From today's post in NewsLink Briefs (my new blog) comments are always welcome.

Eliot Spitzer Tries To Join Clinton Administration / Justin Timberlake Kisses Madonna’s Butt

Eliot Spitzer today went a long way towards improving his image and possibly getting himself chosen as Hillary Clinton’s running mate. “I used to be the guy everybody hated”. He said. “I was after everybody. If you had dirt under one fingernail I could find it.” Bill Clinton wouldn’t answer my phone calls. Now he wants to have me to dinner”.

All of this after the NY Governor was busted for sending thousands of dollars to a high class group of prostitutes. Were these donations to a charitable trust? I don’t think so.

“I had reached the top of the ladder and now I’m on a new ladder. Hillary hates my guts but Bill understands. A lot of guys understand. I was desperate. Everybody hated me. It’s tough being the governor of a big state and not being able to have sex with a beautiful woman.”

“But now I’m in the national spotlight AND I may be available for a new job in a couple of days. I can get dates again. Nobody is afraid of me any more. They all know the days of hard hitting investigations are over. I’m a loser just like some of them. They understand me and I’m probably going to be single in a short time too.”

“I’m pretty excited.”

You go Eliot! Just try to stay out of jail. Don’t stonewall like your new best friend. Come clean and this time next year you could be smelling the rose garden again.

Meanwhile closer to the ground Justin Timberlake was doing his impression of Dane Cook kissing Charlize Theron on the butt.

“Nobody has gotten into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame looking this damn fine”. Is Keith Richards in their already? That’s who Justin must have been thinking about and I can appreciate his attempt to make another human being feel good on her special day.

Justin. Deborah Harry is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Congratulations to Madonna on her induction. I remember all those years you spent teaching young girls about the wonders of the material life and other good stuff. Until one day you finally grew up and changed A LOT. What advice to you have for all those girls who listened to you back then now Material Girl?

Sorry. Hope you didn’t end up in jail or lose your soul?

I started a new blog. It is called NewsLink Briefs. The name came about because I was looking at the newspaper and trying to figure out how I could use it to jump start my brain. There is a lot of information in a newspaper. Some of us kind of look down on them these days. We see it in its yellow bag at the end of the driveway and hope it will go away. It has lost its power over us. But it's not dead. My wife likes it because it has all those cartoons. Maybe cartoons will save newspapers in the end. Just as my poems will save my old blog Virginia Breeze. I have one poem about sending the boss off to an island where he is the main course in the evening meal for a bunch of cannibals. And people seem to love it. It is probably being recited at retirement parties all over the country. And hopefully a few bosses have gone home and cried after hearing it. Because they deserved it.

In any case I started a new blog and tried to incorporate everything I have learned in the last eight months of my blogging internship in it. I purchased a premium theme from Mr. Adii. Or maybe Adii is his first name. I don't know but it is appropriate that I do not know. Because there are things about his theme that are a mystery also. All of you fine young men who went to school and learned about computer languages and code think you are pretty smart. And maybe you are smart. But you are not really smart until you have learned to be polite and answer stupid questions as if it was God who was asking them.

Like Mr. Adii. So after awhile I left him alone and asked a friend to explore this new theme and hook some things up. So the blog is now looking pretty good. And it is much more focused than Virginia Breeze. It is focused like a fugging laser beam on the News Briefs that come out regularly in the newspaper. In this case the Richmond Times Dispatch. But that is not enough. Oh no.

Eight months of blogging has demonstrated to my chemically saturated brain that words are definitely not enough. You need pictures. And preferably pictures of something interesting. So I have added photos of beautiful women. But not from a sexual standpoint. There is enough of that everywhere on the web. It has practically gotten to the point where it is boring. At least for a 58 year old guy it is boring.

What interests many of us is Beauty. In whatever form and in whatever way we can get it. Beauty turns us on. So I am collecting photos of beautiful faces because women have beautiful eyes and lips. They have beautiful hair. And they have shades of red in their cheeks and neck that are fascinating.

So I started this blog and am attempting to write satirical or at least humorous posts about news and politics. It's all about creative content right? And then enjoy also beauty in its many forms. I am not sure whether I want to add photos of beautiful scenes to the photos of beautiful women. This is a process and we haven't reached that point yet.

But it's clear that the beautiful women tend to bring in the readers. Maybe they work better than StumbleUpon in that regard. And I am sure they are beautiful all over as some photographers on the web are willing to show us. But I am not going down that road because my wife, her father and the children read my blog.

And I don't really care about it anyway. Hopefully there are readers who feel the same way and will enjoy this particular combination of content.

We will see.

I started Virginia Breeze about six months ago. Its a WP.org blog and it has been growing slowly. It's a personal blog with photos and writing. Ninety-eight percent of it is original content. After about three months it was given a PR of 3.

At the same time I started VB I started a WP.com blog and pretty much transferred its content to VB. I wasn't sure I could manage a WP.org blog without totally screwing it up and sending it to the bottom of the ocean. I couldn't load a picture in a blog eight months ago.

Google gave that blog a PR of 5 after three months.

So things went along like that and I almost killed my blog. I was very grateful to have the WP.com clone and worked on it for a couple of weeks when VB mysteriously came back from the dead. And I have been working on it ever since with a lot more caution and care. I very gently upload plugins and disengage them if my blog even "coughs".

But I have given up my security blanket and have put hardly any content in it for the past three months. Google responded by taking away the PR of 5 and giving it a 4.

I also have a "Public Diary" that I started when my VB blog went into a coma. It's a WP.com blog and it has about ten or twenty posts in it. Total. Most of them are about what a fugging waste of time blogging can be. I complain about a cold I couldn't shake and basically fume for awhile.

Google gave it a PR of 4 too.

So now I have three blogs and they all have a PR of 4. I don't see that they have anything in common. PR is just a guess on someone's part. If it is a computer that makes these decisions then it needs a new software program. If it's young people who are mad at the world and have entry level jobs with Google.

Well, in that case, I understand perfectly.

I recently upgraded one of my computers to Vista. I didn’t start out planning to do it. But somewhere in the process of reformatting my computer it seemed like a good idea. I think it was probably about the time that I realized I didn’t have the series of numbers and letters necessary to complete the reformatting process. Somehow they had skipped town and there was nothing printed on the computer case either.

So I was stuck without an operating system for awhile there. And then I decided to make lemonade out of lemons and bought the two hundred dollar Vista OS. And installed it.

And everything was fine until I read where Microsoft would upgrade my Vista from 32 bit to 64 bit if I sent them ten more clam shells.

Well that sounded like a pretty good deal so I did that and (wonders never cease) along in the mail awhile later came a slim cardboard container and my upgrade. And I installed it.

And everything was fine until I tried to run my printer and/or my Linksys wireless network. And neither of them worked! I had no internet in my inner sanctum. And that was a problem.

So I went to Best Buy and asked one of the Geek Squad about it and this is what he told me.

Nothing works with Vista 64-Bit OS. Every computer they have sold with it has been returned. There are no drivers that coordinate all the things you normally hook up with your computer.

Now you would have thought that maybe that bit of information would be out here somewhere so that we would all know about it and be able to make informed decisions.

Hey Microsoft! It’s the information age! How about sharing some of it with all of us.

And if anyone has found drivers that will help please let me know. This wasn't a science project and my data may not be accurate. So feed me as they say in Little Shop of Horrors. I still have trouble believing they could have done this.

I recently started using statistics in an attempt to find out how many actual regular readers I have. I have a few courageous regular readers who actually comment here. So I am not talking about them. I am talking about the hypothetical regular readers who are here for the duration but can think of nothing to say.

And I can understand that. I go places and read too. I would like to comment but my mind is not up to it. It’s in surfing mode and you don’t use your rational mind when you surf. You use your relaxed mind. Your bag of tricks is up there and he’s awake. But he’s not working. He’s sitting in one of those chairs you can find at The Sharper Image store. It has ten different vibrators in it plus stereo speakers on each side.

So how does the young blogger who may be 94 years old but has only been blogging for six months deal with this situation without becoming discouraged? Well he or she could hire readers. I do that and presently I am worried because they want to form a union. Clearly they need to use their relaxed minds more and stay away from their rational minds. Or my blogging sisters and brothers could go to Google Analytics and start tracking their visitors and their longterm intentions. In a statistical example from my photoblog PhotoLinkLove.com we will see shortly how this may be working.

I spend very little time on this blog and mainly just post a few of my best photos here every day. And in response maybe ten or fifteen readers come by to look at them. At least that is what I thought was happening. But Google presents a slightly different picture.

And I am not disturbed by this situation or the apparent lack of growth. I don’t have much invested here and am just happy that a few folks are enjoying these photos.

But I am a curious person and so would like to know what is happening here. Is any growth happening? It has only been around for about ten weeks. Can Google tell me something about it? I had a garden as a young boy and would come out every day to see if something had happened. It was like watching grass grow only a little more interesting.

And that is what we will discuss next time since we are just about out of time boys and girls. Didn’t you used to hate it when the guy or girl on the tube used to say that! Captain Kangaroo used to say that and look what happened to him!

Until next time Buckaroos!

And blogging is a long distance race isn’t it? Just about every day for months or years you are going to get up and go to the keyboard. Look at your stuff. Be happy. Be sad. Be indifferent. So many emotions come into play when the blog runner puts on his or her shoes and hits this pixel packed purgatory in full stride. But the WWW will never become the PPP! Believe me I tried it yesterday and all I got was a blog dedicated to a polar bear in a snowstorm.

But that’s not what we want to discuss today. Here are the charts that will help us (I hope) discover how many folks are with us for the long haul. And is their number growing?

Do you like the graduated tint? I have been playing with Google’s photo editor for so long I can’t stop. Be happy there are not little snowmen sliding down the graph on their sleds.

The first graph gives you a summary of what happened in the month of December. And it shows a constant flow of about fifteen visitors except on the day when it wasn’t working. That would have been the day I added a premium template and forgot to do some other things.

I used to assume that these visitors represented maybe 3 or so regulars and 7 or so one time visitors. Notice that the unique visitor count is about two thirds the number of visits. Whenever I look at visits I calculate a number that is one third less in order to try and calculate the actual number of readers. Did anyone say this is an exact science? And here is the second graph.

Here we see how things may really be happening. During this month we see some of these readers moving down the path to become longterm readers. How many? Well there were about 125 visits so I calculate one third less or about 82 actual people came back ten times or more during December. Does that make sense?

I had been assuming that the 3 regulars every day were the same regulars. But what if some of the regular readers were only coming by once or twice per week? Then there would be more of them in total.

That’s a lot different than 3 regular readers and 7 one time visitors. And the graph indicates that a few more are migrating down this pathway all the time. Does that mean that every 10 weeks there will be 85 more longterm readers? In 10 weeks I have not gathered enough statistics to tell but we can revisit this situation in another month. Grab a RSS handle and find out!

In a year could there be 85 times 5 (52 weeks divided by 10 weeks equals approx. 5) readers? Maybe not. Some will fade away. But I spend ten minutes per day on this blog and the idea that it may attract even one hundred regular visitors is surprising. The idea that it could have a thousand regular readers in just two years is simply astounding!

So young blogging grasshopper remember to look deeper into your statistics and see what may be happening there. Someone once said it takes a year or two to build a productive blog. It is clear from this example that it may be so. And imagine what could happen if you spend more than ten minutes per day on your blog! Isn’t that exciting!

Five months ago I started blogging at Wordpress.com. Everything about it was new to me and even posting photos was a challenge. It took awhile for me to realize that they would sometimes disappear in my blog because I was rearranging them in Photobucket. But that was just one of many mysteries that challenged my outlook then and now.

As I begin the new year I need to decide what to do with this WP.com blog. It has a PR of 5 and sits idle most of the time because for the past four months I have been working on its brother a WP.org blog which now has a PR of 3 and many more keywords and readers. It has a Technorati Authority of 79 while little brother stays around 20.

All of this would be fine except that I have read that Google may be penalizing my WP.org blog Virginia Breeze because of the existence of the other blog called Shoot The Virginia Breeze. (Perhaps when I named it long ago I was already aware that it would not be around too long)

It is tempting to just delete little brother. But it is a difficult decision to make.

I have a diary blog that is just a little "hole in the wall" Wordpress.com blog. It's called My Public Diary and is located at www.davidsaidit.wordpress.com. I'm putting this down here so I don't get reamed out again by a total stranger who decides that all of his life's many frustrations have just found a nice home.

You wanna go there! There it is and don't accuse me of promoting my own blog or I will lose it right here at Christmas! Smile.

This little blog-et surprised me by actually starting to serve some useful purposes.

I have these strong urges about once a week to find a new template and try it out. That would not be good to do with Virginia Breeze. Especially now that it sports a premium template and is looking better than ever before. So I go to the diary and in about five seconds find a new one. File under the simple pleasures of blogging.

Exploring Google Analytics the other day lead to the surprising discovery that My Diary is number four in traffic sources for my main enterprise, Virginia Breeze. And the average length of visit is 13 minutes! That compares with 1.1 minutes for StumbleUpon which is the number one source of traffic and 4 minutes for Google which is the number two source of traffic. Direct traffic comes in at number three and is only slightly about SU in terms of length of visit.

Why is this? I'm not sure. Maybe readers of the Diary develop a connection with me that motivates them to stay longer when they go to VB. Maybe there is something going on here that I need to ponder at greater length.

Ryan says, " .... First, discover what people want, respond to, and get excited by and then give it to them.

Don’t fall for the illusion of self-projection. Most of the world is dumber than you, and most of the world has different tastes. Give them what they want, not what you want. Then, as they say, you’re golden."

The entire article is posted at MY Public Diary and I read it once in awhile because this is a difficult challenge for me. I want to write about things that give me pleasure. And the same goes for taking photos.

I wonder how readers feel when they read this? It's not exactly flattering? Am I giving them too much credit when I create something and post it at Virginia Breeze?

Do they really prefer My Public Diary and unflattering remarks, templates that change weekly and boring personal posts about a cough that won't go away or my sudden desire to give up blogging? There are not a lot of visitors there but the ones who show up certainly seem to enjoy themselves and become great readers.

What do readers want? I'm not sure that I want to know the answer to that question.

Last night we gathered on a ship

Our tribe and all our friends,

And sailed for distant galaxies

To find a peaceful land.

The stars received us as we went

Our lives passed through their gaze

We sailed between bright fire and light

Our eyes were all ablaze.

Until we reached a port of sorts

With meadows near a sun

And joyous children running round

Who welcomed us at once.

They ruled this planet with a light

That shone from their deep eyes.

And no one wanted anything

Nor did they fear to die.

For there upon a mountain top

Far as the eye could see

There was one child who filled the world

With food and mysteries.

And when the children grew too tall

No longer children were

They climbed the mountain to the boy

And left through heaven’s door.

We were entranced and climbed so high

To see his glowing face.

He smiled our way

The mountain sang.

We died in his embrace.

And then I woke amid the sails

That guide my ship at night

And prayed that I would someday see

This boy who was the light.

******************************************

For me blogging is all about trying to create something that has intrinsic value. It's about uplifting the spirit in some way. Humor and beauty can do the same thing in this regard. A humorous passage or a beautiful photo can help us get through the day. And a poem can also be uplifting. I don't claim to be a poet. And I am aggravated by poems that I do not understand in the first few minutes. If a poem is like a crossword puzzle it doesn't help lots of folks who don't have the time or patience to unravel it.
This is what interests me about blogging. And it is important enough that I put up with a load of stuff that really isn't all that interesting. All I ask is that my questions about code or plugins meet with a degree of courtesy. Just because I don't know about a lot of stuff doesn't mean I'm an fool.

And I have learned a lot in the past five months. Thanks to all the patient folks out there who helped from time to time. That's what it is about. We help each other actually. And it's important we recognize that fact.

Recently I created a post that has brought me approximately three thousand visitors so far. StumbleUpon can take most of the credit I suppose but it could not have done it without me! In fact SU could not do anything at all if it wasn't for all of us guys and girls out here working day and night to provide it with material.

How did I put together a popular post?

Read the rest of this entry

***************photo strip

Welcome to Martha Stewart’s class on making your blog look nicer this Christmas.

We all love decorations. So why not put them in your blog?! You can divide those long paragraphs up and create little “irrigation ditches” so you won’t have any “word deserts”. All you need a a pair of scissors…. Oh Wait. I forgot this is the internet.

Ever since they let me out of the joint

I have had these moments where I can’t remember….Alright boys and girls. Where was I? Oh, yes. You look at your photos and see which ones have pretty colors straight across and you crop the SOB…….Oh Wait. There I go again. You crop the photo so it’s about forty pixels tall and as wide as Mama Marion’s butt back in the…..Sorry. You can also look at vertical images and press the counter clockwise button. Then proceed as before back to your cell. I mean back to the point where you can crop a very narrow…… strip. Oh God. No! Not again.

Boys and girls this is the end of your blogging lesson today. I must catch a plane for South America. Bye for now.

************photo strip

Oh, I almost forgot. Thanks to my friends at Performancing.com for sharing the basis for this idea. They have lots of them over there. It’s a very helpful place for bloggers.

If anyone here at Performancing.com would like to use any of my Christmas photos I would be happy to send them to you. And if you would put "davidnotes.com" near the photo I would appreciate it.

Everyone have a happy holiday.

I have been just having a blast this afternoon creating colorful little strips about 40 pixels tall and 600 pixels wide. I would like to show you a few of them but my efforts to put them up here where not successful. Basically all I did was look for photos that had a narrow strip in them that looked interesting. Sometimes it was a vertical strip that needed to be flipped ninety degrees.
Either way I now have a growing collection of colorful photo strips that will break up the monotony of the written page. They can go in the top, middle or bottom depending on where I think they will do the most good. I especially like the one that says "ENTER" on it. And I HOPE it sends a subliminal message to my readers!
I used a thin strip of falling water over a cement barrier in a stream to lend a visual image to the post I wrote here about Christmas. Basically, the idea was that a courageous woman had shot a guy who was attempting to massacre a church group. Flowing water is an important theme in various religions so I thought it would go well here.
A hawk flying far above symbolized the idea that if we stand far enough away and look at human history we can see progress down through the ages. I don't know if these things will come through to any reader but they are colorful at least. And hopefully they will work on a subliminal level to help the post in some way.

And I am writing a note to someone. You!

But this has also become one of my best keyphrases and so I use it. I suppose you could use it too if you wanted to try it. We could hang out in Google together in one of the billions of pages out there. Lately I have discovered the good that keywords can do and have much more traffic. Why did it take so long?

The Grand Design

It’s all part of the Grand Design. Why have many more folks come here when my blog was still wandering around and waiting for a great new template. And all the different parts needed to be linked together so readers can easily travel deep into what’s here. But did I plan it this way? No. I didn’t have a clue about how things would go. The Grand Design is a lot bigger than this blog and it leads us all to better days. Always. If we just get out of the way and let it happen. Don’t mess it up with our own plans.

This is the optimist inside me going to work. How would he feel in the year 1915 as we were getting ready for war, depression, war again and then cold war? This is progress? I don’t know. I wasn’t here then. But it could happen again. And we will certainly die someday. Is that progress? Yes, actually, I think it is. They were talking about a new strain of flu on the radio a few days ago. A killer bug. Let’s imagine that it somehow spread through our world and thousands died. What sort of progress would that be?

It would be terrible, of course, for families and friends. If something happened to Beth or the children I would not survive. But they would be in a much better place enjoying the bright lights and freedom from disease and bugs. And I would be hoping to join them soon. Also our world would become a less superficial place. Many people would start looking for spiritual solace and understanding. There would be terrible suffering but in the end the Grand Design would pull us all through.

Christmas Is A Time For Giving

Why did I get off on this? It seems rather dark for the week before Christmas. Christmas is a time of celebration about the birth of God’s son in one of these humble little bags of bones. But look what happened to that beautiful child in just a few short decades. Is the darkness so far off on this day that is bright with laughter and decorations?

My suggestion for this holiday is to think of the person you know who is the most genuinely needy. Someone who is suffering through trials and tribulations. And you wonder why because they don’t seem to deserve it. And give them a large gift of cash inside a nice Christmas card. Take the money you were going to spend the next time you went to the electronics store and give it to them. Then sit back and imagine how they are going to feel when they receive it. Enjoy thinking about their joy. Oh yes. Suddenly the Christmas Spirit has arrived.

A Woman's Courageous Act And Angels Watch

I have been thinking about the lovely security guard in the church who put a stop to the mass murderer who arrived at her sanctuary armed with his assault rifle and much more. She recalls how she prayed and then confronted him with her little gun while everyone else was looking for the nearest window.

Her hands did not shake. Her heart was full of the courage that God gave her in this moment. And she took him down. But this is the thing I find so wonderful. She didn’t kill him. Once he discovered he was shot he killed himself. He ran like they all do behind that invisible door seeking to avoid all consequences for evil deeds.

So she doesn’t have to live with the knowledge that she killed a fellow human being however much of a mutant he must have been. She doesn’t have to wake up every day with this knowledge. This could be God’s response to the idea that you should never kill another human being. Remember the Quakers? What would they have done? Sat there and waited for the end?

A Happy And Meaningful Christmas

I like this ending better. And now I am off to enjoy another beautiful day here in Virginia. We have had record temperatures and it seems like just another wonderful autumn day. No humidity. Where is all the ice on the other side of the mountains? Is it not coming at all?

And tonight we go to our club for Christmas carols, food and drink. Friends and ritual gatherings to celebrate another year brought home and packed away. So many years all packed away.

And hopefully many more before we move on towards a more perfect life and leave our worried little bodies behind.

I hope you have a meaningful Christmas.

Update: I created this document on Google's word processor and included several photos from Picasa2. It looks really nice (in my humble opinion) and so I posted it on my blog, Virginia Breeze. But I also wanted to post it here. Because it is an attempt to get beyond the word desert. Was that the phrase? Or was it word dessert? Or some other kind of dessert? Cake and ice cream?
When I pasted it here the images did not come along for some reason. And I don't see how to use the imaging function here to get them all in just the right place. So you will neded to go to VB if you would like to see my attempt to leave the desert behind and push away from the table too all in the same moment.

How can I say that I have made blogging progress? How can I say that my blog is much better than it was a week ago? I have a new template but so what!

I just know. In my heart I know it is true. And I can predict that an objective stranger would think the same thing.

Every once in awhile you move ahead in life if you keep working at it. Maybe you get a promotion after years of trying. Or you meet someone who changes your life. Or you discover you enjoy doing something you had never tried before. And you enjoy it so much you work it into your daily routine.

I have just had one of those moments. And thank you for sharing it with me.