As you may have noticed, with the advent of automatic updates via Twitter and del.icio.us, yours truly has gotten rather lazy about posting things that you, gentle reader, would find interesting, delightful, or thought-provoking.
This upsets me possibly more than it upsets you, because after all no one likes to feel like they’re shirking their most important duties. The particularly astute may notice that I have taken the author count on the side bar from 4 down to 1.
I feel as though I will be much less inclined to badger my friends into producing material for this website if I do not count them as “authors”. In my mind, an author on this blog should be committed to posting something original at least once per week, if not more often. I barely make this quota myself at times, and would by no means wish to start imposing it on others. Therefore I have decided that they are welcome to contribute at any time, but will only have the burden of being considered an author should they desire it.
That said, I am looking for a few good creatures who can type, who would like to contribute or be a full-fledged author. It’s not a job, I cannot pay anyone for writing here, not even myself. It is purely voluntary. As you may have noticed there really isn’t much of a theme going here. Pretty much any subject goes. Those highly prone to inflammatory remarks, spamming, and being generally hateful need not apply. We here (and I guess at this point it’s the royal “we”) at RKNet are fans of chaos, but not of wantonly pissing off others for no particular reason. What say you, any takers?
Because I’ve caught a serious case of Twitter fever, I’ve added the TwitterTools plugin, which will daily dump my meaningless tweets (from my personal twitter, not the RKNet twitter) into a single post. The benefit of this is that you, gentle readers, will be privvy to the exciting (HA) life of yours truly, and get the added benefit of all the neat links that I tweet, but neglect to del.icio.us and totally don’t bother blogging about.
The other plugin is more for me, and doesn’t have nearly as much of a direct effect on the content of this blog (yet). I finally got around to adding the WPStats plugin and I honestly don’t know how I went without it for so long. Granted, the stats provided by FeedBurner are pretty good, but I need something more directly related to my actual site traffic. While additions like Clickheat are fun, they aren’t necessarily the strongest measure of visitors and activity. In a text-based medium, you’ve got to know what text brings people to you, and what text keeps them there.
Pretty excited about the whole thing. You should be too! It ultimately means I can monitor to see what makes you the visitors the most happy, and increase the volume on those subjects to 11.
P.S. How do the google ads look? Obtrusive? Not awesome enough? Discuss. I’m hoping that they will eventually start actually trending towards being “contextual” so there can be some halfway decent sponsors in the mix. I also have designs on cleaning this place up (a lot) and re-appealing to Project Wonderful’s review staff so I can then allow real humans to display fun ads for their neat stuff on my blog.
Today I put a click mapping app on RandomKitty.net. It will give me “heat maps” of where people click when they are on the main page of the blog. I may add it elsewhere, but the home page needs an overhaul before I do that. If you’d like to view the current heat map of RKNet, go to http://www.randomkitty.net/clickheat and log in with the username and password of “checkit” (no quotes obviously). You’ll have to look at the whole week or the whole month to really get any data, and most of that was me clicking random areas to generate data that I could view to test my installation. I look forward to getting a little eye-tracking information for the site. I’ve been doing a lot of usability reading lately and I know that observing the patterns of people who visit your site is a great way to learn how to cater to them in a more educated fashion. (Or I could just ask: how do you like the site? Is it easy to use? Entertaining? I love feedback, good or bad.)
I also signed up for a Twitter app that will now auto-feed the new posts to the RKNet twitter account. I’m hoping that it will spread the news a little more effectively, maybe get a couple more people on the proper RSS, so they can tell me the Twitter update is annoying and can I please turn that off? I’ve also collected a lot of unique and bizzare followers on Twitter here lately, although I did end up following zefrank, and I even participated in a project to tell really short bedtime stories. (There are some really sweet ones in there.) I’m contemplating signing up for a reverse item, that will post my tweets to the blog, but that could be pretty blah if it’s just me. It would be way more fun if the other writers also posted their tweets.
I just got turned down for displaying Project Wonderful ads, but I’m not down about it. It’s just inspiration to really clean up the home page, get some content squeezed out of the fascinatingly weird group I hang out with, and resubmit. Besides, setting up a PW account was an important step for me. Not so I can subject you the viewer to ads here, but so I can eventually promote RKNet and monetarily support sites that I visit and enjoy at the same time! Win win. Besides, I am in the process of setting up another app that will hopefully drive some more traffic, maybe provide you the gentle readers with some links to other fun internet items (as if you need anything else but RKNet! PFFT!), and perhaps even drag in a little cash for yours truly. Mmm… delicious petty cash.
Speaking of del.icio.us, I finally figured out how to get a feed of links put up by people in my network. It’s like a whole world opened up. I suddenly understand the social value of the site with stunning clarity, and I have to say I’m networked with some folks that have great taste in linking.
The more I experiment with the various services, apps, and information sources that are out there, the more fun I have. It may not all be terribly productive, but most of it does provide me with opportunities to meet new people and learn new things, and I think that’s pretty valuable, don’t you?
We had precisely zero submissions. I’m speechless, gentle readers, but ultimately not terribly surprised. We are a sparse, busy, and easily distracted lot here at RKNet, and we can only assume that our readership shares at least some of these qualities. Most notably the sparseness, what with the sheer lack of exposure. It will change, someday, you’ll see, you’ll ALL see! BWAHAHAHAHAHA-*cough* ’scuse me.
I would like to give honorary first place, however, to Dr. Hypercube for his amazing concept submission. While he was not confident that he could produce the appropriate visual representation of his thoughts on the matter, he was kind enough to send me his idea.
Stay tuned for a complete write up, with pictures to help shed some light on the brilliance at work, soon to come.
Well kids, there’s about 2 days left for RKNet’s very first contest: Design-a-Vagina.
Truth be told I still haven’t come up with any suitable prizes, although the following options have crossed my mind:
Print the winning entry on a shirt, bag, or just get it on some really nice print stock.
Some manner of personal manipulation device (a.k.a. dildo)
A gift certificate of some sort.
A hearty congratulations and a page to enshrine the winner for all time.
However, given that there have been approximately ZERO entries thus far (not even non-qualified entries from the judges!), I suspect that I may not have to concern myself with prizes. Should anyone desire to participate, now is the time! If there’s significant activity near the closing bell I will be more than happy to accept entries that are technically “late”.
Gentle readers, this is your time to shine. Scrape at the creative mucus that resides in your skull for the sake of re-imagining that oh-so-mysterious entry to the female generative organs and we promise not to disappoint in rewarding you.
With all the talk of femalebodyaugmentation and supplementation, I felt it was high time somebody treat the subject with the respect it deserves… by turning it into a children’s workbook sheet and making a contest out of it.
Below are 2 PDFs and a JPG version, meant for 8.5×11 standard printing. I opted to keep it black and white so as not to disappoint those sans color printer (like myself). Photoshop and meatspace entries are welcome. Due to an alarming lack of popularity of RKNet, I’ll run this contest for 2 weeks, starting today. (This also gives me time to determine prizes. Reasonable suggestions welcome!) The last entries must be in by February 27th at noon (EST). After that, I and my esteemed colleagues will proceed to pass them around, get piss drunk, and pick one at random. Which means, gentle readers, that it doesn’t matter how “good” or “bad” you actually do at this activity, because winning isn’t so much based on merit, as it is favoritism and inebriated whimsy! Isn’t that great?
Gentle readers: Well, it’s happened. I done hit the big time. It’s only a matter of time before I’ve abandoned you to go sip expensive bottled waters on yachts and anal-retentively police my own wiki entry.
What, might you ask, has caused this sudden surge in adulation for and popularity of yours truly? Well whether you’d ask or not, I’ll tell you! I’m published!
A while back, I heard about a six word memoir contest being held by SMITH Magazine. I mulled it over and decided that sounded like a lot of fun. So I cruised by the contest site, mulling over my life and adventures and everything so far. It’s hard to write a memoir when your life is still in full swing, but I found six words that I really felt fit who I am and where I am at this point in my life, submitted them with my contact info and that was that.
Some time passed and I got an email from Rachel Fershleiser, the woman who did an awful lot of work to make this happen. The editors of SMITH mag hand selected my entry out of over 5000 that had been submitted! WOW!
Truth be told I didn’t really believe it until yesterday evening when I got my contributor copy of the book in the mail, along with a press kit to help promote this volume that I had a hand in creating.
The book that is the result of so many people’s honesty and wit is called: Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure. They aren’t kidding about the famous, either. They were able to get six words of to-the-bone slices of life from the likes of Stephen Colbert, Aimee Mann, and Mario Batali!
It is a privledge and an honor to have my words chosen, and put into this really interesting volume. True, I cracked it open to find my name, but wound up reading the introduction and marvelling at the process and the TLC the editors clearly put into the project. The memoirs themselves run between hilarious and heartbreaking, with about every other sentiment you can imagine in between. I wound up going through it cover to cover already, and I keep thumbing back to share with my co-workers and friends. I actually can’t say enough good things about this, and I’d say only 25% of that excitement has to do with seeing my name in print.
For anybody who lives near me, if you get a copy and want to get my signature next to my entry, I’d be positively ecstatic to do so. I actually think it would be a lot of fun to go around getting signatures from as many chosen entrants as possible. (Especially if you could get a signature like Colbert’s!)
No, not the abandonment issues you the gentle readers feel when I neglect to update. Nor the abadonment issues my shoutcastlisteners recently developed due to my foolish desire to pull the plug on that project.
This could be the most awesome thing art.lebdev has ever done. Which is saying a lot because if you hit the site, you’ll immediately note (besides the serious Optimus promo) at least a few nifty things.
What is the Optimus? Well, I’d tell you but then I’d have to kill you.
In all seriousness, it’s a fully programmable LCD keyboard. What this means is that it can be customized perfectly for gaming shortcut key layouts, photo editing shortcut key layouts, various language layouts, etc etc. Not only can you assign keys to specific tasks, but you can have those keys display custom images so you don’t forget what exactly those keys are for.
As delightful as that sounds for multi-discipline computer users, the Optimus has been delayed time and time again. The price point may be a bit off-putting for a lot of people, also. $462.27 US dollars will snag you one of these gorgeous technical delights with ONE programmable key. $1564.37 US dollars will get you all 113 keys of LCD glory.
As of this post, it’s available for pre-order and is supposedly going to ship in February 2008. Be patient, gentle readers! Don’t smash that piggy yet (unless you can afford to pre-order)! Save your pennies, nickels, dimes, wrinkled dollar bills.
Despite my lust for this beauty, I’m still skeptical enough to want to wait for some solid reviews before I commit myself to starvation to get one.
The Point is one of my favorite animated films of all time. I first saw it on the Disney Channel in the early-to-mid 80’s. I remember that distinctly because the narrator for the film was Alan Thicke, not the more commonly known narrators of Ringo Starr (VHS release) or Dustin Hoffman (special TV presentation, NBC I think).
I discovered later in life that this melodic fable began its life as the musings of a man on acid. I purchased the album version of The Point! and in the booklet contains the backstory on how Nilsson had a revelation in the wee hours of the morning. To explain what exactly occured to him would spoil watching the film, and the last thing I wish to do is ruin the experience by allowing any of you gentle readers to allow presuppositions to cloud your minds.
I think that all folks young and old should get a chance to see this film, as the message within is one that applies to all of us. Not to mention the rich-yet-rough, hand crafted nature of this gently watercolored piece of animated cinema is so engaging that it appeals to all kinds of visual tastes, not just fans of animation. (Read: It’ll make you look like an important, artsy person if you watch it.)
For you to get a taste of this delightful film, I have put together a block of four selections of music from the film, and one extra Nilsson song that just so happens to rock pretty hard.
Some kids play in the sandbox. We play in the.... litterbox??? The RKNet staff is pleased that you decided to stop by. Currently this is a 1 author project, with periodic guest posts. Contact giania [at symbol] gmail.com if you'd like to play here to.
