Category: Site Updates

Posted on
by

Wow, is the year over already? Here are this blog’s five most popular posts of 2012.

Don’t Use Third-Party Links in Email – Object Lesson: Comic-Con Registration (March)
Being both a comics fan and a long-time email administrator put me in the perfect place to analyze what went wrong when Comic-Con International tickets went on sale. I got linked to by a couple of high-profile sites, resulting in a lot of views during the first few days after the debacle and making March 3 the blog’s busiest day of the year. It quickly trailed off to almost nothing, and didn’t even get a blip when tickets for next year’s con went on sale. It’ll probably be forgotten next year.

Tablet Tip: Using Bookmarklets with Chrome for Android (August)
The two things that seem to pull in perennial traffic are popular images and troubleshooting articles. In this case, I describe how to use bookmarklets on Chrome for Android, since the normal way (clicking on a menu/icon) doesn’t work. (Two words: auto complete.) This one started slow, but since mid-September it’s pulled in more and more views every month.

Nexus 7 + USB Cable = Finally! Photo Uploads Without a Laptop! (October)
This post detailed how I was able to connect my Nexus 7 tablet to my camera, to thumb drives, and to keyboards and mice. It turns out all you need is a $1 cable adapter and a $3 app. This has been another slow but steady post, with a spike in visits shortly after Christmas. These two troubleshooting posts are actually in the top three for December (

Photos: Solar Eclipse from Los Angeles (May)
I went out to a hilltop park in Palos Verdes to watch May’s solar eclipse, which was an 85% partial eclipse in Southern California. I stumbled into an impromptu eclipse festival, with lots of individuals and groups who had all brought different equipment and were happy to share. A link from Patch.com brought in a lot of visits for the first week or so, and then it trailed off with a couple of spikes, one in June (not sure why) and another during the November eclipse.

WonderCon in Anaheim – A Great Weekend Comic-Con (March)
Another post following the typical event pattern of a sharp initial spike and steep drop-off, but this one hasn’t vanished quite so thoroughly as the others…probably because of the uncertainty for most of this year as to where next year’s con would be. What I find particularly interesting is that more people have viewed this post than my write-up of this year’s San Diego convention.

Posted on
by

When I set up a B2 site just for kicks in 2002, I didn’t really expect to still be posting to it ten years later.

Admittedly, I don’t post as often as I used to, and I think fewer people read it than did back in the day — partly because a lot of my more fannish stuff has moved over to Speed Force, partly because I don’t post as often, and partly because of the changes in the social media landscape, most notably Facebook and Twitter.

Vital stats:

2644 posts
3847 comments

Top 10 posts viewed over the past year:

  1. Setting up a Wireless Network on Linux: Ralink 3062 and Network Manager
  2. Comic Con! (2003)
  3. Getting Flash to work on Google Chrome for 64-bit Linux
  4. Songs Not to Play at a Wedding
  5. Victimized Hero
  6. Avocado’s Number
  7. Super-hero Weaknesses
  8. Flash Foreshadowing
  9. Fuchsia Zoom
  10. How to Get Rid of Windows Live Messenger

Posted on
by

After years of piggybacking on employers’ web servers (with permission, of course!), I’ve moved my personal websites to a third-party web host. It’s kind of weird to be dealing with a web server that I don’t fully control, but DreamHost is really flexible and (most importantly) specifically supports WordPress.

The only thing I’ve really missed so far is Apache’s mod_speling [sic], which will automatically correct any one typo or capitalization error when trying to reach a file. It’s nice to have, but far from critical.

Posted on
by

Cool! I’ve been named in The Comics Reporter’s reader poll on Name Five Writers About Comics You Like That Aren’t On CR’s Home Team Of Tom Spurgeon And Bart Beaty. It’s an impressive list, and with some of the big names on it, almost intimidating to be included.

If you’re visiting here for the first time, let me make a bit of an introduction. This is my sort of general-purpose blog, where I write about anything from comics and science-fiction to photos, life observations and technology. If you’ve dropped in from The Comics Reporter, you’ll probably be most interested in:

Thanks to Richard Pachter for recommending me!

Posted on
by

I’m really impressed with the new version of WordPress Mobile Edition. It handles both the low-end and high-end (iPhone, Android) devices cleanly and efficiently. I was using a three-tiered setup with WP-Mobile for basic phones, WPTouch for iPhone and Android devices, and of course the regular theme for desktops, but it seems simpler to drop WPTouch for now.

Posted on
by

I’ve been using Twitter for a couple of weeks as an additional update channel and sort of an adjunct to my blog, Speed Force (you can follow it at @SpeedForceOrg), and I’ve actually realized that yes, there is a point to it. It’s good for the random thought that only takes a sentence or two, but seems like it doesn’t quite warrant a full blog post.

So I’ve added a second account for general stuff, (i.e. not just comics & Flash) as an experiment, at @KelsonV, and I’m tying it to this blog using Alex King’s Twitter Tools. Let’s see how this works out…

Update: Okay, so I’ve got K2R announcing posts to Twitter. I’ve got Twitter feeding to Facebook using the Twitter app on Facebook. And I’m building daily digests on K2R using Twitter Tools (which is supposed to handle loops) and to LiveJournal using LoudTwitter (thanks, andrea_wot).

I looked at ping.fm per rialtus’s suggestion, but from what little I can see without signing up, it only does instant updates, and it looks like it’s push only — i.e., I’d post to ping.fm and it would go out to Twitter, LJ, Myspace, Facebook, etc., but I’d still need something else to pull blog headlines.

So, if I’ve got all this set up right:

Twitter → Facebook
Twitter → LJ Daily Digest
Twitter → K2R Daily Digest (except for stuff that came from K2R)
K2R Headlines → Twitter
K2R Headlines → Twitter → Facebook
K2R Headlines → Twitter → LJ Daily Digest

»All pages site-wide with this tag