This blog is six years old today. Now, I was planning a big retrospective, but the archives are all there and you can go browse through all 1845 entries. Six years of blogging and I’ve managed to spew out over 1800 entries (Jen’s posted too, which I’ll talk about in a little bit), and people have posted over 1600 comments, and I didn’t have comments for the first year of the blog when it was over on Blogger.\
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The blog started out orange, and with spacemen, and went through quite a few different designs (some of which I don’t even remember). Thankfully, Jen decided to join the party and I came up with the design we’ve got now, based on a photo Jen took on our trip to Bethany Beach last summer.\
So here we are, six years of blogging about my life, my family, some about work and about other assorted nonsense. You know, I don’t think I’ll be stopping any time soon. I go through phases where I don’t post for a week or so, but I always come back. I always find some other reason to come back and write. It’s become a part of my life, and things may change around again (you never know), but lawver.net will probably always be some sort of blog.\
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Thanks, blog, for holding all the nonsense, and for keeping an archive of me over the past six years. Thank you Blogger and thank you Movable Type.
Category: blogging
Searching For The AOL Blogfather
For a while, I thought that I might have been the first AOL employee to have a blog. I know that can’t be true, but I’m curious as to who the AOL Blogfather is (term stolen gracelessly from Reid, who is one of my blogfathers).\
If you’re an AOL or Netscape current or former employee and you have a blog whose first post is older than 7/20/2000, please let me know (you know, post a comment). It would be nice if the blog was still active.\
Why do this today? Well, another great AOLer has started a blog, Jacob Rosenberg. Jacob’s a great guy and one of my favorite operations folks. His second post is a short history of the many web servers that have come out of AOL. I’ve used all of them at some point, and remember them (mostly) fondly.\
Only nine days until this blog’s sixth birthday. I still haven’t decided what to get it yet.
Weekend Update
Max had another soccer game on Saturday. He has so much fun there, I have to recommend it to all parents of young children. It is so much more interactive and physically demanding than tee-ball or little league. (It’s practically non-stop running for an hour, instead of standing around waiting to bat or for someone to hit the ball your way.) It’s kind of hard to watch though, because he tends to stop paying attention. Which is fine since he is only 6, except I want him to pay attention and get better. But I don’t want to be one of those overzealous parents you hear so much about. In practice all of the boys seem to be getting better at the basic skills, but come game time, they just kind of do a “Lord of the Dance” imitation when they get near the ball. If the teams kept score, you’d note that they are relatively high-scoring though because 1) we don’t use goalies and 2) once a kid makes a good kick, he can usually follow it through to the goal because there is almost no defense on the field.\
Yesterday was the first day in nearly a week that I didn’t have a horrible headache plaguing me all day. Also, Kevin only worked 11 hours. Coincidence? I think not.\
Tonight is the series finale of 7th Heaven. Sniff. Let’s all take a moment to reflect on this horribly written and horribly acted show. The fans will miss the many non-interesting story lines filled with hypocrisy, manipulation, backstabbing, and outright lying. I guess they’ll just have to pay more attention to the Bush Administration to get their fill from now on.\
In Brian news, he has been wearing only one sandal for almost 2 hours. I don’t know why.\
Kevin told me he gets teased by coworkers about my numerous Veronica Mars posts. Hmm, I guess this means I shouldn’t post my thoughts on under-wire bras.
Blog Of The Day
Hey look, we’re the blog of the day!
Microformats a Go-Go
One day last week while the boys were watching TV, I decided to finally get this here blog up-to-date with microformats, especially since I’m all for them and keep telling people to use them. Might as well take my own medicine, right?\
As of sometime last week, the front page has three separate hAtom feeds and each entry has an hCard on it. I’ve been trying to find time to redo my resume (no, I’m not looking, this is just an excuse to use hResume), but haven’t had time (working nights and weekends will do that to you, along with the fact that I really need a haircut).\
I didn’t have time to remove the classes I had on there before and change the CSS, so the source looks a little cluttered, and nothing’s been done to the archives. I just didn’t have time (running theme, I know).\
If you see anything wrong, please let me know so I can fix it.
Sweet Talk
Remember when I said UPN could kiss my ass? Well apparently that is just the kind of sweet talk they like (I should have known they liked it dirty and rough, they are UPN after all), as I was invited to be on the cool kids list too! YAY! Who knew complaining could be so effective?\
Here is the latest press release:\
VERONICA MARS Viewing Party\
UPN is offering its dedicated Veronica Mars bloggers a great opportunity to have your 15-seconds of fame! Every week, get a group of friends together for a Veronica Mars viewing party and shoot some video of your event. The tape can include anything you want: sound bites of your friends talking about their favorite characters, you saying why you love Veronica Mars, or a group shout-out to your friends and family in your hometown. But keep it clean, because your tape could end up airing on UPN during an episode of Veronica Mars!\
If anyone out there is interested, leave me a comment and I can get you the details and UPN’s contact info!\
And guess what? Veronica Mars is on tonight at 9pm EST on UPN! YAY!
Blogging While Black Revisited
Like last year’s Blogging While Black, this year’s did not disappoint. It is my favorite panel so far, and I left with a lot of interesting thoughts in my head and a lump in my throat. It expressed, through the lens of what it’s like to express your cultural identity as a black person online, my absolute favorite thing about blogging: that blogging allows me to get a glimpse into lives, cultures, situations and events that I would never have to opportunity to otherwise. The panel is that same experience as an “out of browser experience.” I don’t know what it’s like to be black, or the challenges faced by minorities in coping with what feels like being stuck in two worlds: the black community and a society dominated by white culture. It was just fascinating to me, and I thought the panelists did a fantastic job of expressing their individual issues, their internal struggles, and the larger questions raised.\
I especially love George Kelly. George and I don’t get to spend enough time together, but from the moment I met him, I loved him. George is one of the most beautiful people you will ever meet. He is kind and deliberate in everything he says. He glows with kindness in a way I’ve never seen before, and love being around. He is whip-smart, eloquent and inspirational (the “out of browser experience” line is his, as were several other winners in today’s panel). I think he takes great pains to make sure that the people around him feel included and a part of his space (which I don’t think makes sense, but I don’t know how else to express it). George, you are a prince among men, and I hope you know it.\
I wish I could express how great the panel was today. It was more than the sum of the words spoken or the people in the panel. Last year, I felt a little uncomfortable, sitting there feeling like an intruder in what looked like a private discussion among a community I didn’t belong to. Today, I felt like I was being drawn into a discussion, an open expression of what it means to be black. I wasn’t being talked to, I was being talked with, and the difference was subtle, but everyone in that room was involved. About halfway through, almost all the laptops were closed and everyone was jazzed. We were all awake (even though it was the last panel of the day), and participating. There was laughter and some challenge, and some pain. But it was all done together, as a single group. I don’t think anyone left that room feeling left out or alone. We left having experience something together.\
I’m really really tired now, and that probably made no sense, but Blogging While Black encapsulates what makes SxSW so special. Even though it’s huge this year, and I’m hobbled and stressed out about my panel, I felt that attraction, that feeling of belonging, that recharges me and keeps me going for another year. Thank you, George. Thank you, Lynne. Thank you, Jason. Thank you, Tiffany. Thank you, Tony.
I Love Information
So I needed a break from thinking about markup and decided to go check out the stats for lawver.net generated by my friendly web server. I stumbled on something interesting (to me):
- pages served in 2003: 67,492
- pages served in 2004: 581,041
- pages served in 2005: 1,003,530\
I think I joined Dreamhost in about the middle of 2003, so that’s understandable. But, still, that’s almost doubling the amount of traffic every year. I think that’s pretty cool.\
Some more stuff that’s probably only cool to me: - About 25% of the visitors to this site are Mac users.
- NetNewsWire is the most popular news reader among the RSS consumers of this site.
- Bloglines is number two.
- Search engine bots index this site more often than they probably should.
- The most popular search terms that get people here are:
- sick movies
- beautiful font
- maddenisms
- green snot
- chicken noises (holy crap, I’m number one!)
- nerd jokes
- Over 25% of my traffic comes from Google if you include all the localized versions.
- About 1% of my traffic comes from inside the AOL campus local network (which oddly enough, doesn’t worry me at all).
- According to Sitemeter, I went from about 2,200 “visits” a month in October of last year to over 9,000 last month (which was an aberration, but July was still almost 7,500).\
Told you I love information.
Look Around, See Anything Different?
I switched some things around this evening (because there was nothing on TV). I’ve split the main page into two columns so Jen and I can post without feeling guilty for pushing each others’ posts off the front page. We also have his and her’s RSS feeds in case some of you don’t like me and only want to see Jen’s stuff. I haven’t removed any feeds, so there are still the unified feeds.\
I never cease to be amazed at how comfortable Movable Type is to work with. The templating system is natural and it’s easy to customize how your blog looks, what it does and how it outputs and formats data. I love the developer community that’s come up around it that creates really cool plugins before I know I need them. I know I flirted with switching, but I don’t think I will. MT is just too comfortable.\
Now it’s back to my new microformat and writing more XSL (for a project you’ll all be hearing way too much about in the very near future). Thank you, internet, for everything. Good night!
Whoops
I need to write myself a to-do list when I do an upgrade of Movable Type. Since MT 3.2’s been in beta, I think this is the second time I’ve forgotten to rename the comments script. If you’ve tried to post comments the past couple days, I’m sorry!! It should be fixed now…\
In other news, pain killers are good.