Many thanks to Grandad. This absolutely horrendous, disjointed post is all his fault but he’ll probably blame it on K8.

And here we go….

I seem to be getting older these days. Not only am I getting older but it seems to be becoming a habit, a perpetual thing if you will. Knowing full well that it’s always a changing world out there, I began to feel that dreaded sensation of old(er) age that life was beginning to pass me by. I just didn’t seem to be attracted to all that new and interesting stuff out there. A mere 5 years ago, life at home was nothing like it is now and things like having a PC and being connected to the Internet hadn’t been part of my life for at least 4 years at that point. When I finally came to live with my honey in old Stove Pipe City, I was more than way behind as far as the old WWW was concerned and my disabilities from my time in the service had begun to take their toll. In short, my health was lousy.

But being a veteran of the Cold War, serving as one of those strange, stubborn, thickheaded, tenacious, twisted breeds of Navy men called submariners (who are always on the best bad behavior), it didn’t take too long to pick myself back up from the stresses of taking care of my folks, getting back to work and start building my life back up again. I even enrolled in the VA and let me tell you, life as a veteran hasn’t been the same since.

Even so, every night I still dreamed of the ocean mist in my face as I stood watch on the bridge of that submarine during the rare times we were surfaced, watching the reflections of the sky dancing on the surface of the water and thinking how beautiful the day was and of all the destruction those nuclear weapons we and other subs carried hidden from sight under the ocean could do to this world, erasing these beautiful days forever. One saving grace was that my boat was a “fast attack” and our job was to prevent just such a thing from happening…and we did.

We pause from this utterly disjointed, meandering post in order to change the subject entirely…

An oddball and an “off the subject” thing I might mention (so I can use up several tags at once) is that I was born in 1959 and this makes me one of those boomers. In fact a lot of these folks my age and up go around advertising this fact quite a lot lately and even more of the same age that hate the word boomer and spend a lot of time making sure everyone knows it. And strangely enough a lot of these folks have blogs out on the WWW. In fact, we have a regular blogging community having adventures in SEO, metrics systems advertising and spam protection using Akismet and Spam Karma. They’re blogging about the going green, clean energy, global warming, warm winters, the weather and hernias. A lot of them also have WordPress installs because they decided to “do it themselves” no less and these bloggers have learned all about wp plugins and the havoc a bad one can cause, upgrading from WordPress 2.1 to WordPress 2.2 to WordPress 2.3 and hacking their own themes. So who says you have to be young to do this?

I find these blogs to be the best reading around with a ton of great info and insight to be found. A regular digital democracy by jeezum!

I call these folks (and myself) BC Bloggers (Before Computers).

We now return you to more of the same boring nonsense as before…

So one morning, shortly before the holidays, while reading a new Yankee Magazine I found myself taking interest in my surroundings again and with a gift of a digital camera from my wonderful lady, my fascination with gadgets came flooding back. Another item I received also helped peak that fascination was my first set of hearing aids. One disability I ended up with from my time spent poking holes in the ocean was being deaf and since this particular form of deafness is self perpetuating, I began to realize that if I was going to hold down a job, I needed to be able to hear. Logical thinking on my part I thought.

By the way, do me a favor and don’t call me hearing impaired please. I’m deaf…period! Thank you very much.

And so came my first pair of hearing aids (complete with remote control no less) and life in general changed drastically–I now could hear the comments made behind my back. Made life at work a great deal more interesting for those so called friends of mine and their brilliant ideas. All of a sudden they found themselves on the business end of my subtle, dry, sarcastic wit and humor as I quietly stabbed them with their own misc nonsense.

Getting back to what I was saying…at home with the cats, I was just thinkin’ on how I just might finally want to get me that new computer so with hearing aids in my ears I began to peruse the local community at large to see if there was anywhere nearby where I might do this. Okay…there wasn’t. Up here in the Northeast Kingdom by the Canadian border where the local environment, the seasons and the amenities thereof hasn’t changed for the last 50-60 years, I decided the only way to get this new PC was to order it online. My lady was nice enough to let me use her computer to do so.

Too make an already too long post short…

Six months later, DSL finally came to our area (yup, 2004 and all we had was dial up) and with DSL…the blog was born and I was back in business with all my backwoods tech yearnings at full steam. Of course I started with a first post and quickly followed with a few misc posts but then went on to more specific subjects like absentmindedness, at which I excel, posts about space and science and basically ending up wandering all over the place with my various ramblings which entirely confused any readers that happened to stop by thus establishing my reputation as a complete knee biter. Google became my best friend and I even managed to take on a few blog projects put forth by Liz Strauss. I managed to survive them as well (just kidding Liz).

I wrote up posts about my lady’s Long Meadow Farms Quilts (her long time quilting business), quilts, quilting and stained glass. Just so you know, I test each new quilt that she makes by sleeping under it. Good God, I hope she doesn’t read this.

Things have slowed me down of course. I spent quite awhile at the VA hospital in Boston, MA for an endoscopy and surgery for instance and while I was there I spent the initial recovery wandering around as best I could, gazing out of the various windows at the grand vista that was Jamaica Plains…okay, maybe not exactly what one would call a vista but it was better than gazing at all the old farts like me laying in bed in various stages of decomposition. That can get to you after awhile so the hallways and various lounges were the places the hospital staff often found themselves searching after they finally noticed that I had been missing for a day and a half.

Once, while gazing out one of these windows, I noticed that part of the window had been cut out and had been replaced with one of those flat panel LCD TV’s that’s replacing the old CRT sets these days. There was a live interview with an author of some best selling book going on at the time and in my slightly drugged state I remember thinking that this author guy was a real windows live writer. I found out later on that some other author, in a fit of jealous rage, tried to burn down the poor guy’s home and although the local fire department was able to save most of his property, they said it was a real scribefire.

Amazing what you can learn in a hospital. Even more amazing what one will go through to get just three more tags taken care of for the sake of two extremely bad puns.

So there you have it. After starting 3 new sites and keeping one of them, through the 1st writings of nearly 15 years ago to finally publishing on my own blog, seeing my blog referenced in the news section of the online version of Time Magazine, through snow days, spring and Springfield….I’m finally done with this unbelievably horrendous, disjointed, discombobulated, post!

I may not exactly be the person of the year, but you can just call me the ultimate tag warrior! Now where’s my pogo stick?…I’m outta here!

Disclaimer: Of course a few of the tags and categories had the same name which means I really need to weed these things out and none of the tags/categories are necessarily related to the various horrendous, disjointed post subjects. And since I use these tags for my Related Posts feature I decided not to list all them at the bottom of this post for obvious reasons.

Oh yeah, and I simply could not find a way to use Firefox/Thunderbird and JT Evening News so I…wait minute, I guess I used them after all. Good deal!

Did I pass?

Update 11/15/07: It has been pointed out to me that I haven’t tagged anyone with this meme yet. This was strictly due to the fact that whatever brain cells I had left fried for good after I finished this horrible thing. In short, I had to take a few narcotics and pass out on the floor. But now it’s morning and it seems not all brain cells died in the fire of the moment and since my friend Cat stopped by to comment and had the audacity to state that she had over 100 categories and it would be too much hard work…after I managed to shoehorn over 100 tags and categories into the above post…consider yourself tagged Cat!

I also tag Elaine, Emma and Micki as well since I admire these ladies as writers and also because I haven’t given them any reason to harass me lately.

And yes…I was scrutinized by the originator of this meme, K8 and I did indeed pass. Almost makes it all worth it.

I’m too technically oriented.

No, I don’t mean in my writing style which is haphazard as my subjects are but rather my overall nature in general. In other words; I’m always catching myself becoming more occupied with how well the blog works than writing up the actual content. God forbid that a page doesn’t render exactly right or loads a bit slower than usual or that this particular image in my sidebar is not exactly aligned with the one below it. And that’s just the minor stuff. Don’t even let me into the backend of it. Into the actual gears, levers and motors of the operation or in this case, widgets, hacks and plugins.

Is this plugin slowing me down? Is that one overloading my database? I’ll go nuts trying to find out why posting a comment no longer refreshes the page all of a sudden (my host’s having problems) when I know damn well that it’s been working just fine up till then. It doesn’t occur to me at all that I hadn’t changed anything before the problem occurred yet I’ll spend two days ripping up works trying to fix my piece of WordPress machinery that wasn’t broken in the first place.

OMG! My SEO score went down a half a point! I just gotta FIX IT!

*heavy sigh*

Why can’t I just leave well enough alone and just get back to writing?

Look, I understand that there is a learning process to be had here. I do understand that I’m just not the type to set up a basic install and just happily blog away not giving a hoot about whether anyone can actually find my blog or not. If that was the case I’d still be on Blogger where I started off from about two years ago. But I also found out that there is a huge amount of things to be learned about SEO and 404 pages and how to avoid them and redirection of permalinks and easy site navigation and W3C and sitemaps and stuff to stop spam with and .htaccess and, and, and….

IS THERE A PLUGIN FOR THAT OR WHAT??!!??

WordPress is releasing a major upgrade on the 24th of this month.

Groooaaannnn!

Oh well. I am what I am and all that. My love for tinkering will always be vying with my love for writing as to which has the highest priority. The fact that I’m my own best mechanic is irrelevant since I’m having extreme difficulty in splitting myself into two pieces.

I feel so besides my self at times. (and I’m not even sorry I said that).

I suppose every blogger out there has their own worst fault that they’re constantly battling day in and day out. No one is ever that focused and consistent except maybe for one or two very unique individuals for example. And there’s other ones out there of course, I just had to pick on these two because they were the first ones to pop into my head–just like this post. And I ain’t neither one of them nor do I have their abilities to stay on focused on one subject and the task at hand, which is writing up good content on that particular subject.

Oh well…I like what I’m doing and I’m rather proud of the mechanics running it. Heck, I even have folks dropping by occasionally and leaving comments which is just fine by me.

And I’ll keep working on that fault of mine.

Technorati tags: blogging faults, blogging mistakes, confessions

So what have I accomplished since this blog first out started as “Conversation Lost” on the old Blogger site way back when?

Well….this:

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

Posts: 400 And that’s typing with only two fingers no less.

in

33 Catagories And most are pretty vague I admit.

Comments: 644 Folks actually stopped to chat. Okay… So almost half are my replies. S’okay with me.

Spamments (last year or so): 6506 No comment…

PR: 5 Go figure…

Alexa: 455554 Now that’s gotta mean something!

Blog Juice: 1.6 to 2.2 to 1.7 to ?? So what do they know? They missed 199 freakin’ incoming Technorati links fer chrissakes!

Blog Flux: 810 to 508 to 824 And it will be different tomorrow too…

Blog Lines: 9 Just a-cookin’ here ain’t we?

Technorati Authority: 65 I feel so barely officious.

What else we got here? Let’s see…

I’ve been called an and a blogger by Liz and a by Micki.

I’ve posted about life at home, life as a veteran and life in general. I’ve talked about blogging, community and WordPress. Reviewed this, that and the other thing just ‘cuz I wanted too. Ranted about ridiculous antics by our so called officials and puzzled over stupid people tricks.

Some of my posts are way too long.

I’ve helped out a few of my fellow WP bloggers that were having trouble with themes, plugins, upgrading and hosts. I’ve sweated over posts that I didn’t have to. Laughed in delight and howled in derision. Growled and cursed in frustration and completely destroyed one keyboard because I made the same typo 6 times in a row.

My wonderful lady gave me one of her sub domains when I voiced my desire to have my very own WP blog (Thank you honey. Regret it yet?). And I’ve made several friends along the way and at least two real good ones. Becky helped me out when I first decided to “do-it-myself and I passed the experience on to Elaine when she first made the big move herself.

May she forgive me someday.

I almost decided to quit exactly two times. Never again.

I’ve neglected my sidebars, my links, my blogroll and the categories. I do like my header image though.

I’ve sat up till late at night and back at it early in the morning. I feel my poor wife has become a blogger widow and I’m forever thankful for her patience.

It takes me way too long to get one single post out.

I pay for the privilege of hanging my face out in public and exposing them to the strange workings of my mind. I’ve thrown the idea of monetization right out the window. I’ll never make a dime with this blog and that’s as it should be.

I’ve poured over statistics, SEO and Webmaster tools. I turned poor Firefox into a complete set of blogging tools by stuffing it so full of extensions they’re running out it’s furry little ears. I’ve pounded and hammered at my WP installation until I finally liked the shape of it. I’ve left exactly eight questions on the WordPress forums–all unanswered.

I have plugins for my readers, plugins for comments and plugins for me. But I’ve never plugged a sponsor.

I had to stuff more memory and a 550 watt power supply into my old computer just to so it could keep up.

I’ve wrapped the blog in 4 different themes and will most likely try out a few more before my next renewal.

And I’ve missed a thousand other points and people but time simply does not permit. Thank you all.

Did I have to think twice before renewing? Uh-uh. Not in your life.

Why, you may ask?

Because I’m still having a hell of a good time!

That’s why.

What do I think the future may bring?

Heck if I know. That’s the best part of it I think.

Onward…

The above Text Browser gives you suggestions on how to improve your site’s overall SEO score and shows you percentage of relevancy of your Site’s title, description and keywords. All you have to do to access this handy browser is go to the Domain Tools main page and type in your site’s URL into the search box provided. When your “Whois” page loads up, you’ll see the Text Browser over in the right sidebar. Just click anywhere inside the Text Browser to bring it up. Once it’s loaded you’ll see a small button in the upper left hand corner of the browser with an “I” on it. Click on that to bring up the “Optimization Notes” page and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Anyway, without going into a lengthy explanation as to how I did this, that and the other thing and mostly because the lawn needs mowing, I managed to get my my blog’s SEO rating up from 92% to 97% overall with 100% relevancy for my keywords and description by adjusting these two items using the above WordPress plugin and monitoring the changes in relevancy by clicking on the little refresh button in the navigation bar of the Text Browser. Worked pretty slick.

The “Web Developer Toolbar” extension for Firefox came in handy when I discovered that no matter what I put in for my keywords, they never seemed to change in the Text Browser. By viewing the “generated” source code of my home page using the Web Developer Toolbar, I found that although my keywords were being correctly changed in the header, there was also another line of similar code generating yet another set of keywords lower down in the source code which were the ones I was seeing in the Text Browser. This finally led me to my tagging plugin that I had previously set up to generate my keywords and it was interfering with the SEO plugin. I changed the tagging options so the plugin wouldn’t generate keywords and voila(!)…the problem was fixed.

Now does this mean that I actually have an almost perfect SEO score? No, it probably doesn’t since I don’t know how valid the Domain Tools’ Text Browser really is especially in the present day confusion of what really works for good site SEO.

Now, does what I’ve written come across terribly confusing?

You bet it does…even to me which is why I spent two hours playing around like I did–for educational purposes. I’m still too light on the subject of SEO for me to be comfortable with it as it stood. What I mean is; you can have all the damn SEO plugins you can get your hands on but you have to know how to use them before they can be effective. Hence all the experimenting. I just figured I’d throw a post up about it so I can make any readers who happen to stop by scratch their respective heads as to what the heck I was doing.

Confusion loves company you know.

Technorati tags: SEO, Domain Tools, keywords, WordPress SEO, SEO score

Things may get hard to find for those of you who who tried to get here from a search but hopefully things will get straightened out as time goes on. If anyone has some useful SEO advice they might want to pass my way I definitely won’t mind listening. In the meantime, I’ll be working on getting things right.

So what kind of keywords would one use for a personal type blog anyway?

Technorati Tags: SEO, 404 pages

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