Rebirth

So I took a few weeks off. I'd managed not to keep up with my one-post-a-day promise, and found that I had nothing to say anyway. So it was a nice break to recharge my batteries.

But hey! I've got a new computer now, and I want to play. It's a netbook, and I'm thinking I'll, like, use it on the subway and stuff - giving me more 'downtime' to fill by blogging. That's the theory, anyway.

And yet... what lessons have we learnt from our time away? Well, here's the thing - I went into blogging with this idea that I'd do this big series of one-note blogs that had weekly entries. I had this idea - which is probably more or less right - that they'd perform better (monetarily) if they were more or less consistent in their topics. But I'm not sure I chose them right, started several on whims, and got completely swamped by them. Even doing only one entry a week (which allows you to run a backlog if you have a burst of inspiration) gets to be too much if you have, like, fifteen of these blogs.

Now, this particular blog was also a whim. Its name is perfectly literal - amongst all of my abuses of Blogspot's MO, I'd have a blog that was not updated consistently, and spoke about topics both more random and more personal. Unlike the others, it'd be a real blog.

But then it turned into a kind of catch-all, encompassing stuff that I felt like doing that didn't fit into the very tight constraints of my other active blogs. So I'd put together stuff like lists of my favourite flags or lists of album covers that featured nudity (with time, I'd start another blog for that particular purpose, largely in fact because lists seemed to be taking over this particular blog).

Some of those became relatively successful, to the point that A Proper Blog would consistently, every day, get more pageviews than any of my other blogs. This was funny in that those other blogs were designed to be optimised for maximum pageviews, and this one was designed to be a silly afterthought. But it certainly encouraged me to give this particular blog more attention.

Then, on the 31st of December, 2010, on a sudden whim, I announced that I'd be updating this blog every day.

And for months and months, I followed that, forcing myself into new directions for creativity - which for me also includes 'creative ways to knock off entries that are obviously filler when the need arises'. It was enjoyable, if hard work. But there were two downsides. First, I had to ignore every other blog, leaving them either entirely or mostly stagnant. And as it became obvious that Album Cover Gallery would overtake this blog for daily pageviews (a situation that remains true to this day), I probably should have worked on developing it instead. But I just didn't have the time... and I'd made myself a promise regarding this blog, not that one. The other downside is that this current blog veers so wildly in different directions that Google's algorithms probably just give up trying to make heads or tails out of it. I've subverted my entire 'game plan' regarding Blogspot.

So I'm back working on this blog. But it's still conceptually a work in progress. I know I want to devote more time to other blogs, and that will come at the expense of this blog. So while I like the idea of getting back to daily updates, I'm not making a guarantee. And I think I want to have a good sit-down about this blog and what it ought to be. I kind of think I'd like to use it to focus mostly on politics and on music. Google can deal with two main themes. I'd like it to be mostly rant-style exposition, with less randomness and less 'variety' stuff. But I doenjoy doing the 'variety' stuff - should I be shunting that elsewhere, on yet another Blogspot blog, or five?

I don't know... but I'm back. And determined to figure it out.

And Now... the End is Near...

It's half a year now I've been able to keep up my crazy pledge to update this blog once a day. But while I'm proud of myself for carrying it on this long, I've run out of steam. I have lots of half-written things and ideas and stuff I'd like to add... but among other things it's just too darn hot. So I think this is probably the end of the road. I'd like to maintain the entry-a-day, but how?

My Three Twitter Crown Jewels

I have a Twitter account. I don't use it very much - I can't say I really 'get' Twitter. But I keep it mostly because it seems like one ought to have a Twitter account. You know, as a social duty I guess.

So anyway, I have three crowning moments as a Twitter user. Or actually they really have nothing to do with my being a Twitter user so much as other people.

One is 'Sleeveface guy'. He's someone who has carved out a particular space for himself in the world by photographing himself or other people, and collecting photographs by others, in which the subject obscures his face with an album cover also featuring a face - the point being that it makes the person look as if he is the famous person on the cover. A Toronto radio station recently brazenly ripped him off in a media ad campaign.

Now 'Sleeveface guy' is no celebrity. But he does have a published book, one I'd flipped through in an Indigo. He was someone I could say I'd 'heard of', and it was quite early in my online adventures that he tweeted about my 'Better as a Single' blog. Seeing someone I'd 'heard of' tweeting about me was a serious trip, even if it's pretty small potatoes as things go.

The second jewel in my crown was much more recent. I'm a bit of a geek for election stats and polling info, to the point that I have a blog called 'Poll Vaulting' dedicated to it and also include a lot of polling references on this blog, 'A Proper Blog', when I fear my own political convictions will make whatever I'm writing a bit less than objective. Canada has only a few big-name pollsters, and you get to know all of them by name if you follow the business.

A particular favourite of mine is Frank Graves, CEO of EKOS Polling. EKOS is often accused of having an anti-Conservative bias, which I admit might be why I like him - it might be true that we're attracted to data that tells us what we want to hear. Anyway I additionally like his commentary, which I tend to find very intellingent and informative. Just a week or two ago I wrote a blog based on his own crow-eating post-mortem on his election results, and was honoured to find Graves himself tweeting my blog entry.

The third is probably the most awesome, though I'll never know how 'real' it is. Yoko Ono had tweeted that you could ask her questions by tweeting them to her and she'd answer some of them. So I did, asking her a question about Joe Jones, whom she'd performed with on the 'Fly' album.

Now I genuinely like Yoko Ono as a performer and a musician, and it might well be that not many people tweeted musicianly questions to her. As it was, i kind of imagine that a media consultant of one kind or another working with Ono would find her, in person or over a phone, and ask her preselected questions, which Ono would answer verbally. Someone would transcribe them, and voilà! Q&A interactivity. Still, I do imagine the actual words were Yoko's, so having Yoko Ono answer a question I'd asked was a rare fanboy honour that had me giddy in a way no man in his mid-thirties has a right to be.

The answer was posted on her website, not on Twitter. But it still counts, because it came from Twitter.

I bet I could stalk celebrities on Twitter and amass a portfolio of celebrity answers to my questions or celebrity references to me. But meh. Why bother?

Note: I've spent ages trawling through the archives at imaginepeace.com, looking for Yoko's answer to my question, and I can't find it. It might be there, but I'm bored of looking. Sorry...

Giving Up?

I might give up on my one-entry-a-day routine for A Proper Blog. It just takes more effort than I can afford. A result of it is that I've not been able to update any of my other blogs. Or, you know, have a life or anything. Okay, it's nmot that big of a burden. But it's still a bigger burden than I think I can bear. In particular since in the past few weeks I've taken a huge hit in number of hits. For whatever reason, Google isn't sending me traffic like thye used to. Not to say that this is a great blog worthy of too much traffic - it's not. But the huge cut has made me start questioning rather it's worthwhile. I'll try to keep the daily-thing going for a bit, but if I happen to crap out and miss a day or two... well, it won't be the end of the world, will it?

I mean, who's even out there reading this?

Googling Me

What do you get if you Google "a-proper-blog.blogspot.com"? Not much, really, in 12,600 results: mostly vsrious entries in this blog itself, or weird trawling sites. A few odd places my url shows up:

• On lookfordiagnosis.com, some page advertising "Images: sexual infantilism".
• A virus-filled site called br@kencontrollers.com (url altered to prevent accidental clicking) seems to have a few of my entries copied in 'forums' that nobody ever looks at, with a claim that a certain 'download' link will somehow 'download' my blog entry - instead, it downloads a virus.
• 'Boys Butt - find to shar boys but free image download', which is awesome. I get the odd person coming to my site looking for 'boys butt' - all because I quoted Shakespeare!. How awesome is that.
• kgbpeople.com claims that 'personal information' about early Smiths producer Troy Tate can be found on my site - which is certainly can't.
• A forum devoted to the band Ween mentioned me in a page about 'albums with female nipples on the cover'. I got a lot of hits from there at one point.
• A link that rather excitingly claims to be about 'Kung Fu Fighting and Other Love Songs', but when I click on it find no such thing. Pity.
• A shoutout on the nicely frequented ginandtacos.com, talking about horrid flags. Someone in the comments links to my entry on same.
• Something in... er, Malay perhaps, called thinkwithnonie.blogspot.com copies a random image that I copied from some random place on the internet, but it much more generous than me, linking to the source. I just grabbed it and ran.
• 'Readers pick best webcomic Frogger joystiq' and 'Endless funeral a second beginning', which sound intriguing but are both hosted at a .cc domain that I fear to click.
• And my Alexa page! Which tells me that this is, amazingly, the 16,719,533rd most viewed site on the internet (woohoo!) and apparently (though I've never noticed this myself) 'death by captcha' is my highest-impact search query, responsible for over 10% of search queries. I doubt that somehow. Overall, according to alexa.com, these are my highest-impact queries:
• death by captcha
• death by
• don't touch my junk
• long distance calling
• flags of the world
• street view
• greatest hits album
• party names
• with animals
• my junk
• in the world
• long distance
• political party
• red stripe
• album cover
• the world
• dolphins
• streetview
• usenet
• the borgias
• movies
• google street view
• gilmore
• control
• political blogs
• google maps
• adsense
• adam sandlers
• of the world
• jailbait

Yay!

Woe is Me

I'm kind of drying up at the moment with the blogs. It's not that I have nothing to say - it's just that for some reason I only have things to say when I'm not in front of a computer. When I actually get a chance to sit down in front of a computer and get some work done... my mind wanders. I hate it, but there's not much I can do about it. I'm still going to try to maintain my one-post-per-day pledge, but I think I need to look into ways to get that done with, well, with minimal effort. For the time being. Disapponting to me, but that's the reality. Haikus?

What am I Doing?

I'm a bit unsure of myself at this point. In January, I made a snap decision to push forward full-steam-ahead with this particular blog here, committing myself to an entry a day. I'm enjoying doing it, but seeing as how I'm pressured for time anyway and would always like to doing more than I'm currently able to, it has had a negative effect, in that I've had pretty much to stop all of my other blogs, which I enjoyed doing as well.

Google seems to appreciate the high levels of activity this blog gets: certain items get way more hits from Google users than I suspect they would have if I'd put them on other blogs. But this blog is a rather purposeless mishmash of ideas from all over the place - and while that's not a bad thing, it makes me wonder why anyone would want to follow this blog regularly.

The hundred blogs I've started up over the past few years were all meant to be 'idea specific' blogs that would focus on one theme or one idea, thus ideally letting Google know what they focused on (bringing more hits and targeted ad revenue) and also ideally developing a core of followers. Neither of those seem to have happened, though it might be the low frequency with which I update them. As there's only 24 hours in a day and I have to devote about 23 of those to 'other things', there just doesn't remain enough time to really keep those other blogs 'active' enough for Google to take notice of them.

So what do I do?

Some Highlights

Here are a few things I've written here and there that I thought deserved note:

• A really detailed look at the Beatles' White Album.
• An overly fearful look at what 'vote splitting' could mean, looking at the 2008 numbers.
• Something about how every album Elvis Presley released in the 1970s had the very same cover.
• A quiz I really enjoyed doing featuring morphed faces.
• An introduction to a large-scale look at the Wailers' recorded legacy; this is a w-i-p.
• Songs where the singer's accent spoils the rhyme scheme.
• One of my most popular posts: a list of the best flags in the world.
• A poem, God forbid, about drugs.
• The first of a three-part look at the cover-art legacy of Hipgnosis.
• A list of ten evil, evil clowns.

This Space Intentionally Left Blank

So this is the 'big day', a day suddenly so much bigger and so much more meaningful than we figured it would be when the writs were dropped.

There's a lot I'd like to say, but I'd like to respect the tradition of keeping mum while polls are open. And then once the polls have closed I'm certainly not going to be blogging. I'll be stuck to the news.

So no political talk today, and neither did I want to stick something random and apolitical here either. We'll be back to business as usual, or so I suspect (to be honest I don't have much of a backlog at the moment and I've always relied on a backlog while doing this blog). For people not interested in politics, I apologise for the past five weeks. Back to complete randomness, I promise. And to some of the recurring-themes that I've more or less put on hold these past few weeks.

And as for today, no political talk. But if you are Canadian, and if you haven't already... go and vote. Who you vote for is less important than that you vote.

Flag Counter: North America

Flag Counter tells me where in the world visitors to my blogs have come from. As ought to be no surprise, the USA and Canada rank numbers one and two for visitors.

No surprise because the USA is the largest English-language internet-using country, and Canada is my country. A decent percentage of visitors from Canada are probably me, myself. In fact, my province, Ontario, is home to over half of all the Canadian hits I've recieved, and there have been more hits from Ontario than from the whole of the UK - which is my third-ranked country. How sad...

I know that because for Canada and the USA, it'll subdivide the hits by province or state. So I can confidently tell you that I've gotten hits from all 50 American states, all 10 Canadian provinces and all 3 Canadian territories. In nowhere near equal numbers, but there you go.

The American state with the most hits is California - no surprise both because it's the largest state by population and because it's home to Silicon Valley. Mountain View, CA, a community that Wikipedia tells me has a population of 74,066, is where probably more than half of my California hits come from - I know that not from Flag Counter but from Sitemeter, which will show communities. By now, whenever I see 'Mountain View', I just think, 'Ah, Google has crawled my site again'. Good news, but not really hits. Not humans, anyway.

The four American states where the smallest number of my hits have come from are South Dakota, Wyoming, North Dakota and Alaska - no surprise, I'm sure, since they have small populations. I have mentioned Alaska, however (I doubt I've mentioned Wyoming before today) - but my blogs are probably banned in Alaska because of excessive Palin-hatin'.

In Canada, quite obviously bottom of the list would be the three territories - I've only had three from Nunavut, and those took me ages to get. I actually only have a slightly larger number of hits from PEI than from the Yukon, but I've posted about the Yukon and the Northwest Territories on a few occassions, in fact. The provinces and territories roughly line up according to population, actually, with the exception of Québec being third below BC instead of second, but that makes sense, I guess, since y'know... language and all.

Changing of the Guard

For the past ten months or so (I can calculated it, and I will, but I can't be bothered at the moment), the title of 'most viewed of my blogs' has been the same: this one, A Proper Blog. And with my 2011 commitment to posting at least one entry a day on this blog (obviously as a result meaning less frequent posts on other blogs, the majority of which I'm now let fall entirely dormant), I certainly expected that to continue. I had a theory that a much more frequent updating schedule would endear this particular blog to the Google Gods.

To an extent, it has (I think). But against all expectations, in the month of February, it lost the title of 'Most Popular Bungle Jerry Blog'. One other blog of mine has whooshed ahead of it, with a 500% increase in views in February over January. And it hasn't gone viral: that's all organic Google searching. Someone up there in Mountain View must love me.

Or must love 'Album Cover Gallery', anyway, for it's the blog that's broken ahead, gone off-and-running and left this here blog in the dust. It was my Hipgnosis special, where I exhibited 75 covers designed by Hipgnosis. That went over well, and clearly I need to really concentrate on that blog in March, in a 'strike-while-the-iron-is-hot' kind of way. It's not my favourite blog to do, but I launched it on a hunch that Google would like it. And Google does seem to, even if it only has a dozen or so entries.

Who'd have thought it?

Anyway, hats off to the new king. From the new #2.

My Greatest Hits

As of yesterday, here are my 'greatest hits' in all of my blogs: the blog entries that have had more than 500 page views. Yay. It looks like overall I should just give up trying to say anything and just go into porn. Porn and album covers.

1. Album Covers with Naked Boobies, 6,815 views.
2. The 15 Worst Flags of the World, 1,718 views.
3. Weezer Cover Gallery, 1,185 views.
4. A Compendium of Rather Rude Place Names, 1,118 views.
5. More Album Covers with Naked Boobies, 1,057 views.
6. Depeche Mode Single Cover Gallery, Part One, 973 views.
7. The 15 Best Flags of the World, 938 views.
8. Hipgnosis Selected Album Covers Part 1: 1968-1973, 916 views.
9. Parliament / Funkadelic Cover Gallery, 782 views.
10. Jailbait, 613 views.
11. Montréal's Best Public Schools, 558 views.
12. Montréal's Best Private High Schools, 541 views
13. Canadian Political Party Logos: the Superhuge Version, 525 views.

Yay. I keep like 100 blogs and it turns out only four have any entries that have surpassed the 500 mark.

Flag Counter

So I have one. A Flag Counter, that is. You might notice. It lies, actually: it shows combined totals for all of my blogs (well, most of them: some blogs I've never gotten around to adding this to) and only for the past twelve months or so.

Pointless numbers, really. The USA leads, more than twice as many hits as number two, which is Canada (not surprising since I talk about Canadian stuff a fair bit). The UK and Australia are also in the top five, so language is clearly an issue - outside of the 'anglosphere', it's the Germans most willing to struggle to understand what I write.

What I like, though, is how it keeps track of each individual country that has accessed your page. Okay, so plenty of American have seen this blog. Fine. But it's the nooks and crannies, the tinier or more off-the-beaten-path countries that intrigue.

For instance: obviously people have come from the UK and from Ireland. But the flag-enhanced map of the world on Flag Counter shows, around those two, that I've had one visiter each from the Faroe Islands and from the Isle of Man, and two each from Jersey and Guernsey. In the Pacific, I've had one person from French Polynesia, four from Papua New Guinea and five from Guam. While it shows, intriguingly, not a single visitor from the People's Republic of China (which bans Blogspot, though Blogspot's own stats show Chinese visitors), I've had 63 from Taiwan, 43 from Hong Kong and one only from Macau. There are 18 African flags on my map, including Djibouti and Mauritius. I've had visitors from every South American country except Guyana and French Guiana, every Central American country, and buttoads of Caribbean countries, including Anguilla and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Flag Counter says it's a total of 146 countries, and quite surprisingly 117 of those have had more than one visitor. It's a pity that it only gives simple numbers: I don't know what on my sites was intriguing to that one person from Liechtenstein or that one from Tajikistan, those two from Rwanda, those four from Palestine, six people from Brunei and nine from Nepal. I do wonder, though.

My Resolution, One Month In

Image by tallys14 via FlickrSo I decided that in 2011 I would update this particular blog every single day, as opposed to about two or three times a week, as I had been doing. I'm one month in, and while I've pulled it off so far, it hasn't been all that easy. It's taken a good deal of effort, even though some of what I've posted has been knocked-off rubbish. The effort has meant, of necessity, that some other blogs I keep have fallen by the wayside. By now probably 70% of the 'blog work' I do is for this blog and this one alone.

But it's been worth it. I've enjoyed pushing myself, and at least some of what I've done has been worth the effort. I'm seeing an increase in visitors to the blog, but what is intriguing is that the hits are all over the place. Where before the vast majority of traffic to my blog came to see only about five different entries or so, now they're coming in all over the place. Perhaps Google is rewarding me for having a decently active blog. I'm not getting huge numbers so far, but let's see - maybe they're forthcoming. And if they are, what I might do is slowly republish old moribund blogs here - do what maybe I whould have done in the first place, just kept all of my blog-babblings in one place. I've decided to do that with one particular relic-blog, called 'Makes No Sense at All', and maybe I'll do that for others too.

But I think I'll carry on with the entry-a-day thing (in fact, I've averaged slightly more than one a day). Maybe some time before 2012 I'll actually have regular readers (God forbid), but if I don't, well, at least I'll have enjoyed what I'm doing.

New Year's Resolution

I've decided that my New Year's Resolution for this year, 2011 (for those in America or in the Iraq who don't have calendars), is to have at least one entry on this blog every day. Not just 'an average of one a day' either but actually one per day - or, well, one per weekday and maybe some on weekends too. It'll be tough as hell, and I don't give myself more than a five percent chance of actually making it, but there you have it. My million other blogs too, I'll carry on with. Somehow. I think a good amount of the entries here will be cheap'n'cheesy, and possibly be ads for other blogs too. But oh well. Here goes...

Related articles

• Doomed New Years Resolutions (socyberty.com)

Alpha Inventions and Adsense

So I've been using Alpha Inventions and Blogsurfer. Not even sure why, really... I guess I thought it would be a worthwhile way to get my blogs 'out there' in the wider world somehow. I was using them a lot back in December, January, etc. and have more or less gotten bored of them. But I think I realised something: I had a blog, Montréal Through Google Maps Street View, that seemed to be doing well on Adsense. Well, by 'well', I mean it had a good per-view value. Higher than other blogs, anyway. Now, the per-view rates (per-thousand, actually) on Adsense are more than a bit of a mystery to me. So I was curious why this one blog was doing well. I decided to put it on Alpha Inventions, which is only good for about 40 hits or so, to test a thing or two. I wasn't surprised that hits from Alpha Inventions got a lower value than usual - makes sense, really, seeing as people don't actually watch Alpha Inventions - they just have it running in the background. But I was horrified to discover that after using it once on that blog it seemed as if all subsequent hits were devalued too. Alpha Inventions appears to give a permanently lowered value to your websites. Which sucks.

So I guess it's better not to ever use blog surfing sites if you use Adsense. Wish I'd known that before...