Well, here we are at #4,000. This puts us just 1,000 posts away from our stated goal of 5,000. Along with the 4,000 posts, we have 6,050 comments as of this writing, and that’s very cool. We appreciate all the interaction everyone has with the site.
Interestingly, we hit 2,500 posts exactly one year ago today. That means our daily post count is about 4.1 (almost 6 without weekends). This means we’ll hit 5,000 posts early next spring, which is always what I figured. We’ll have some contest or something when that happens and hopefully give some stuff away.
So as long as we’re celebrating a blog posting, here’s a list of some of the best and more interesting posts of the last 4,000:
Most Commented Posts
Both posts have had their comments shut down since. The Bill Gates post was the first post I ever did this on — in fact, I had to go look up the exact template tags to do it.
When this site was deanebarker.net, there was actually a post about politics that got over 300 comments. (Although that’s cool, about every post at Rosie O’Donnell’s site gets over 300 comments — this one got almost 2,000 comments, in fact. You see, that’s the trick to getting a lot of comments — become a famous lesbian.)
Longest Posts
Shortest Posts
Posts With the Most Prominent Links
Any one of those links mentioned is worth 5,000 page views, easily.
My Favorite Posts
Most Glaring Example That The World Is Ending
Some of the comments on this post, easily. I mean, come on people — do I have to spoon feed the sarcasm?
The Post Most Likely To Get Me Sued
I’ve been watching the comments on the Geek Squad post pretty carefully. Nothing has gotten out of hand, and there’s a lot of good discussion going on, so I’m keeping my hands off for now. However, it still makes me a little nervous.
Only Post I’ve Ever Been Threatened About
There were some comments on this post about Convea that I was asked to take down under threat of “legal action.” I’m still bitter about it, but I wussed out and folded.
(Some long-time readers will remember that this site came down for six weeks in early 2003 when I was threatened over another post, but it was a completely different site back then, so that doesn’t really count. And I deserved that one.)
Posts That Bummed Me Out The Most
Two of them, actually — both pretty recent.
Both sucked, but they are what they are. People have every right to express their opinions.
Most Pissed Off I’ve Been While Writing A Post
This one, about the comment spammer. That’s also the closest we’ve come to getting taken offline.
Post Containing the Most Hyperlinks
This one. There’s 40 of them in here. Markdown rules.
So, what’s next? Some ideas for the future:
Ask Gadgetopia
I’d like to provide a place for readers to ask questions of the community that’s built-up around this site. Not specific “debug my code” questions, but general questions about the best way to do something. There’s a lot of knowledge out there I know some people would like to tap.
Reader Survey
We did a survey a long time ago. I’d like to do another one to find out who’s reading. Total vanity, but still.
Let’s Give Stuff Away…
I’m getting an increasing number of people offering me review copies of stuff (software, games, books…) in exchange for some publicity. I’ve started asking for two copies: one for me to review, and one for me to give away to someone. However, I can’t figure out a good way to give the stuff away.
Let’s Go Somewhere…
I’d like to send Dave or Rob to MacWorld, or me or Joe on this PHP cruise. I’d need to know, however, that we can provide some unique value. A lot of sites send people to these things — can we provide something different enough to make it worthwhile?
So, that’s it. I’m sure I’ll forget about post #4,500, so I’ll see you number 5,000. I’ll be here — I hope you will too.
Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes: My boy Jakob Nielsen takes on blogs in this version of the "10 Biggest Mistakes" list. He has some good advice. Here are the 10 and what we have done or plan to do about them: No Author Biographies I want to do…
Ketchup stain sparks e-mail flurry: A secretary at a London law firm accidentally spilled ketchup on the pants of a senior associate of the firm. He sent her an email asking for £4 to have his pants cleaned. She responded with wonderful sarcasm and CC'd some people, who forwarded it…
Why bother seeing the world for real?
I occasionally run into situations where it would be really great to add an 'intellisense' feature to a text input on a web form. That is, something along the lines of AutoComplete or Google Suggest. There are a bunch of scripts available on the Internets to handle this for you, but…
If you have Google Adsense on your site, here is the best piece of advice I can give you: don't put borders around your ads. I had a border around my skyscraper banner on the right here, so it sat in its own little box. A friend told me to…
I've been spending some time working with Smarty lately. This is ostensibly a "templating language" for PHP. But I think it goes beyond that. I assert that Smarty has become a sub-language all by itself. (Update: I thought of a much better name for this: "sand-boxed PHP." …
Admit it: whenever some group like 37 Signals or Six Apart comes out with a new software product, you secretly think, "I could of done that." How many of us developers thing we could build something just as good if we only put in the time? I do. Yes, I admit…
I mentioned in the last post of 2004 that one of my goals for 2005 was to get the site redesigned. Well, it's finally gonna happen. Here is the new design, and I invite comments from anyone who has an opinion. Also, in the next week or so, look…
Geek squad to the rescue: I don't know why, but I hear a lot about these roving Best Buy tech support guys. I have no idea what suddenly elevated them above "normal" on-site computer techs, but Best Buy seems to have struck on a good marketing thing here. Best Buy's…
Yeah, I'm pissed. Really pissed. When does comment spam become a DDOS attack? There's a fine line, and some a**hole crossed it this morning. I knew there was a problem when I sat down to eat my cereal and read the news this morning and the Windows XP…
Daring Fireball: Markdown Syntax Documentation: I've been playing around with some of the plugins in the MT3 Plugin Pack. Markdown is a plaintext to HTML convertor, much like Textile. However, there's a philosphy behind it: Readability, however, is emphasized above all else. A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is,…
The biggest thing I pulled out of The Building of Basecamp workshop is that you don't have to follow all "the rules" to make something great. When you think about companies delivering services over the Web, you think about...org charts, support staff, call centers, requirements documents, functional specifications, etc. 37…
Last September, we celebrated number 1,000. About two months later, we got to 1,500. Apparently we were too busy to celebrate number 2,000, because that one slipped by before we noticed. So, here's 2,500, which is cool for the sole reason that my goal for the site has always…
Hi, this is President Bush. No seriously — the entry was written by George W. Bush. I'm posting to this blog because it seems like Deane's site is a great way for people to get in touch with the movers and shakers of the world. Apparently a great number…
Isabella Kennedy arrived at 7:03 p.m. Eight pounds, 12 oz. Mom and baby are fine. Now, for the important bit... I had trouble versioning this one. Was she Deane 2.0 or 5.0? She is my daughter — a direct descendent of 1.0 — hence a 2.0. However,…
This blog posting has spawned its own Web site: fakescrowsites.com The comments on this entry are closed as of June 10, 2004 so we can start transitioning people to the new site. Con victims out $10,000 or more: Here's a whole bunch of horror stories about fake escrow company Web sites…
Report: Bill Gates tops list of charitable givers: Love him or hate him, this is a very good thing. Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates and his wife Melinda are the most generous charitable donors in America, Business Week magazine said on Thursday, as the couple gave away or pledged a…
I've complained off and on about the lack of user-defined fields in Movable Type. Today was finally the day I got off my high-horse and messed with some code. Here is a method to add a new field to the MT database. The field can store whatever you like,…
I'm about to admit something odd, and perhaps career-threatening: I'm sick of learning. There, I said it, and I feel better. It's true: learning about new technologies and new ways of doing things is something that plays on an addiction of mine and of many other geeks, I'm sure. …
I've subscribed to a new RSS feed that's injecting styles into posts — each post is surrounded by a FONT tag that makes the text Arial, instead of the default Times New Roman that Outlook (I use NewsGator) would render in if not for the tag. I always felt that RSS…
Here's an idea that credit card companies should implement: an RSS feed of your credit purchases, in real-time. Basically have an RSS feed of every authorization on your credit card(s), as they happen. My wife always wants me to keep receipts, but I always lose them or send them through…
Convea - Open Source Business Application Platform: This is a pretty stunning piece of work. It's super-Outlook in a browser. IE 5.5+ only. Try the demo. If you're ever used Oddpost, you'll be just as impressed with Convea. Using astounding client-side programming, they have utterly and completely…
I got to thinking the other day that the content management field is flooded, especially the open-source systems. Go to sites like CMSInfo.org, OpenSourceCMS.com, CMSWatch.com, etc. and you'll see hundreds of them. Then, every week, I get notifications that new ones have been released: NetWizard Matrix, and Tiki,…
I was over at OpenSourceCMS.com today playing around with some content management systems: phpWebSite, Xoops, and PostNuke. They were all quite good, with phpWebSite being the one I enjoyed the most. But I want to articulate something I've had in the back of my mind for a while...
I'm just a "Geek". 24.65483%
This whole Aestiva thing has got me thinking about development platforms. Every week, there's a new one that claims to be simpler and faster than the last one. ASP is simpler than JSP, PHP is more capable than ColdFusion, HTML/OS makes developing apps faster than the others,…
My buddy Rob and I were talking the other day about top-down vs. bottom-up entrerprise architectures. My last company attempted to implement a top-down architecture, where every system was planned out as to where it fit in the grand scheme and everything was on one big server under one…
This is an article I wrote to summarize and codify a lot of the usability information I was absorbing earlier this year. The same points kept popping up in different places, so I wanted to have an informal checklist to which I could refer. One thing led to…
Become a famous lesbian? Guess I’m not up for THAT challenge…
What Deane meant to say was send Dave AND Rob to MacWorld. Woohoo.
"What Deane meant to say was send Dave AND Rob to MacWorld. Woohoo."
I'll second that motion! MacWorld is twice as fun when you go with someone, plus you can cover twice the territory.
"Dave had a couple linked to from AppleInsider and MacInTouch, but I can't remember which ones (sorry, Dave)."
One of them was the post about Steve Jobs' mansion, The Woodside Controversy, but I don't remember getting a link to MacInTouch, except maybe in my dreams.
Whether tragic events touch your family personally or are brought into your home via newspapers and television, you can help children cope with the anxiety that violence, death, and disasters can cause.
Listening and talking to children about their concerns can reassure them that they will be safe. Start by encouraging them to discuss how they have been affected by what is happening around them. Even young children may have specific questions about tragedies. Children react to stress at their own developmental level.
The Caring for Every Child's Mental Health Campaign offers these pointers for parents and other caregivers:
* Encourage children to ask questions. Listen to what they say. Provide comfort and assurance that address their specific fears. It's okay to admit you can't answer all of their questions. * Talk on their level. Communicate with your children in a way they can understand. Don't get too technical or complicated. * Find out what frightens them. Encourage your children to talk about fears they may have. They may worry that someone will harm them at school or that someone will try to hurt you. * Focus on the positive. Reinforce the fact that most people are kind and caring. Remind your child of the heroic actions taken by ordinary people to help victims of tragedy. * Pay attention. Your children's play and drawings may give you a glimpse into their questions or concerns. Ask them to tell you what is going on in the game or the picture. It's an opportunity to clarify any misconceptions, answer questions, and give reassurance. * Develop a plan. Establish a family emergency plan for the future, such as a meeting place where everyone should gather if something unexpected happens in your family or neighborhood. It can help you and your children feel safer.
If you are concerned about your child's reaction to stress or trauma, call your physician or a community mental health center.
May be im a mourner may be i deserve to do something else. Need to feel the sense.
