I’ve removed the ol’ tag cloud that I’ve had on the site for the past hundred years or so as tag clouds are becoming passe, like parachute pants and a stable global climate. Instead I’m using a widget that now groups the tags into a dropdown menu so you can easily (assuming you have a robust scroll wheel on your mouse or energetic finger for your mobile device) peruse all 463 of them.
My post-to-tag ratio is clearly out of whack as making random tags I’ll only ever use once (364 of 463) is almost as fun as making lists. And I love making lists so much people do indeed ask me, “Why don’t you marry them?”
Because I used the “l” word, here’s a list of my five most-used tags:
he’s got legs (97)
he’s got (tired) legs 91
Africa hot (67)
random stuff (67)
book reviews (63)
Summary: I like talking about my legs a lot (ie. jogging), I regularly complain about the heat (see above, re: stable global climate), I have a lot of thoughts just drift into my head, and finally, I review most of the books I read. Who knew?
I spent some time thinking–several long minutes–over what to write for the one-thousandth post of this blog.
Should it be something deeply profound and insightful? Haha, no. I’m not about to take the blog in some bold, new direction.
How about a list? I love lists. This was very tempting but collating a list about the blog, such as links to “the best my brain could come up with” posts felt too much like work and a random list didn’t seem worthy.
A haiku? They’re fun and simple. But lazy, really. Doesn’t this milestone deserve something that takes more than a few seconds to dash off? Probably not, but I can pretend it does.
After mulling these three ideas my several minutes of thinking was over and here I am.
I now present all three below. What tremendous blogging value I give to the several people accidentally stumbling across the site because I wrote “Zachary Quinto naked” into this post.
Something deeply profound and insightful
I don’t actually have anything for this but take a look at this Wikipedia article on the Observable Universe and try wrapping your mind about how big it is, how small we are and just what the heck is out past the part we can’t observe, anyway? I say space monsters.
[box title=”A list of the 10 most-used tags on this blog in a fancy box” box_color=”#329242″]
59 he’s got legs
57 random stuff
46 he’s got (tired) legs
40 Africa hot
33 random thoughts
32 stupid ankle
28 damn snow
27 National Novel Writing Month
27 book reviews
27 weather you like it or not[/box]
This list demonstrates several things, leading to a bonus list (but not in a fancy box):
I’m obsessed with my legs, admittedly the sexiest part of my body.
I’m also obsessed with randomness. What is the difference between random stuff and random thoughts? A good question.
I complain about the weather. How trite and predictable. Expect more starting this summer.
I’m determined to write novels in 30 days or less.
I am at least semi-literate, having read and reviewed several books.
I am not above puns or terrible wordplay.
A haiku about my blog
What to write each time
A never ending challenge
No naked Quinto
One of the plugins I use on this blog is Better WP Security. Among its features it records any bad login entries. These are people and/or bots trying to enter the admin area of the blog by trying out various username/password combos, hoping to get lucky so they can do all manner of nefarious deeds once allowed in.
As you might guess, the most common username used in these attempts is “admin” and it’s why basic security has you change it from “admin” to anything else (I’ve done this, in case any bots are reading).
Sometimes the username entered is more curious than “admin”. For example:
Bernardo1133
Did Bernardo get misdirected or confused? Did he think he was signing into his own blog? What are the other 1132 Bernardos up to, anyway?
BroderickCrook
Oh, I just bet you are a crook, Broderick! Nice try, buddy.
creolened
Clever bot. But not clever enough.
DebWordenrfai
This one may have been trying to login to World of Warcraft.
What’s sad is the number of legitimate visits to the site is usually in the range of less than 10 per day, meaning the blog on average is more than ten times as popular as a potential hacking target than as something to read. On the plus side that less-than-ten number is still more people than ever read my paper journal.
It seems that one of the updates of the NextGen Photo Gallery plugin I use on the blog reworked things to the point where most of my gallery pages were nothing but a spectacular mess of exposed, broken code. While interesting in an abstract sort of way it was not very practical for the viewing of photos.
I finally went through and cleaned up most of the pages and broke off Hiking into its own separate category. Still to come are better descriptions for each page and improved old photos, as I realized a lot of them were scanned with particularly poor brightness/contrast. But it’s a start.
The general Photo Galleries and Hiking may be found by clicking on the words you just read.
I’ve trimmed away a few links from the My Links section of the sidebar. Gone are:
Fitocracy. I simply never use this site anymore. LinkedIn. For now I have decided to keep the more business side of things off this website, since it is more focused on personal ramblings. Nike+. I still use this site regularly but the revamp bafflingly requires an account to view anyone’s profile. So much for sharing!
Facebook and Google+ remain once-every-six-months affairs for me and Smashwords should have more to it soon™. I may start using Twitter more. Or not. MyFitnessPal I login to everyday and today is my 165th day in a row. Woo for consistency.
Also it is very warm sitting here today. I miss my fan.
And it’s not even an April Fool’s joke! (I am fond of the 8-bit Google Maps, myself)
After several false starts in March I am boldly planning on posting something to the blog every day for the rest of the year. That would be nine months in all or 274 posts, assuming I meet the bare minimum.
Some of the posts will be fluff but I shall endeavor to say something worthwhile as much as possible.
Yes, I am back on the bandwagon again, the bandwagon being ‘writing something on the blog every day no matter what’. As always, this means some days will be what one might call content-light, while others will be a little meatier. I think I am dangerously close to mixing metaphors here.
I finally got off my figurative butt and inserted a graphic as part of the masthead for the blog. As of this writing it is a photo I took at Buntzen Lake during a hike in January. I am planning on rotating through a number of images. I’ll probably jazz up the site a bit more in the coming weeks, though I am undecided on how best to do this. I can’t decide between animated gifs or auto-playing midi files. If only the <BLINK> tag was still supported.
In case the image mentioned above isn’t the current one, here it is below (click for full-size):
UPDATE, June 6, 2025: Yes, nearly 15 years later, I decided to check again after reading this post and discovered that stanjames.ca was available, and now it is mine. I may do nothing with it, but it's mine all the same.
As you may have cleverly guessed, my real name is not Creole Ned, though I have been known to answer to Ned in person. I like having this one layer of separation online, where my real identity is not exactly hidden (it’s listed in the About section here) but not front and centre, either. This is not to say that I write through a persona — Creole Ned is simply the online ID I use.
From time to time I have thought about going with a domain that uses my real name but it turns out they’re all taken. My last name is very common — James — and the first name (Stan) is not uncommon enough to not be hooked up with James online. I took a little stroll on the web and discovered that stanjames.com is, of all things, a gambling site. That’s kind of depressing (and it’s the reason I’m not providing a direct link to it). I don’t think I’ve ever gambled, apart from an occasional lottery ticket, which I view as more of a charitable donation than anything (I am always reminded of the old Lotto 6/49 slogan from back in the 90s. It was “Hey, you never know!” The long-defunct Doppler Superstore had a sign out front and after they became an authorized lotto dealer, they had the slogan up for awhile, except they got it slightly wrong. It read, “Hey, you’ll never know!” It’s probably the best case of accidental truth in advertising I’ve seen). stanjames.net, stanjames.org and stanjames.info all redirect to stanjames.com. Man, that guy was thorough. stanjames.ca is also taken but in this case it’s “under construction”. I can only dream in anticipation over what wonders will be revealed there.
It turns out that most variations on stanleyjames are still available but I never use my full name, though if I did it might cut down on the whole “Stan the Man” thing or the “No, my name is not Dan” thing (I once had a roommate named Dan and occasionally carried on longish phone calls with people who actually wanted to talk to him and not me). I could also try a variation like stanwjames which is available (trivia: all three of my names can be re-arranged and still work; the middle name is William) but again, I just don’t have a compelling need to switch over.
So creolened.com it shall be for now and the undermined future. Go me!
UPDATE: It turns out this “Stan James” fellow is simply a composite name for a well-known UK bookmaker (Wikipedia link) and when I did a Google search of my name, the bookmaker monopolizes nearly all the first 20 pages of results. I show up once on page 14 due to my Facebook account. I guess this is good if someone decides to “google” me before hiring me for some sort of job. Unless they think I’m a UK bookmaker and have a thing against them, of course.
changed the background to a slate blue-gray kinda thing (will probably play with it some more)
made the site name match other links, color-wise
broke lots of stuff while experimenting but fixed everything back up
I will be restoring the writing exercises shortly and continue to fine-tune. To the average person this is about as exciting as watching a pie-eating contest where no pies are delivered for consumption but to me it’s like a pie-eating contest where one of those huge dump trucks from a strip mine shows up with 500 metric tonnes of pie.
added jQuery Colorbox to the photo galleries (this makes the photos pop-up all pretty-like)
removed a bunch of links from the sidebar, moved some to the Books etc. page and re-ordered others
removed the Sections, uh, section. The Sections links are now only at the top of the page. Redundancy is redundant.
killed the ‘jogging’ tag as it is now its own category
The biggest change is the complete removal of all of my writing. I’ve decided to take a different approach for now and will only be making a few selections available on the site, though all of the writing exercises will be back, since they are freely viewable on the Martian Cartel forums. I haven’t modified the theme yet but will be tweaking the colors and perhaps adding a graphic at the top of the site.
I recently bought an LCD monitor (BenQ FP937) after so many people raved about them on Quarter to Three. After a period of adjustment I can understand the raving. The clarity of the image is well beyond what my trusty old Viewsonic P95f+ was capable of, even when it was new out of the box. The screen is also a lot brighter than my CRT and this reminded me again of how much I dislike websites that have black text on white backgrounds. It’s understandable that people want to create sites that look like printed paper because everyone is cozy and comfortable with books and magazines. However, books and magazines do not throw a ton of light into your face while you peruse them. The Internet, as it currently exists, does.
Down with white, up with greenish-blue, I say.
Meanwhile, Samuel K has blogged his own site (UPDATE, January 3, 2022–yes, nearly 17 years later. Sam’s site no longer works and has probably been offline for the past decade. He’s on Facebook now. Also, I learned how to turn the brightness down on LCD monitors.) and posted a picture of his cat. I am thus obligated to do the same and go one better by posting a slightly larger picture of my cat. I give you Pooter (edit: okay, that was too big even for me):
