• Here's the approximate breakdown of browsers and agents, gleaned from the full numbers:
  • Internet Explorer: 61% of all traffic
  • Mozilla/Netscape browsers (Firefox mostly, I think): 23%
  • Opera: 1%
  • RSS readers/agents: 2%
  • Bots/search engine crawlers: 8.2%
  • Other stuff (random bots, feed readers, crawlers, obscure browsers): 4.8%
• Among real visitors, some surprises in country of origin (I'm not listing all country stats here; suffice to say, the U.S. and Canada are the top two):
  • China: 13,221 visitors
  • Malaysia: 1,930
  • Uruguay: 1,371
  • Sweden: 912
  • Saudi Arabia: 899
  • Greece: 524
  • Iran: 450
  I'm surprised I'm that popular in China.

Being inspired by Chris's post about the same, I decided I'd list my favorite/best posts for 2005. These aren't the most popular ones (I'll cover those later), but the ones I personally think are the best.

I'm not ranking them, though, other than in the date in which they appeared.

• Bandage Man
• Globe
• Things about Bend that I miss
• Things about Bend that I like
• Our local Jedi
• My semi-annual TV rant
• Pimp name
• Hard drinkin'
• Bandon cheese woes
• 4 8 15 16 23 42 (my long rambling post on Lost)
• Haunted Bend
• Tarding down literature

You may or may not have noticed that I've turned off comments on posts older than three months. I wasn't getting tons of spam comments (spamments?)—I suspect my filtering was working well enough—but I was certainly getting tired of the ones that were coming through. Since they were almost invariably on old posts, I finally bit the bullet and took care of the problem.

If you have a burning desire to write about a past blog entry, just use the contact form. Of course, that's no guarantee that you'll get anywhere. :)

So Simone was telling me that the design here on the blog was getting stale, "too much green," things like that. Okay, I said. Come up with a new design for me, and I'll implement it.

Her eyes got big. For like, one day? she asked.

For as long as I like it, I said (or words to that effect). I'm not a designer; I came up with something I kind of liked, but if someone wants to make me a better one, I'm all for it.

So we'll see what Simone comes up with for me.

Okay, this is getting crazy: my Burger King mask post is up to 236 comments, and there's currently active discussion on where to find a Burger King mask online, and a guy named "John" is even making his own masks and selling them on eBay! In fact, I grabbed a couple of his pictures of the homemade mask—click through to see...

More...

The Burger King mask post I made back in April is insanely out of control; right now, it has 59 75 comments on it, mostly from people who want one of those masks (and one or several guys who claim to be making it, or have it for sale)! It's such great entertainment to watch the comments roll in.

I'm getting so many hits on this because of great search engine placement for "burger king mask." On Google, I'm number 5 and on Yahoo, number 3(!). Man, I wish I could plan posts like that one...

Some more on trackbacks. To my mind, they are simply another form of comment, so that's exactly how I'm treating them. You won't see a special "Trackback" down there next to the "Comments" link. Instead, they'll just be integrated with the comments in chronological order.

I think I saw Sam Ruby doing this first, and it makes much more sense to me to treat trackbacks this way.

I've finally bitten the bullet and implemented Trackback here—well, half of it, anyway. My site should now be able to handle Trackback pings from other sites. I even implemented the RDF autodiscovery crap, but added a bonus: a new meta tag like so:

<meta name="trackback.ping" content="Trackback URL for a particular entry">

So maybe I can influence client software development in some small way with this.

I haven't implemented outgoing Trackback pings yet—i.e., me pinging others' sites when I link to them. I'll get around to it at some point.

It hit the stands today—the Bend Bulletin article on bloggers that I and others were interviewed for. It's a pretty good article, and I like the layout. Of course, I'm probably biased because my picture's in it, and my earlier posts about the interview are the lead to the story...

Anyway, it's the front page of the Community Life section. In a supreme example of irony, however, you won't find the actual article about the online world of bloggers online anywhere. So I can't link to it. Maybe I'll try to get permission to republish the article online here, so it'll at least show up somewhere online. (And how many times can I work the word "online" into a paragraph?)

Oh, and a little secret: in the photo they have of me, I'm "working" on an Apple Powerbook. However, honesty compels me to reveal that not only do I not own an Apple... but I don't even own a laptop! Make of that what you will.

Following up on my interview for the Bulletin last week, today I went over to the Bulletin building to have my photo taken for the article. Actually, it was myself, Jake, and Chris from monkeyinabox all there for photos.

Very interesting. The photographer took a bunch of pictures of each of us, then put us together in several ways; I'm very curious to see how they turn out. It was certainly a new experience for me—not that big a deal, really, but still kind of cool.

I'm told this article should be appearing in the Friday edition of the Bulletin. Stay tuned!

My wife and I are heading up to Portland for the weekend, and will be back Sunday sometime. Needless to say, I'll be taking the weekend off from blogging (even though I'll probably be online Sunday night; we'll see). Have a good weekend!

I was interviewed today by a reporter writing a story on local bloggers for the Bulletin. Very interesting, kind of cool. I'm not sure what will come of it other than myself sitting there yammering on semi-coherently, but the article will apparently be published next Thursday. I'll have to pick up the paper to see.

And, the guy is interested in talking to as many bloggers as possible. Email me if you're interested.

In other related news, Jake has an angry letter to the Bulletin on his site. That rant kind of spun out of this local story situation. Worth a read.

Going through the chuggnutt.com logfiles for the 6th, I noticed that there were suddenly a bunch of hits to the Oobi image I'd posted here a while back from TotalFark. Basically, someone's linked directly to the image on this server from a high-traffic site.

Now on the one hand, that's kind of cool—but on the other hand, I'm a little irritated because TotalFark is a paid subscription site that I can't access without registering first, which means I can't just go and see what they're doing with the Oobi image they're pulling from me. Does that seem fair? Their site is saving money by sucking an image down over my bandwidth, and on top of that I'd have to pay them additional money to find out why.

And before someone points out to me that it's only like 5 bucks to register and I'm therefore a cheap bastard, well, consider this: FARK's Terms of Service at the bottom of every page reads:

Text comments, audioedit submissions, and photoshopped images posted on Fark by registered users may not be reposted or broadcast without the express written permission or license from Fark.com and must attribute Fark.com as the source.

So if they won't let people use their images without their permission, then why should I? It's the principal of the thing.

Grumble... It might be time to brush up on some Apache rewrite rules...

Yeah, I'm still here. Just haven't found the time or energy to post much lately. So, quick one-off tonight with an interesting site: Lulu.com. Free self-publishing of books, which they will print on demand and ship to the purchaser. Sort of the CafePress of publishing.

Still continuing to settle in to the new house. This weekend we cleared out the storage unit, and it never ceases to amaze me just how much stuff we've managed to accumulate over the years. Of course, it doesn't help that I've got a packrat personality and it's actually hard for me to get rid of stuff. But—wow. How does this happen? You're puttering around in your daily life, happily oblivious, then one day you turn around and BAM!—where did all this stuff come from? And yes, you remember getting that, and yes, those have a story, and then you realize the true culprit:

Time.

Time: you lose track of it for even a moment, and it will sneak up on you. Your kids will grow a few more inches and start school, everyone you know is suddenly older, the music you spent formative years of your life listening to is on oldies radio stations, and stuff accumulates.

And yeah, that packrat personality I mentioned, I have that. But not too badly though, not apeshit crazy like you see on TV or read about, where the old hermit guy has 30 years of newspapers tied up in his living room, or the wacko lady has 8,000 unopened boxes of toothpicks, or anything like that. No, I've got it just enough to annoy my wife. Could it ever get more serious? I doubt it.

But you know... time will tell.

Well, we're all moved in and (relatively) comfortable. Still not feeling like blogging much—after 3 days of moving and cleaning and unpacking, and the ongoing process of more unpacking and arranging and tweaking (things like hanging curtains, and towel racks), I'm just beat. So, some quick thoughts on the moving process:

• Smartest thing we did: hiring movers. Totally worth it. If/when we move again, it's the only way to go.
• Taking a day off from work was also smart.
• Going back to work feels like a vacation.

Ugh. More later.

So tomorrow we get funded and close on our new house, and take possession. Then comes the Move; we'll start hauling a load or two over tomorrow evening, and then Saturday is the big day. Fortunately, this time we've hired movers to do all the heavy lifting.

I don't expect to be online much or at all after I leave work tomorrow, at least until Sunday sometime, maybe later. If all goes according to plan, Bend Broadband should have our cable service turned on Saturday (I think), but I seriously doubt I'll be interested in going online after spending the day moving.

Thus marks the end of one chapter of our lives, and the beginning of a new one. It's not the first house we've bought, but it will be first brand new one we've lived in. Should be interesting!

I got an email from Al Fasoldt yesterday that was in response to this piece I wrote last year. He wanted to know what I was thinking when I wrote it, and basically called me on it. I remembered being harsh when I wrote it, but since it was last July I didn't remember any real details (it was on the software Hotbar, and Web tracking in general), I went back and re-read what I wrote.

Wow.

I wasn't just harsh and sarcastic, I was downright nasty. Looking back on it now, it was pretty uncalled for, and I honestly don't know why I was so rude. So, I emailed an apology to Fasoldt, and I'm doing the same publicly (since I lambasted him here in public): I apologize for being so nasty and writing that entry up the way I did.

Yes, back from Portland since yesterday, but I'm finally catching up on everything—internet connectivity has been spotty at best here for some reason, so last night after not being able to connect to anything for the umpteenth time, I said, "Screw it!" and gave up.

Portland is where it's supposed to be. Bend is where I left it. Good enough.

I'll be offline all this weekend and most of Monday. We're going to Portland: the kids have another eye doctor appointment with someone new on Monday, so we're making a weekend out of it and heading up tomorrow.

I'll check my email Saturday morning but after that it's au revoir.

So yeah, I took the weekend off from blogging. Ran out of steam, I guess; I didn't even read any other blogs on Saturday, I was engrossed in finishing up Kiln People. Sometimes it's just plain nice to take a break.

I've been vastly updating the search functionality on my site. I'm still using MySQL's built-in FULLTEXT indexing to perform searches, but I've made the results page look a lot more (okay, almost exactly like) Google's. The main differences are that I'm not paginating search results (yet)—all searches limit to 10 results—and that I'm showing a relevance percentage, the first result being arbitrarily determined to be a 100% relevant.

To determine relevance, I'm relying on MySQL: a fulltext MATCH(field) AGAINST('search string') directive will return the relevance number that MySQL computes when used in the SELECT part of a query. (See MySQL Full-text Search in the online manual for detailed info on this.)

Further plans for searching that I haven't implemented yet: utilizing MySQL's IN BOOLEAN MODE parameter with searching to allow advanced things like phrase searches (with quotes), required word matching (using the plus sign), and subexpressions using parentheses. It's pretty cool stuff. Oh, and I want to be smarter about presenting excerpts: Google tries to show you content excerpts with your search terms in them, I want to be able to do the same; currently I'm just showing the first 250 or so characters of the text with HTML stripped out of it.

And since I'm developing my whole Personal Publishing System in an open process, I'll write up a detailed technical article soon on how to effectively use MySQL fulltext searching and show Google-like results. All real-world; the code will be cribbed right out of my search.php file.

Just flipped the switch on the site design I wrote about (see "Everything Old is New Again"). So far things are looking good, but there might be some bugs still lurking. And right now the changes only apply to the blog pages; I haven't reworked the ebooks page or others, yet.

And there's two new pages available: What is Syndication? and My Projects. The Syndication page is a sort-of FAQ on syndicating a site and RSS—a helper page, or primer page, as it were, to anyone who sees my RSS link and wonders what the hell that is. Consider it a draft, but I will be updating and maintaining that page, and aim to make it a good landing page for syndication/RSS questions.

I've started tinkering with the design of my site here, changing things around, making the blog pages more blog-centric, and in doing so I realize that this "redesign" is basically the same design I was using up through July of last year. How quickly we forget.

As to what I'm changing, I'm simplifying the table layout and applying more style sheet rules to clean up the underlying HTML, and I'm moving back to a two-column format, with the blog content in the left column (wider) and all the rest in the right column (narrower). After staring at the three column layout for over half a year, I've finally decided it's just too busy, and going with a more readable format is better. Hey, the two column layout with content on the left is almost a blog standard, if there is such a thing. Damn Movable Type for destroying the curve :)

I'm also restructuring the overall site architecture a bit, moving some clutter off the front page to inside pages, consolidating some stuff, adding some new pages to (hopefully) enhance overall usability. Maybe someday I'll even tinker around with an all-stylesheet layout approach; I know HTML table-based layouts are anathema to some folks out there. But right now my general philosophy is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it—but simplifying it is okay.

I've been terribly lax lately in responding to my emails that are ebook requests. I'm awfully sorry about that; I'm responding to some tonight, but if you sent me a request for an ebook and haven't heard back from me, I apologize.

Doing some further testing on the new CMS. There should be a "MORE" link below if you're viewing this from the front page. If you click on it, you'll get the extended body text and as a treat I'll throw in some of the things I'm doing behind the scenes.

More...

I'm flipping switches on my blog tonight, and going live with my new CMS I'm working on. Hopefully, all will work as planned; consider this entry a test message.