Symbolic Forest

The great thing about a three-day weekend is that it means you can fit two days’ social events into the weekend, and still have a day over to relax and recover before getting back into the office. And, of course, to try and make sure you have plenty of blog posts in draft ready for the following week.

In the meantime, it’s been a while since we’ve had Search Request Round-Up. So, here are some of the better ones:

did nostradamus predict bird flu – no.
have you tried turning it off and on again – ohhh, yes. Many, many times.
takin over the asylum dvd – I have no idea if it’s been released or not, but it definitely should be, and I’d buy it if I found a copy.
not to be loose or hump shunted is a phrase you see painted on the sides of railway wagons. In essence, it means “careful – don’t bash it about”.
rachel whiteread cubes what will happen to the – I’d assume they’ll all be melted down, because they do look recyclable. Unless, of course, anyone has a spare derelict power station to re-erect it in.
has suzie dent got a boyfriend? – I really have no idea. Try asking Des Lynam.
how do you make chocolate cornflake cake? – I can’t remember the details, but essentially you just mix cornflakes and melted chocolate, and try to resist eating the mixture before it sets.
pasquale’s italian edinburgh – I don’t think we ever did work out if Pasquale’s chippy on Clerk St – the one all the students bought their deep-fried confectionary from in my day – is still there or not.
photograph of drunk people on glasgow underground – I know I, for one, have been drunk on the Glasgow Subway, so they can’t be in that short supply
local paper cleckheaton – I assume it’s covered by the Huddersfield Daily Examiner. Don’t believe everything you read in the papers, though.

And that’s enough of that for a bit.

Keyword noise: internet, search requests.

It’s that Friday post again…

It’s also getting into the hayfever season. I’m already getting complaints about the volume of my sneezes. This morning, though, whilst getting dressed I sneezed. And fell over. With one sneeze, my back became a little world of pain. I could barely move, and had to lie on the floor whimpering for ten minutes in the hope it would go away. It still hurts quite a lot as I’m sat writing this.

Things I’ve been thinking about a lot this week: the rubbish choice we have in the local elections, Flann O’Brien, and the Plain People Of The Internet. Expect them to pop up here again soon.

Following up Tuesday’s post: our ventilation fight with the Office Manager goes on. His latest claim is that it would be illegal for us to prop the door open, under the fire regulations. In retaliation, I now have a digital thermometer on my desk. At least The Boss is starting to weigh in on our side, having realised just how warm our office gets. Currently we’re at 22.3 Celsius and rising.

There was a bit of a spike in blog traffic the other day; it turns out I was spidered by a mysterious site which consists solely of an “under construction” page. How 1990s of them. I suppose it’s my own fault for not setting up robots.txt properly.

Current temperature: 23.8 Celsius and rising. Sorry, 23.9.^* I’m off to get a glass of water.

*** or 75.2 if you’re American. Although it went up to 76.3 in the time it took me to write this footnote.

Keyword noise: air conditioning, allergy, backache, hayfever, sneezing, temperature, ventilation.

The other day, I wrote a post that essentially said: “today was a Thursday, but it felt like a Friday“. The next day – when it was still the top post on the page – Gordon replied: “hang on, it is Friday!”

I know it’s hardly a serious thing, but it set me thinking: should I try to stick to a more rigid posting schedule? After all, it’s convenient for the readers if I’m nice and predictable: posts coming up at the same time every day, not just maybe one a day, at some point. The Plain People Of The Internet,^* the theory goes, are used to, say, predictable telly scheduling,^** and would like predictable blog scheduling too.^***

As it is, the blog is updated when I can think of something. Usually, this means late at night, which (in turn) means that, say, a Thursday entry doesn’t get read until Friday. Sometimes, though, it means lunchtime. Occasionally, I post something early in the morning: this means I have been Organised, and drafted something properly. Most of the time – like now – I write whatever’s on top of my head, and press post straight away. Should I be a bit more organised about it?

* apologies to the late Myles na gCopaleen, whose column in the Irish Times was often visited by the argumentative Plain People Of Ireland.

** Presumably apart from the ones who watch BBC 2.

*** I think I originally read this in something by Nielsen, but I can’t find the quote right now.

Keyword noise: blogging, Jakob Nielsen, regularity, timing.

Gordon has written something very interesting about why he likes reading blogs.

…now and again I’m still taken aback when I read something on a blog that I hadn’t previously considered. … I mean when someone, as part of a post, mentions something specific about themselves that I hadn’t previously noted.

You should go and read the whole thing, because it’s good. Essentially,^* he loves the occasional sudden reminders that you don’t know much about even your regular reads. There are fundamental parts of their personalities that don’t get mentioned.

Personally, when I started this blog, I particularly wanted to hide certain things. Well, “hide” is the wrong word – “omit” would be better. So, there are lots of things about myself that I don’t talk about, largely because they would be really quite boring to most people. Some of the things on the original list, though, have probably seeped through by now. It makes me wonder, though: those of you who read this site even though you don’t know me personally, or from one of the messageboard sites I post on. Do you care that you don’t know very much about me?^**

* and, Gordon, if you’re reading this, I hope I’m not misrepresenting you by my overly-trimmed summary

** For one thing, your mental picture of me is probably better-looking than reality.

Keyword noise: anonymity, blogging, imagination, personality.

Well, I’m back at the office again, pleased to see that WordPress‘s advance-publishing feature works as advertised, to get Saturday’s post up whilst I was still waking up in my hotel bed in Barking.

I had a wonderful weekend away, got a bit emotional at W and P’s wedding, and danced very enthusiastically at their wedding party. I’ll be posting more about it in the next few days, partly because I’m going away again next week, and “what I did on my holidays” will be easy to get written in advance. So, coming soon on this blog: flirting by chocolate, failed blogstalking, sugarcube art (with hide and seek), a stressed registrar, adventures on the District Line, posing for photos, fairy lights, laughter, and lashings and lashings of ginger beer champagne.

Photos will be coming too, once I get my rolls and rolls of film back from the chemists, and get them all scanned. I’m old-fashioned, me.

Keyword noise: Civil Partnership, holiday, London, travel, wedding.

Someone recently said they thought the mysterious creature at the top right was myself. Strangely enough, it isn’t. Here’s a slightly better picture of it:

The creature isn’t me, but it does have a name. This is a gruntlebeast. Although shy,^* and so rarely seen on camera, these rather sad monsters are unfortunately rather common.

Their name comes from their main food: gruntles. They will often attack lonely strangers, using those vicious teeth to remove the victim’s gruntles. Often, the victim will not even notice the beast’s attack, only realising that they now feel rather disgruntled.

Clearly, these things are a menace. They account for a large proportion of the disgruntled people in the world, in turn leading to large-scale outbreaks of annoyance, irritation, depression and Being A Twat. You should watch out for them, and be particularly wary if you hear their distinctive hunting cry: “Arrg kxrrt!” If you see any, or hear of any sightings, then let me know. Be safe out there.

* and also, according to some accounts, sometimes invisible; which may account for the partially see-through appearance of the one in the picture.

Keyword noise: arrg kxrrt, disgruntled, fake mythology, gruntlebeast.

Website design and usability expert Dr Jakob Nielsen has published his list of the top ten blog design mistakes. So, I thought I’d go through the list and see how many of them I’m making.

No author biography, no author photo. Well, there’s a kind of biography, but certainly no photo. I don’t want you to know who I am. It wouldn’t mean anything unless you already know me in real life. Telling you more about myself wouldn’t gain me anything in credibility, which seems to be the most important point here.

Nondescript posting titles – I do this all the time. Mostly because, as he says, writing good headlines is hard work. Partly, though, because this isn’t a news site. If you look at a newspaper, the concise descriptive headlines Nielsen favours are all over the news pages; but the comment sections’ headlines are deliberately vaguer and enticing.

Links don’t say where they go – I try not to do this, because I know it’s bad for search engines.

Classic hits are buried. If I ever write some, I might think about doing something about this.

The calendar is the only navigation – in other words, you should try to categorise everything properly. I’d say I score half-marks on this one.

Irregular publishing frequency is about the only thing on the list you can’t accuse me of, unless you want to complain about me not always posting at the same time every day.

Mixing topics. Hah. I don’t even have a topic.

Forgetting that you write for your future boss – this is why I don’t tell you much about who I am, in the hope of avoiding this problem. Nielsen thinks that trying to avoid this is hopeless given the march of technology, though.

Finally, Having a domain name owned by a weblog service – lots of well-known, well-respected sites do do this. I see the point, though: you need to control your domain to control your reputation. Not something I need to worry about, though.

Totting up, I seem to have hit six (and a half) of the top mistakes in weblog design. All of them, though, are all very good points when made about a different sort of site to mine. I just don’t feel that those six mistakes I’ve made are a problem for me at the moment – and some of them might be mistakes, but they’re decisions that I deliberately took. I’m fairly happy with the nature of this site at the moment, whatever an expert might say.

Keyword noise: Jakob Nielsen, web design, blogging.

Feeling at a loose end, I’ve been experimenting with possible ways of adding Technorati tags to the posts here, without making them unreadable. There are three ideas I’m trying:

1. using a different class of link for links that identify tags
2. additionally, confining tags to a footnote-like section at the bottom of each post
3. putting tags inside an “invisible” block inside each post (using ‘display: none’ to hide the tag paragraph)

This post uses Idea 1; and I’ve also edited Friday’s post to use a combination of ideas 1 and 2. Thursday’s post, on the other hand, has been edited with Idea 2 alone. My first reaction is that including the tags in the post body makes the post look a bit too messy, and not many people will realise the difference between the two sorts of link. If you have an opinion, let me know what you think. Would Idea 3 even work, or would it just be ignored?

Update, later that day: I’ve emailed Technorati Support to ask if Idea 3 would actually work. It does feel like a bit of a dirty, underhand trick to pull though.

Update, some years later – Jan 24th ’09 to be precise: I eventually decided on a method combining Ideas 1 and 2. And – pending a redesign – I still use it. However, I’m currently rewriting all the tags so they don’t go to Technorati any more, they go to “tag pages” within this site instead. It’s demonstrated, for one thing, that lots of people do actually click on the tags. Incidentally, as part of this, I’ve regularised the “test posts” described above; the “(b) test” no longer looks as described.

Keyword noise: blogging, folksonomy, tagging, Technorati, web design.

Standing in the shower tonight, I noticed – for the first time, probably – that it’s branded with the word “Aquatronic”. Or, rather, “AQUATRONIC”.

Now, this is a shower that was made in the 1990s, so I’m not really sure why. I mean, adding “…tronic” onto the end of a name to signify New! Scientific! Modern! really is such a 1960s thing to do. Plus, the “aqua” part is fairly self-explanatory, but the word you end up with is completely meaningless if not negative. Aquatronic? Electricity and water? Doesn’t that get you electrocuted?

It set me off wondering what meaningless-but-great-sounding words I can put together along the same lines. Filktronic? Definitely a plausible music genre even if Google hasn’t heard of it.^* Plockfultronic? Squimtronic? This site is definitely very squimtronic, even if squimtronic doesn’t quite have a meaning yet.

* Not quite true – it returns one hit, a German-language page about a Momus album.

Keyword noise: aquatronic, marketing, Momus, names, squimtronic.

So far, I haven’t tried to explain the name of this site; and nobody’s asked, probably because very few people read it. I thought it up whilst sitting one afternoon on Doncaster station, waiting for a rather late train, and ever since I’ve been worried that it’s too pretentious.

The meaning came second, but if you ask me it’s a good meaning, so that doesn’t really matter very much. The Forest isn’t made of solid wood and trees, but it is there, around us. It’s there all the time, but some days you can see it more than others. Some days you feel that whatever happens to you, however wonderful, you’ll still be feeling awful at the end of the day and you still won’t have achieved anything. That’s because you’re stuck in the Forest, and you haven’t managed to fight your way out of it yet. This site is – at its deepest root – all about doing just that, because it’s written by me, and that’s what I spend an awful lot of my time doing.

That last sentence makes this site sound as if it’s going to be very, very personal, all the time. That’s not true. It also makes this site sound as if it’s going to be very, very pretentious, all the time. I’m going to try to make sure that that’s not true either.

The monster up at the top right does have a name. I’ll get onto that another time, though. I might even make t-shirts.

Update, April 12^th 2022: No, I know the monster’s not there any more, and it hasn’t been for a while, but it’s on the About Me page.

Keyword noise: anxiety, blogging, explanation, names.