The Goose Is Getting Fat
Ah yes, November... it's arrival can only mean one thing: *sings* Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat. Please put a penny in the old man's hat... *hums to himself*
Anyways, it's a typical Tuesday morning in the library after English class (which only finished 10 minutes early today, believe it or not), so that means all of the ideas I've compiled over the past few days will get written about.
Peterisinsane.com
I guess I should mention first that Nick actually wrote in his blog. Mind you, he didn't write more than a few sentences, but it's a start. In his first entry, he mentioned contributions towards the purchase of peterisinsane.com; I saved him the trouble and just bought it for him right out (gotta love $2.99/yr domains from Yahoo). Of course, this caused some panic when I sent him a text saying he now owned peterisinsane.com for the next two years. He called me up and asked, "How much did that cost?! That must have been expensive, right?" to which I replied, "It was less than I make in an hour." He asked, "how much is that?" and I said, "it was $6." Somehow, he misinterpreted this dialog and understood it as being $6 an hour for two years... so at this point he was going insane. I reassured him that it was $6 for two years, calmed him down a bit, and that was that.
So, as soon as peterisinsane.com makes its way through the system and registers in your local domain servers, you should see some sort of placeholder for Nick's website. What exactly he'll put there, I don't know, but I intend to help him out and I'm sure he's open to ideas if you have any. I'm just still amused at the fact that peterisinsane.com actually exists, and I think the ensuing amusement will be well worth my $6 investment. Where Nick will find time to actually put anything up at his website I'm not entirely sure, but hey, he's got two years to make good use of my investment, and with free hosting and a free domain, I don't think he'll be in any sort of hurry.
Hmmm....
I got an anonymous comment a day or so ago in response to my Shipwrecked entry in which I mentioned blogs that I enjoy reading. The comment said this:
Subject: John Siracusa
Although the FatBits blog just started a month or two ago (Ars had no staff blogs at all before then), John Siracusa has been writing for Ars Technica since 1999. You can find a list of his articles here:
http://siracusa.home.mindspring.com/john/articles/ars
In particular, his Mac OS X reviews are widely viewed as the best (or at least the most thorough) on the web.
There wasn't any notion as to who wrote it, and it got me wondering: who is this mystery reader? As far as I know, the only friends I have who would read John Siracusa's writing have LiveJournal accounts (Bryce, possibly Evan) or would sign their name when posting an anonymous comment. Given the fact that it was early in the morning and I had nothing better to think about, I started speculating. Was it just someone random who'd stumbled across my blog and knew about FatBits? Was it Siracusa himself, reading what others had written about his blog (which is easy to do thanks to Google BlogSearch)? The world may never know.
Blog readership
The mysterious comment combined with an Alertbox article about blog usability-which I stumbled across via Joel On Software-got me thinking about my blog. Currently, my known readership consists of a fairly large subset of my friends (both from church and school), my mom (and most likely my dad too), Brian and Liz and others from the homegroup, Mrs. Centanni and Mrs. Urban (both of who have hit the site at least once, however they may never return for all I know), and other people who have some connection to me through my sister or otherwise. Overall, that's a much larger list than I ever expected I'd find regularly reading my blog, so I'm happy as-is. I often wonder though whether people who have no clue who I am ever read my blog, whether frequently or once-off because they stumble across it. Currently, I'm okay with just the people I know reading it, because I don't think it's really worthy of going "mainstream"-I write about too large a variety of topics and tend to have way too many personal references which people who don't know who I am wouldn't get (a.k.a. the whole Nick thing).
After reading the usability article, I realized just how many of those rules I break on a regular basis (or just as a result of this being a LiveJournal), but I wonder whether or not I would gain readers on anywhere near the scale that, say, Daring Fireball or Joel on Software does/would if I did follow the rules. I think that moving to my own site, where I'll have a WordPress (and therefore have inherent integration with the blogosphere) and the ability to have an "about me" page, not to mention no ties to LiveJournal (as nice as it may be) will automatically gain me a bit more credibility and potential readership. But I wonder, will I ever hone my writing enough to compete in the big leagues? To get hundreds or thousands of hits a week? A day? Will I ever have huge debates and flame wars popping up in my comments (a la any big blog that discusses controversial issues)? Will I ever have more comments than I can count on my fingers for a given post? Once again, the world may never know... but I'll keep wondering nonetheless......
Anyways, it's a typical Tuesday morning in the library after English class (which only finished 10 minutes early today, believe it or not), so that means all of the ideas I've compiled over the past few days will get written about.
Peterisinsane.com
I guess I should mention first that Nick actually wrote in his blog. Mind you, he didn't write more than a few sentences, but it's a start. In his first entry, he mentioned contributions towards the purchase of peterisinsane.com; I saved him the trouble and just bought it for him right out (gotta love $2.99/yr domains from Yahoo). Of course, this caused some panic when I sent him a text saying he now owned peterisinsane.com for the next two years. He called me up and asked, "How much did that cost?! That must have been expensive, right?" to which I replied, "It was less than I make in an hour." He asked, "how much is that?" and I said, "it was $6." Somehow, he misinterpreted this dialog and understood it as being $6 an hour for two years... so at this point he was going insane. I reassured him that it was $6 for two years, calmed him down a bit, and that was that.
So, as soon as peterisinsane.com makes its way through the system and registers in your local domain servers, you should see some sort of placeholder for Nick's website. What exactly he'll put there, I don't know, but I intend to help him out and I'm sure he's open to ideas if you have any. I'm just still amused at the fact that peterisinsane.com actually exists, and I think the ensuing amusement will be well worth my $6 investment. Where Nick will find time to actually put anything up at his website I'm not entirely sure, but hey, he's got two years to make good use of my investment, and with free hosting and a free domain, I don't think he'll be in any sort of hurry.
Hmmm....
I got an anonymous comment a day or so ago in response to my Shipwrecked entry in which I mentioned blogs that I enjoy reading. The comment said this:
Subject: John Siracusa
Although the FatBits blog just started a month or two ago (Ars had no staff blogs at all before then), John Siracusa has been writing for Ars Technica since 1999. You can find a list of his articles here:
http://siracusa.home.mindspring.com/john/articles/ars
In particular, his Mac OS X reviews are widely viewed as the best (or at least the most thorough) on the web.
There wasn't any notion as to who wrote it, and it got me wondering: who is this mystery reader? As far as I know, the only friends I have who would read John Siracusa's writing have LiveJournal accounts (Bryce, possibly Evan) or would sign their name when posting an anonymous comment. Given the fact that it was early in the morning and I had nothing better to think about, I started speculating. Was it just someone random who'd stumbled across my blog and knew about FatBits? Was it Siracusa himself, reading what others had written about his blog (which is easy to do thanks to Google BlogSearch)? The world may never know.
Blog readership
The mysterious comment combined with an Alertbox article about blog usability-which I stumbled across via Joel On Software-got me thinking about my blog. Currently, my known readership consists of a fairly large subset of my friends (both from church and school), my mom (and most likely my dad too), Brian and Liz and others from the homegroup, Mrs. Centanni and Mrs. Urban (both of who have hit the site at least once, however they may never return for all I know), and other people who have some connection to me through my sister or otherwise. Overall, that's a much larger list than I ever expected I'd find regularly reading my blog, so I'm happy as-is. I often wonder though whether people who have no clue who I am ever read my blog, whether frequently or once-off because they stumble across it. Currently, I'm okay with just the people I know reading it, because I don't think it's really worthy of going "mainstream"-I write about too large a variety of topics and tend to have way too many personal references which people who don't know who I am wouldn't get (a.k.a. the whole Nick thing).
After reading the usability article, I realized just how many of those rules I break on a regular basis (or just as a result of this being a LiveJournal), but I wonder whether or not I would gain readers on anywhere near the scale that, say, Daring Fireball or Joel on Software does/would if I did follow the rules. I think that moving to my own site, where I'll have a WordPress (and therefore have inherent integration with the blogosphere) and the ability to have an "about me" page, not to mention no ties to LiveJournal (as nice as it may be) will automatically gain me a bit more credibility and potential readership. But I wonder, will I ever hone my writing enough to compete in the big leagues? To get hundreds or thousands of hits a week? A day? Will I ever have huge debates and flame wars popping up in my comments (a la any big blog that discusses controversial issues)? Will I ever have more comments than I can count on my fingers for a given post? Once again, the world may never know... but I'll keep wondering nonetheless......