Dossy's Blog » Blogosphere

Making slow progress

Dossy Shiobara — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:24:42 +0000

After several rounds of comments, leading to what I hope are improvements, resulted in this latest iteration of my blog theme:

Sure, it looks like someone beat up a clown and then vomited on the body, but it’s progress. As before, any comments would be greatly appreciated.

It’s time to tweak the blog theme

Dossy Shiobara — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 14:18:22 +0000

As part of 2010, I’d like to finally move away from my mostly monochromatic color scheme for my blog. However, the problem is … I can’t choose colors to save my life! After some fiddling around last night, these are the colors I ended up with:

It might not be the worst possible colors to pick, but … ugh, even I know they’re ugly. But, I just can’t choose good colors!

Help me! What colors should I use as the palette for my new theme? I really do like the background color and body text colors I chose … but what about a highlight color? And link colors? Let me know what you think I should try, please!

Fragile Vastness: biological destiny to be hopeful

Dossy Shiobara — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:31:43 +0000

I normally don’t bother with these memes, but this one was just too awesome to pass up. The results are astounding … So, on with the goodness:

1 – Go to a random page on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 – Go to “Random quotations”: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3

The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your album.

3 – Go to Flickr and explore the last seven days: http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days

Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 – Use Photoshop or similar to put it all together.

5 – Post it and invite your friends to join in.

Here’s mine:

Tags: meme

False alarm on that subscriber mass-exodus

Dossy Shiobara — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 00:36:56 +0000

As the ironic gods of synchronicity would have it, my recent inflammatory post didn’t actually trigger a mass-exodus of subscribers. What really happened was either FeedBurner under-reported my subscriber count or Google had some issues starting January 17th through January 22nd. The entry for “Google Feedfetcher” disappeared from the “Feed Readers and Aggregators” list, which accounted for a significant portion of my subscriber count–almost half of it.

FeedBurner’s description of Google Feedfetcher reads as follows:

Feedfetcher is how Google grabs RSS or Atom feeds when users subscribe to them in Google Reader or iGoogle. Subscriber counts include Google Reader and the iGoogle. Feedfetcher collects and periodically refreshes these user-initiated feeds, but does not index them in Blog Search or Google’s other search services.

So, I don’t know if Google’s Feedfetcher didn’t poll my feed for those days, or if FeedBurner simply failed to account for them. Either way, my subscriber count appears to be back to normal.

Tags: feeds, FeedBurner, Google, subscribers, analytics

Saying goodbye is hard to do

Dossy Shiobara — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 15:48:01 +0000

All it took was this unpopular post, and I lost half of my feed subscribers, going from around 180 down to 90 …

The irony is, it was probably the most active post on my blog for quite a long time, gathering a lot of interesting comments from several different people.

I guess the typical blogger would be devastated by losing half his audience in one day, but the sad truth of my blog is that most of my traffic comes from search engine referrals. While it makes me sad to see them go, if it was so easy to unsubscribe after one post, I wonder how much value they were getting out of my blog in the first place.

I guess this is one way to start off blogging in 2009 with a bang, huh?

Tags: meta, blogging, subscribers, fail

Let Regina show you the gems of Wikipedia

Dossy Shiobara — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 12:58:14 +0000

My friend Regina has started a new project, Things I’ve Learned from Wikipedia. She’s only just started, but she’s already uncovered some real gems.

If you’re interested in learning more useless trivia and obscure facts but don’t have the time to surf around yourself, go and read her blog. As she says herself, “One day you’ll be on Jeopardy and remember something you read on this blog. And then you’ll thank me.”

Thanks for all the comments!

Dossy Shiobara — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 01:18:24 +0000

Last week, I upgraded from Movable Type to WordPress. Since then, I’ve received a bunch of comments on various entries, some old, some new. What’s surprising is the fact that in a week I probably received more comments (not even counting the spammy ones) than I have in the past three months! Wow!

I don’t get why, though. I did clean up the design a bit, but it’s fundamentally the same. I replaced my home-grown CAPTCHA implementation with reCAPTCHA. The comment form is pretty much the same. I can’t think of anything that I would attribute to this increase in activity.

Regardless of why, I’m thrilled that more folks are sharing their feedback with me. It’s one of the reasons I love blogging: being able to interact with people. Thanks, everyone.

Tags: blogging

Goodbye, Movable Type. Hello, WordPress!

Dossy Shiobara — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:34:26 +0000

So, after years of hacking custom changes into Movable Type 2.6, I’ve finally had enough. I’ve switched to WordPress 2.6.

Part of the move included exporting my old posts and comments from MT and importing them into WP. For that, I wrote a small Tcl script that reads the MT database and writes it out in WXR format. I stored my MT data in a SQLite database, so the script expects its input from a SQLite DB–it would be a bit more work to read the data from a MySQL DB, but it’s definitely possible.

I’ve kept the essence of the previous blog design in my WP theme, but it’s cleaner markup and CSS and I’ve tried to make the ads less intrusive.

“Monsters are real. But the real ones are not bulletproof.”

Dossy Shiobara — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:18:27 +0000

I haven’t been actively reading my feeds, so when I fired up the reader today, I saw Bill Kocik’s pro-gun essay in his blog.

Personally, I:

Do not own my own firearm.
Do not like the idea of anyone using firearms.
Recognize that firearms exist and will never go away.
Believe that someone is less likely to perpetuate a violent crime if the odds that they will get shot in retaliation increases.
Believe that in a world where guns are readily available, a steady equilibrium of safety will eventually be reached–perhaps, unfortunately, after much death by guns. Those left remaining and still alive will learn to co-exist safely together.
Do not believe that fewer guns is the answer. As long as the balance of power leans in favor of criminals, no one can be safe.
Am thankful that there are people who responsibly own and carry firearms, so that I don’t have to.

Wishing that we could live in a world without firearms is just that: wishful thinking. The reality is that guns have been invented and that can never be undone. The only rational path to safety is reaching the point where enough people are carrying firearms so that using one inappropriately will be dealt with swiftly and abruptly: with deadly force.

Tags: liberty, safety, firearms, guns, violence, crime

Why do you read this blog?

Dossy Shiobara — Tue, 20 May 2008 18:32:26 +0000

I’ve always wanted to blog about more personal things but always wondered who would bother to read it or even care. I’ve tried to stick to more technical subjects that might be useful and looking at my web traffic, this has definitely worked out. But, looking at the 160-odd subscribers to my blog makes it clear that there aren’t many people who care to read it regularly enough to subscribe to it.

But, there still are 160 or so out there, who have subscribed. I’d like to ask you: why? Do we know each other? Are you generally curious about me? Are you hoping I’ll post something useful for you and you don’t want to miss it?

I really want to know. Either leave a comment on this entry, or email me or catch me on IM and lets talk.