Blogging about NOT blogging

Hey! Remember me? I used to blog at this site quite a bit. But in the last year or so, things have really gotten quiet around here. It's not that I've stopped writing, in fact I'm writing more than ever. It just ain't here.

Back in 2008, I wrote 165 articles on this blog, including 20 articles in September alone. In 2009, I dropped to 122, and then dropped by exactly half to 61 in 2010.  But I was sick for half of 2010, and came back a little in 2011 with 82 articles. In August of 2011 I joined In Lax We Trust (now InLacrosseWeTrust.com) and moved all my lacrosse writing over there. Four months later, I created my own lacrosse blog, nllchatter.com,  and a month after that I started writing for ILIndoor.com. I'm actually a pretty big player in the world of indoor lacrosse now. (I can write that here because the lacrosse people who know that that's a total crock don't read this blog and the people who read this blog don't follow lacrosse to know that that's a total crock. Except that I just told you. Crap.)  I still do a lot of writing for those two sites, and as a result my output here has dropped off. I dropped again by over half to only 33 in 2012, and this article (early February) is the first one of 2013.

For those of you who have been disappointed about this apparent drop in productivity (hi Candyce!), you have my sincere apologies. It was not my objective to abandon this site. But in order to stay current on the National Lacrosse League, I have to focus a lot of my spare time there so that I (appear to) know what the heck I'm talking about. Between that and taking the boys to soccer and swimming during the week and spending time with Gail and the boys on weeknights and weekends and visiting relatives all over Ontario and oh yeah, that pesky full-time job, I don't end up with a lot of time for other writing. I do miss it though, and when I look and see that my most recent article was posted six weeks ago, I get kinda sad for my poor neglected little blog.

That said, please understand that I am not under the delusional impression that there are thousands, hundreds, or even dozens of people clamoring for me to write more. I write here because I enjoy writing and the occasional discussion that comes out of it.

There are two other other reasons I don't write here as much as I used to. The first is to stop annoying people. In looking back over my previous non-lacrosse articles, many of them in the last year or two are related to skepticism, eg. why vaccines are good, why legislating some alternative medicines makes no sense, why the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are all nuts, stuff like that. I decided to tone it down a little on that front since I felt like I was starting to become that guy that people stop listening to because he just rants all the time. I still have an article or two in the queue in this vein, so it won't entirely disappear. Natural News aficionados, beware.

The other reason is Facebook. Other than skepticism and lacrosse, most of what I wrote were comments on random articles I read on the web and short funny stories about my kids. These days, I frequently find myself posting these to Facebook instead of writing a whole article about them. This isn't a conscious decision, it's just how things have worked out. If I have a lot to say on a subject I'll write an article about it, but there have been a few times where I've wanted to say something but just didn't have the time to say it all so I just post it on Facebook.

I have at least ten articles in the queue. Most are just ideas that I've had and currently consist of single sentences that I will eventually expand. A few have been started, some are about half done, and at least one has been mostly done for a year but is likely way out of date so I almost have to start it over. There's one I'm having fun with but it involves a lot of creativity and thus is very time-consuming.

So the take-home message here is that I have not abandoned this blog and will still post things from time to time. Some of them might even be entertaining – you know the old bit about the blind squirrel occasionally finding a nut.

Why I blog

All blogged out... for now

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed a slowdown in the number of postings over the last five months or so. This is because of the other two blogs I've been writing for: NLLChatter.com (my own lacrosse blog) and ILIndoor.com, the premier box (indoor) lacrosse blog anywhere. Since late December, I've written twenty articles on ILIndoor (listed here) and almost eighty articles on NLLChatter. By way of comparison, I've written all of ten here.

The National Lacrosse League season ended a little over a week ago. There are indoor lacrosse leagues in the summer, as well as a field lacrosse league, but I don't really follow them, so I'm pretty much done with lacrosse until next winter. So now that I have more free time to not write about lacrosse, and because the weather is beautiful outside, I'm finding that sitting at the computer and writing about other things is a little less of a draw now than it has been in the past. I'm quite sure this is temporary, and I do have a number of articles in the queue either needing polish or waiting to be written. In fact, one of them will likely be posted later today.

So do not worry, faithful reader, that I have quit the blogging game. Stick with me and there'll be more articles coming – and I guarantee that you'll get the same amount of insight and wisdom as you've always gotten from me. Interpret that last sentence as you will.

Canadian Blog Awards redux

Back in November, I found out that my blog had been nominated for a 2011 Canadian Blog Award. Well, the results from the first round of voting are in, and I am excited to say that I placed fifth out of 39 in the Best Personal Blog category. Thanks very much to everyone who voted for me, but we're not done yet! The final round has already begun, and now there are only five nominees. The vote counts have been reset to 0, and we vote again.

My blog got 34 votes in the first round, while the blog in the lead got 81, so I've got some ground to make up but with your help, dear reader, we can do it. Please vote, and I don't want to put any undue pressure on anyone or use guilt trips or anything, but if you don't tell your friends and family to vote too, well I guess the terrorists have won. And it's your fault.

Voting began on December 24, and ends on January 20. Go and vote now! (Note that I was unable to see the names of the nominees on the voting page when using Chrome, but IE and Firefox work.)

Again, thanks to whoever nominated me and to everyone who voted for me.

Canadian Blog Awards

Yesterday someone left a comment on a recent article of mine. I get the occasional comment when my articles are posted to facebook but very rarely on the blog itself, so the fact that I got a comment at all was pretty cool. The comment said that the article was "brilliantly written", which is even more cool, but the next sentence blew me away:

I found you through the Canadian Blog Awards and no wonder you're up there!

Ummm, what? First off, I had never heard of the Canadian Blog Awards. That's fine, there are a zillion things on the internet that I am unaware of. But how would you find my blog on a blog awards site unless... no.

As it turns out, yes! Someone has nominated Cut The Chatter in the Best Personal Blog category. I am extremely flattered, honoured, and surprised by this. There are a few reasons I'm surprised:

• It's just me and my blog. I like to think that at times it's insightful and entertaining, but come on. It's just me. My wife doesn't even read it.
  
• I'm up against some other blogs with hundreds of regular readers. I have three members. Only one of my last ten articles has been viewed 100 times. More people read my stuff through facebook and RSS and I can't count those, but I'd bet that the average article I write here is read by less than 50 people total.
  
• My content is all over the map. Personal stories, lacrosse and other sports, skepticism, technology, music, whatever.
  
• Sometimes I write four posts in a week, sometimes four posts in a month. No consistency at all.

So that's why I'm surprised about the fact that I was nominated. But I'm also surprised about the nomination process itself:

• Whoever nominated me did not tell me they were nominating me. To the nominator: First off, thank you very much. Secondly, please don't feel pressured to reveal your identity to me. If you would prefer to remain anonymous, that's totally fine.
  
• The awards site itself did not contact me to tell me I was nominated.

That second one seems especially weird. The site itself (which is simply a blog with links to pages on a generic polling site) is obviously not updated very often – the 2010 award winners were announced last October, and there are only three articles since then. One of them says that the 2011 awards were delayed because of a lack of nominees. The About/Contact page talks about "this year (2010)". The Rules page talks about the 2010 awards as being in the future. It makes me wonder how many people actually vote on these awards – did the winner in a particular category get 50 votes? 500? 50,000? I have no idea. Oddly, there are also the Canadian Weblog Awards which seem to be unrelated to the Canadian Blog Awards.

Having said all that, regardless of whether these awards are voted on by 50 people or 50 thousand, it's a cliché but it's true – it's an honour just to be nominated. I'm truly flattered by this, and every time I've thought about it since I found out yesterday, I smile and just shake my head. Last week someone at work told me that he enjoys reading my facebook statuses and notes (i.e. blog posts), and that made my day. Then this past Monday, someone on twitter told me that I was her favourite lacrosse writer, and that also made my day. And now this.

I never wanted to be a writer, I never studied journalism, I never even liked creative writing in school, and I hated writing essays. I started this blog on a whim in April of 2005 and have been writing about whatever ever since. It's only in the last three years or so that I've discovered that I really love doing it, and to have people tell me they enjoy what I write is amazingly rewarding. To be nominated for this award and have people vote for me is just mind-blowing beyond words. Thank you so much to my secret admirer whoever nominated me and to everyone who's voted for me.

Well, what are you waiting for? Don't waste any more time listening to me gush.  Go vote!

What led you to me?

Here are some actual searches that led people to my blog from September to December 2010. 

Attention Facebook readers: You might want to click the "View Original Post" link at the bottom of this note. Facebook sometimes messes up the formatting.

• "toop ten 2010 fucking girls an sking" – I have no idea how this led to my blog. I even tried doing the same search and my blog didn't show up in the results. I messed around with this search string to try and make my blog appear in the results – including adding "cut the chatter" to it – but I couldn't.
• "garth brooks bmw truck opera subsidize"
• These three were all on the same day. Not sure if it was the same guy who kept forgetting the answer or three different people, but I have not seen criteria like this on any other day.
  • "my middle name is earl song lyrics"
  • "my middle name is earl lyrics to song"
  • "what song miidle name is earl"
• Someone found my blog through a search from www.google.com.ar. This must be Google's search engine for pirates.
• "my face has sunken"
• "i have been sent home with a t-tube coming out of my tummy what is this"
• "boys on pool table doing the macarena" as well as "macarena boys dancing pool table"
• "procedure for placing drain tube in buttock cheek ct guided"
• "should you call ambulance when acute pancreatitis attack" – on the assumption that you don't want to die, I'd say yes
• "do they have to cut my stomach to tie my tubes"
• "is wayne gretzky circumcised" – I wrote an article on circumcision several years ago and ever since, I've seen a number of searches hit my blog asking about the... um... status of celebrities including Wayne Gretzky, Eric Lindros, Charlie Sheen, Clay Buchholz, and others. I don't know why this information would be of value to anyone and honestly, I don't want to know why someone thinks it might be.

Two blogs for the price of one

Not only will I be writing on my own blog (this here one), but this season I will also be writing for "the official un-official fan blog of the NLL" at nllblog.tumblr.com. I will be one of at least four writers on that site; the other three are based out of Edmonton but we hope to cover the entire league, not just the Rock and Rush. This is a new site, so I'm not sure what kind of readership we will have but regardless, it'll be fun. I will likely post any new lacrosse articles I write both here and there.

Windows Live Writer

I recently upgraded my MSN Messenger to the latest version, and Microsoft was kind enough to ask me if I wanted to install a bunch of other crap applications with it! Well, it was kind of them to ask; not every company does (lookin' at you, Real Player). Anyway, one of the apps it asked about (and the only one I installed) was Windows Live Writer, which is essentially a WYSIWYG editor for blog postings. It has all your standard Word-like buttons for formatting text and adding images, lists (numbered and bullet), hyperlinks, tables, etc. as well as undo/redo. It also allows you to keep drafts, preview what the posting will look like when published, spell-check the article, and even add categories. It knows about the blog software you use so it can (presumably) tailor itself to what you're using. If you're using Wordpress rather than Blogger (which I use), some Wordpress-specific options may show up while Blogger-specific options would not be shown. Once you're done, you can even publish your article directly from Live Writer – just click a button, enter your password (if you haven't saved it), and you're done.

One of the coolest features is the preview pane. Live Writer will download your blog's template, and use it to generate the preview so that while you're writing your posting, you can see exactly what it will look like once published. Blogger has a preview option as well, but it sucks. I mean it really sucks. Really. It's just hopelessly broken. It does basic HTML formatting so that <em>italics</em> shows up as italics, but the font it uses is different from the one that the blog uses, tables and images aren't formatted the same way, the width of the text area is different, it just looks nothing like the final product. Google (which owns blogger) doesn't get much wrong with their software, but this is one area where they've really dropped the ball. Live Writer, on the other hand, shows the preview exactly as it will show up on the blog, complete with the sidebar, previous posts, dates, labels, links, the blog title, everything. I'm very impressed.

Before using Live Writer, I would write my blog entries in emacs using markdown format, then run it through a perl script I wrote that called markdown and did some other formatting and wrote the output to an html file. I could then preview the html file in the browser for formatting and when it was done, copy-and-paste the contents of the html file into the blogger "Create Post" page. Going from the text I was editing to the html was a two-step process – I would switch from emacs to a command shell and run fix <file> and then start <file>.html which would launch Firefox. From then on, I would save my edits, then go to the command shell and run fix again, then switch to Firefox and hit CTRL-R to refresh the page. This was not that big a deal, but the WYSIWYG thing is much easier and I love the accurate preview window.

I've used it so far to write a few blog entries (including this one) and I'm really starting to like it. The preview thing is awesome, it does spell-checking which neither emacs nor markdown do (after pasting the html on the blogger page, Firefox will do it, though I'd have to remember to actually check it before publishing), and there are plug-ins you can get to add other capabilities. For example, if you post lots of pictures or video to your blog, there are plug-ins to make those easier. One thing I don't particularly like is font support. If you choose a different font, it uses the <FONT> html tag to specify it. I don't like the font tag – I prefer using CSS – but I rarely change fonts anyway.

Interesting note: Over the past week, I have found a couple of interesting spelling suggestions for technical words from the spell checker:

• "Unix" for "unix"
• "Xbox" for "XBox"
• "VMware" for "VMWare"
• "Perl" for "perl"
• It doesn't know what "emacs" is (suggested "maces")

While testing the font thing out, I found another cool feature: if you do want to do something that the editor doesn't directly support (like <tt>fixed width text</tt>), you can just switch over to the Source window and enter the HTML directly. This also allows you to add other html stuff as well as custom styles, and even JavaScript (which actually runs in the preview window). Just for fun, I even tried the <blink> and <marquee> tags – though I truly believe that anyone using either of those should be shot – and marquee worked but blink did not. I don't care about that though, since I'll never use either of those on a blog entry. If I did, according to what I said before, I'd have to shoot myself. And I would.

Anyway, if you have a blog, and you use Windows (I kind of doubt that there will be Linux or Mac versions anytime soon), you may want to check this out. And by the way, in case you think this is a paid endorsement or that I'm posting this because I have friends at Microsoft or something, it's not and I don't. I did work at Microsoft for a four-month work term over seventeen years ago (holy crap, I'm old), and I know the guy who created Xbox Live (though he doesn't work for Microsoft anymore), and I listen to Scott Hanselman's podcast, but that's about the extent of my association with Microsoft. But if anyone at Microsoft wanted to pay me after the fact for writing such a glowing review, I'd gladly take an Xbox 360. Feel free to contact me for my address.

My blogging legacy

Some actual searches that reached my blog in the last month:

• Google Search: circumcise waterpark
• Google Search: is clay buchholz uncircumcised
• Yahoo Search: "other words for penis"
• Google Search: is charlie sheen circumcised?
• Google Search: is wayne gretzky circumcised

Geez... I wrote one article on circumcision, and searches are still hitting it over two years later. It is also the current cutthechatter.com record-holder for comments, with twelve. I guess it was on the cutting edge (har).

As a comparison, an article on the circus that I wrote the same month has zero comments, and I've never seen a single search hit that one. I guess penises are big on the internet! Wait, that's not what I meant...

Blogger vs. Wordpress

When I changed my blog over to the new URL, I started thinking about hosting the blog myself, rather than going through blogger. My first thought was "How am I going to move the existing articles over?" I have since decided not to do this, at least for now, but while thinking about it, I realized that I had no backup of my blog entries anywhere. I thought this might be a good idea, so I looked for an export function in blogger, but there isn't one. After a bit of searching, I found a couple of complicated methods of exporting all of your blog entries. One of these involved replacing your template with a different one, which would change the actual blog itself so that you could basically cut and paste the entire thing and then replace the template afterwards. This seemed like overkill, but then I found a comment that said something like "I just created a wordpress account and imported everything".

I looked at wordpress and found that not only did it have an import feature that would automatically import all blog entries and comments from an existing blogger blog, but it also had an export feature which would to export your entire blog (including comments) to a single XML file. This seemed like exactly what I wanted, so I created a wordpress blog, imported everything from my blogger blog, then exported it to an XML file. The whole process took maybe 5 minutes, and I now have a 1.4 MB file containing every entry and comment on my blog from the beginning of time (also known as April 9, 2005) until January 26, 2008. I then changed my blogger setup so that it will automatically email every entry I post to my gmail account, and I'll set up a filter there so that entries automatically get tagged as blog entries and archived so I'll have a record of those as well.

Truth be told, I actually prefer the look of the wordpress blog to that of my blogger one. The export feature is a very nice thing that blogger doesn't have, and I was considering switching over to use wordpress permanently, until I saw this at the bottom of wordpress's features page:

To support the service we may occasionally show Google text ads on your blog, however we do this very rarely. In the future you'll be able to purchase an upgrade to either turn the ads off or show your own ads and make money from your blog.

I seem to have this implicit dislike of online advertising (though I use (and love) gmail which does have ads, and I appreciate that this is how these services can be offered for free), so no thanks. If I had hundreds or thousands of readers, I could maybe see putting some ads on there for a little extra income (though having said what I said about online advertising, I might feel like I sold out to The Man). However, the way my readership numbers look now, I'd likely make nothing — the odds that either of my readers would click on anything are pretty low. Isn't it ironic that one of the reasons that I don't want to switch is because Wordpress might show Google ads, while blogger (which is owned by Google) does not?

Another problem is that if I wanted to use www.cutthechatter.com (rather than cutthechatter.wordpress.com), I'd have to pay $10 / year, whereas it's free with blogger. (Well, I have to pay for the domain itself, but I'd have to pay for that either way.) So I think that for the foreseeable future, I'll be sticking with blogger.

I do think I will have to play around with my blogger template to make it prettier, possibly using the Wordpress one as a guide.

National Delurking Week

Happy National Delurking Week! For anyone who doesn't know what that means, "lurking" is what you do when you read a blog but never post any comments. This week, you are encouraged to post a comment, just to let me know that you're out there.

For anyone who reads this blog (or its equivalent on facebook), feel free to post something profound, something not very profound, or just "hi"! And remember...

New domain!

I've registered the domain cutthechatter.com for my blog. The blogspot URL will redirect to www.cutthechatter.com, so there's no immediate need to change any bookmarks or anything. Right now, you need to specify the www. prefix, but I'm trying to fix that. Update: This is done now, so just cutthechatter.com should redirect you to the blog as well.

The hosting is still done through blogger for now, and I have no immediate plans to change that, but someday I might.

Don't tell me why you want to know

I use mybloglog.com, which gives me stats on how people find my blog, i.e. of all the people who find my blog, where do they come from? Some of the searches that people have done to lead here are kind of interesting:

Google Search: eric lindros uncircumcised
Google Search: weird thing about linkin park
http://search.sweetim.com/search.asp?ln=en&q=OLD FILM TALKS ABOUT TWO PERSONS HAVE CANCER ONE OF THEM PLAY SKI
Google Search: which arm did anakin lose to darth tyrannus
Google Search: there is a song i heard on q107 making fun out of bryan mccabe who sings that song 2007
Google Search: 2 player can 7up vs diet coke football game

I'm frightened to ask why someone cares whether Eric Lindros is circumcised.

Incidentally, the vast majority are from Google searches. I see the occasional Yahoo search and other searches (sweetim.com I've never heard of), but easily 95% are from Google.

A thinly veiled attempt to increase readership

Mmmmmm-kay. I have exactly two lurkers. You'd think that a blog like this that deals with a fringe sport like lacrosse as well as the day-to-day life of Joe "2.3-kids-a-minivan-and-a-mortgage" Suburbs would get thousands of hits a day, but alas, you'd be wrong. Then again, I don't care about reader numbers, do I?

Seems that the real way to attract blog readers is to (a) be famous (nope), or (b) be an expert in some field and write about that (nope). However, I've seen several blogs about politics, and they always seem to attract the commenters, so maybe I'll try that. Note that I don't really follow politics much, so you might have to fill in some of the blanks here:

Did you read about what <politician> said the other day about <current political issue>? I just can't believe anyone can think that way - those damned <political party>s. Don't they understand that <opposing viewpoint>? Don't they remember <politician from 10-40 years ago>? Have we learned nothing from <scandal>?

OK, that's not working. I guess I'll stick to writing about stuff that I am more familiar with, and hopefully my faithful readers will occasionally find it interesting.

Item: Nicholas had oatmeal for breakfast this morning. I shit you not.

National De-lurking Week

Happy National De-lurking Week! (Thanks cahwyguy) For those unfamiliar with the term, a "lurker" is someone who reads a blog (or newsgroup, message board, etc.) but doesn't post anything. This is the time for those who read but don't post comments to expose yourself! Feel free to leave a comment on this article if you're reading it - make it something deep and insightful, or just "hi!".

Just remember:

Lots of article changes

I changed my blog over to the new blogger format today. Visually, there isn't much difference, but it makes it very easy to change the layout and stuff. One new thing is the addition of "labels", which you can assign to each article. Down the side of the blog, there's a list of all the labels, and you can see all the articles with that label. So if you want to see all the lacrosse articles, you can click on Lacrosse. Kinda handy, so this morning I went back and tagged a whole bunch of older articles. I didn't do all of them (I've posted almost 200 articles to this blog since I started it a year and a half ago!), but quite a few. If you have an RSS subscription to this blog, you might notice a whole bunch of new articles - that's why.

URL changed

OK, the URL for this blog is now officially http://cutthechatter.blogspot.com/. I've created a new blog over at the old address, and I changed the feedburner.com feed. Turns out that the LiveJournal syndication user was using the feedburner feed anyway, so I didn't have to do anything with that. The only other thing I've done is edit some old postings on this blog that contained links to other postings — I updated the URLs in the links.

If you notice anything weird, please let me know!

Changed comments again

I changed the comment stuff on my blog back to the standard blogger comments. The Haloscan stuff was working OK, but I just didn't like the look of it — to read the comments, you had to pop up a separate window, and that window had advertising links in it, and I'm too lazy to reformat the window to look nicer. I've moved the comments made during the Haloscan days back over, though I haven't found a way to reset the times to the original times, so it looks like I got a bunch of comments on various different entries all within a few minutes of each other on the same day. One of the main advantages of Haloscan is trackback, which is not offered by blogger, but my blog is low-traffic enough that not having it is no big deal.

Update: I figured out how to edit comments, so all the comment dates/times are now correct.

Technorati tags:
Haloscan
blog comments

I'm a real blogger now

I guess I'm really a part of the blogosphere now - not because I'm writing stuff on a blog, but because someone else's blog linked to an article in mine. Whimsley saw my response to his article on blogging. I had to smile at the sentence "Except he says it better" — Tom is a professional writer and published author, so this is quite the compliment to little ol' me.

Tom's blog is read by a number of other people (friends and family of his, and likely some people who have read his recently-published book), and if his book is a hit, that'll bump his readership numbers as well. Since there's a link to my blog on his, that might bump my numbers too. Woohoo!

Oh wait, I don't care about that. I forgot.

Technorati tags: blogging

Technorati

I signed up with Technorati the other day, and I found a way to set up a posting template that includes the technorati tag links, so some of my postings will have these links at the bottom. I'll put relevant tags on an article, and if you're interested in that topic, you can click on a link and technorati will search for other entries in the blogosphere that use that tag as well. I'm not going to go back and update a year's worth of entries to add these tags though, so this will likely only affect new postings. I may add some tags to a couple of recent entries, just to see how it works.

Technorati tags: technorati