I’ve been doing these Seven Days posts for a few weeks now, and I’m going to continue doing them, because as much as anything else they are good for maintaining some sort of writing discipline.

The question is, on posts – like the SD/TV one that just went live a few minutes ago – that tend to run to more than two or three shows – or books or movies – do you think it’d be easier to read or work better if I broke them up into a few shorter posts, seperated by show or theme – instead of the one long one?

It occurs to me that if you’re an avid watcher of “Bones”, or want to argue with me about “Buffy”, having to dredge through a bunch of stuff that you don’t care so much about might be annoying.

If anyone has any thoughts on this subject, or has any other ideas on what I can do to make the site easier for you to read – up to but not including getting someone other than me to write it! – as always please tell me all about it in the comments…!

“Macromyopia is society’s tendency to overestimate the short term results of a technology and to underestimate its long term results…”
John Barlow, Author and Songwriter.

I’m looking at you, Second Life. Also, as a follow on from that, the comments in this post at Snarkmarket had some insightful phrases that I hadn’t heard before.

“Men overestimate what they can accomplish in a year. But they underestimate what they can accomplish in five.”
Len

“Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.”
Paul Saffo

And while we’re on things I’ve heard today:

“Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.”
The Magistrate’s Blog

Finally, on a blog (I forget which) talking about Obama’s recent, apparently terribly disappointing decision to be a politician, someone quoted the apparently old adage which perfectly sums up the salesman mentality seemingly present in every walk of life in the UK at the moment:

“No one else can give you as much as I promise you.”

(Well, it’s new to me!)

I offer you: YOUTUBE EMBEDDING! BWAHAHAHA! After all this time, I finally found a plugin that seems to work. It’s from here, by the way: http://www.paulbain.co.uk/simple-youtube-plugin-for-wordpress-easytube  /, and it’s a thing of beauty. Although the “newer” version on the website doesn’t actually work in my install.

If you know why the subject line is relevant, you deserve extra points, which you may redeem when the internet is over for a passel of naff all. You lucky people!

Whenever I feel down about my writing, all I need to do is look at the spam filter on this website’s comments. Among the encouragements found therein:

Good observation, your ideas are right on…
Leggo ed imparo sul vostro luogo. grazie! (Not sure what it means, but you can’t lose with lego.)
Thank you, I could not have sead it better my self….
Never be ashamed! There’s some who’ll hold it against you, but they’re not worth bothering with…
Your post is on target. Keep it up….
great blog, keep it comming….
Didn’t notice it before … quite clever….

I mean, okay, they are all fake people made of spam, but how sweet are they? They may not be real, but these guys love me!

Unlike my stupid backwoods redneck WordPress plugin tag generator. When things go wrong, which happens often with that particular plugin, it sees fit to announce that “something done went wrong.”

Story of my fucking life!

Things I already know need fixing:

1. The permanent pages haven’t been formatted to fit with the rest of the design. Neither has the search page. Neither of those looks very nice right now.
2. The Powweb ad on the front page doesn’t sit right. Imagine it how it would be on one of the single post pages.
3. [edit] Just been informed that it doesn’t work in Firefox, but won’t have access to check till I get home.

Things I’m thinking already:

1. I like that you can reduce the size of your window and completely delete the ads. And I don’t think the ads take up too much space when the page is fully expanded.
2. I really like the header as a solid black band across the top of the screen, but I’m not sure if it works for this design. I think it would lend itself much better to a design without fully bordered boxes/panels. Also, while it looks nice with a reduced page, it looks a bit weird fully expanded, and I think would make more sense on a page that took up the whole screen.
3. I’m seriously thinking of adapting the original design so that it’s the same, but with these three columns, but I’d like to know what others think.

Please, please leave your thoughts in the comments box… although I already suspect that a lot of you will agree with what I’ve already said.

Oh, right. Yeah. It’s here: Plugin love

Apologies also to those of you who are either young Muslim women in the UK hoping to hook up with a bright-eyed young Christian fella, or vice-versa, because I am frantically adding each one of those sorts of sites shown here to my Adsense “no fucking way do I wish to advertise these sites round these parts” filter. Which is a pain in the ass, but what are you going to do?

Regular readers (all 7 of you) will be glad to hear that, even though I have softened somewhat in recent weeks, I am still an amoral, dark-hearted heathen fuck, deep down where it counts. I have nothing against Muslims or Christians, I just really don’t see why, with the all-seeing, all-powerful almighty on their side, they need to come round here, selling their wares…

(Although actually, maybe a website promoting romance between young Christians and young Muslims wouldn’t be all that bad an idea… thinking about it, they have more than enough in common to make relationships a viable proposition, and that whole “no sex before marriage”, “the human body is a sacred instrument that shouldn’t be sullied with lustful thoughts” thing is going to make it tough for them to hook up with any right-thinking, normal-headed youngsters… There may be some money in this, after all…)

You may have noticed (although hopefully not too easily, as I tried to integrate it into the design of the site as much as possible) that I’ve started including ads in the sidebar. If I can make it work in a non-intrusive way, I’m thinking of including a couple more, too.

I feel terribly guilty about this, not least because:

a) My upbringing has created a situation where I feel guilty about almost everything.

b) nixsight was already all about my vanity and self-indulgence… working out ways to make that pay go against everything I believe in. Well, a couple of things. One… one thing. And maybe “believe” is too strong a word.

As I’ve said in another post, I’m very poor at the moment. Not “third world” poor, no. Not “living on the streets” poor, either, but poor enough that I’m having to try and work out every possible way of maximising my income. Pretty soon I’m going to be selling a few much loved and prized items on Ebay, and I’ll keep you posted on that. When I do, I’d really appreciate it if those of you reading could spread the word to anyone you think might want the goods.

Yes, really appreciate it. Possibly enough even for hugs.

Anyway, I’m going to endeavour to keep on top of the ad targetting as much as possible, so that I can at least take comfort in the fact that the stuff that’s advertised is useful to my readers.

In the interests of making full use of the interactivity of the web, I’ve tried to include useful links to related material (which should appear in bold) within my posts, when time allows.

However, I’m skint, so what I’ve also done, when possible, is when something I’ve mentioned is purchasable at Amazon, I’ve created a link to it there. If you use that link to buy the item, I get a bit of money.

I’m just trialling this at the moment, and don’t expect to make any real cash, but I thought I should mention it, in case:

a) I suggest something you like the look of and you feel like helping me out by buying it through here.

or

b) You hate this sort of shit, and just wish everyone on the internet would stop trying to make money and go back to the great wholesome things that used to go on here, back when there were only five people using it to send dot matrix celebrity portraits made entirely out of standard keyboard characters and symbols. In which case, I want you to know that I wouldn’t be doing it unless I was really, really impoverished. Honest!

Found out that we don’t have broadband at home until 08/03, but once that’s done, it’s time to start picking the bones of my old site, and working out what I want to strip out and put in here. By then I should have worked out some sort of flash-fiction discipline, too. Or else, how I’m going to rework the old stuff so that it looks like new flash-fiction!