July 21, 2003
Tour weblog update
I'm not posting much here, since I'm posting like a madman right over there.
The site is doing very well. A lot of people are saying nice things about it, and among recent linkers were The Guardian (the UK newspaper), Jason Kottke, an Australian site called Grouse (where it shares the front page with "Take a Cruise with Dirk Benedict"!), and TotalFark.com, the for-pay version of Fark.com.
During the most-visited hour for which I've viewed the stats, I had 320 visits, and more than 14,000 since July 8; more than 3600 today.
I've claimed the site on BlogShares, where it's valued around $1,000,000 (insider tip -- sell before Sunday!).
July 21, 2003 in About NotD | Permalink | Comments (0)
July 15, 2003
TdF weblog takes off
The Tour de France weblog has taken off beyond my expectations.
I've had links from Anil Dash and Little Green Footballs, both of which generated some good traffic.
I've had a few links I can't decipher and been named someone's blog of the week. I made the Daypop Top 40 (at number 40).
Today: 2324 visits (the control panel calls them hits, but they're clearly counting referrer hits)
Peak hour was around 160.
I was hopeful that the bike racing books linked from the front page (and linking through my Amazon associates ID) might actually amount to something, but so far there have been exactly ZERO people who have bought squat from Amazon.
Can't talk about TypePad much, but I will say I like it. It's letting me do a lot of things much more easily than in MovableType.
July 15, 2003 in About NotD | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
July 09, 2003
Pleasant Google surprise
Noticed I'm getting a bit of a traffic spike, largely from Google.
So I popped up Google, entered "Tour de France update", and started looking for my page on the list.
As you can see, I didn't have to look very far.
Does anyone have a pointer to a method (using Apache's mod_referer?) to send folks who Google for the Tour to my Tour de France archive?
I hate to let this much Google karma go to waste....
July 9, 2003 in About NotD | Permalink | Comments (0)
July 07, 2003
Beta Nicest of the Damned on TypePad
I'm beta-testing MovableType's new service TypePad.
I can't say much about the system, but I have a beta site you're welcome to try out.
I'm still messing with the layout, blogroll, etc., but I would love to hear your feedback, either here or through e-mail.
July 7, 2003 in About NotD | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 12, 2002
Interesting thread
If you didn't catch Paul's reply to yesterday's post "Blogs and Journalism", you should check it out. I left my comments there, but I know a lot of other people who read NotD have strong opinions on journalism.
December 12, 2002 in About NotD | Permalink | Comments (2)
Posting lull
I haven't been driven into an Atkins coma, but instead have been the fortunate benefactor of a "right place at the right time" moment. During my week replacing power supplies, configuring Windows 2000, and salvaging laptops, it came down that my temporary employer is facing an audit in January. That means they need some help fast, collecting policies, hardening servers, and possibly implementing better network monitoring.
Couldn't Frank do some of that? Why, sure, but not at my charitable hourly rate. Why, of course not -- we were going to contract that out at 5 times that rate. Needless to say, I'll be getting my hands on as many of those 5x hours as I can between now and the audit, and learning a lot about one of the great oxymorons to boot: Windows security.
December 12, 2002 in About NotD | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 05, 2002
Ouch ... Another outage
The power was out again. Looks like we went down at 7:07 p.m., and it was back sometime before we got back from trivia (Ga. Power estimated it would be back by 9:30). Sorry for any inconvenience.
By the way, after winning the inaugural night of trivia at Ruby Tuesday's in Duluth last week, the Maroons came in third tonight.
Things are not looking good for the Democrats in Georgia.
November 5, 2002 in About NotD | Permalink | Comments (0)
October 30, 2002
Outage....
Sorry the site was down for a couple of hours -- it's running out of the house, which lost power briefly. Everything appears back to normal now.
October 30, 2002 in About NotD | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 22, 2002
RSS updates
I've updated the RSS feeds here and they validate as RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0, respectively.
The new validator that Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby set up is very easy to use, and includes step-by-step instructions for updating default MovableType templates.
October 22, 2002 in About NotD | Permalink | Comments (1)
August 21, 2002
Little voice
Ron Rosenbaum: Columbia's J-School Needs to Consider Trollopian Retooling
Columbia's J-school is considering its role in light of selecting a new dean, and Rosenbaum asks what do J-schools do? A friend, he says, has the succinct answer: "They beat the voice out of them", meaning, of course, the students.
Since the article's very long, I want to pull out what he calls the "philosophic fallacies" of J-school theology:
1) The Fallacy of Third-Person "Objectivity": There’s a strong current of J-school theology that worships the third person as if it were the Third Person of the Trinity, and that despises the First Person with a puritanical fervor, as if "I" were Satan's Own Pronoun.Over and over again in J-school classes, students who had internalized this theology would ask me plaintively, "How can you justify using the first person — isn’t the third person more 'objective'?" Or, literally, "Are you sure it’s O.K. to use the first person?" I almost felt as if I were in Oliver Twist’s orphanage: "Please, sir, can I have my voice?" ...
2) The Second J-School Fallacy might be called The Fallacy of What Is Really "Hard News."
The idea that "hard news" is only about politics, economics and diplomacy is built into J-school ideology. Despite recent events that have demonstrated rather dramatically that such "soft news" subjects as theology are really hard news, reporting about ideas, about cultural questions ... has only recently begun to get a foothold in J-schools ...
3) The third, perhaps most controversial of what I'm calling the Three Fallacies of J-School might be called The Anti-Sensationalist Fallacy.Beneath this fallacy lies the belief that the only real news is official news of state: news of politics and economics, news made by legislative bodies rather than human bodies, news made by people with credentials.
I took 2 j-school classes, and was trained by j-school students on The Way to Write, and I find myself fighting all my hard-learned wisdom to write for this 'blog.
Voice is everything in a blog, and attitude is the major component of voice. This is why I still read Dave Winer everyday. Journalism, on the other hand, is about at least the appearance of voiceless objectivity.
If you present one side, you have to give equal time to the other. If you have an opinion that the source is lying, but no one will say so, best keep it to yourself.
And of course, blogs fly in the face of the 3rd fallacy, showing that somebody is interested in news made by the uncredentialed.
August 21, 2002 in About NotD | Permalink | Comments (0)