Justin Cox's Mindless Chatter » blogging

February Blog-O-Rama

Justin — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 15:08:24 +0000

It’s been six months since I last attempted the Blog-O-Rama Challenge. Despite February being a short 28 days, I figured it was time to bring the challenge back.

Over the next 28 days expect to see some of the most interesting and insightful posts ever published on the internet. Ok, that’s not exactly true. You should really expect a plethora of useless drivel, most of which will be utterly unimaginative and not worth the time it takes to read it. Yeah, you got me. That’s also not true. In reality you can expect 27 more posts that fall somewhere in between win and fail. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.

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Five Little Questions That Aren’t So Little

Justin — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 00:19:20 +0000

I’m not usually one for meme’s but this one seemed like a good bit of fun. It’s an interview meme being conducted by fellow bloggers. I found the meme a Gretch-a-Sketch’s very cool site and decided to throw my name in the ring. Should you be interested, or want to participate, here are the rules:

The Rules of the Interview
1. Leave me a comment saying you want to be interviewed.
2. I’ll email you five questions, of my determination not yours!
3. You update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

A few days back Gretchen sent me five questions. It’s taken me a little bit of thinking to properly answer them, but hopefully it’ll be worth it. Without further adieu, here’s what Gretchen wanted to know:

1. If you were limited to seeing one genre of movie for the rest of your life, which genre would you choose?

Can I say indie? It’s listed as a genre at Netflix so it can’t be cheating, right? I’ve always said the Independent Spirit Awards are the coolest thing Hollywood does and that independent films are the only true creativity left out west. The stories are more interesting, the characters are more real, and they’re just much more enjoyable movies to watch. If I were restricted to just watching indie filmes for the rest of time, I’d be alright with that.

2. Do you have any secret talents that none of us know about yet?

I don’t think I’ve talked much about it here or on Twitter, but I really enjoy cooking. Inspiration typically comes from the Food Network, usually through Diners, Drive Ins, and Dives or from something created by Alton Brown or Giada De Laurentiis. I’m not a great cook, but I know my way around a kitchen and do enjoy it and not many people know that, so there you go.

3. Which of the 48 continental states would you visit if you had a free month and unlimited funds?

I would love to tour California. Driving the PCH seems like a lot of fun and it’d be very cool to be able to go from the large cities in the south to the vast wilderness in the north. Not to mention seeing the redwoods and Hollywood. That’d be a very cool month. It’d have to be one of the months that has 31 days though; 30 or 28 just wouldn’t be enough.

4. What’s your favorite part about being a youth minister?

Good question. I really enjoy my job and there are many things that could potentially be my favorite: working with the kids (surprised?), planning and executing retreats and mission trips all over the country, and being able to give back to a system that helped me when I was younger. Though what I consider my favorite part would be our worship experience on Sunday nights. Over the last year it has greatly transformed into what it is now — a very energized youth praise band and messages built around month long themes. It’s been a very cool process to be a part of and it has presented some very cool worship experiences.

5. (I’m gonna steal one from my interview because I think it’s so good.) What do you hope to accomplish with your blog?

I don’t know if I’ve ever really thought about that. I write things mostly for myself — there are a few things I write that I ~~know~~ think other people would be interested in. It would be awesome to be the next John Gruber and live off my blog, but I’m pretty sure that’s not going to happen. The site landed me a few featured spots in the local paper over the years, but that’s not really what I write for. When it comes down to it, I write as a personal outlet and if people find it interesting, than that’s pretty cool too.

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Easy Spoiler Tags in Wordpress with CSS

Justin — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 17:38:51 +0000

I’ve been known to spoil a few things in the past on Twitter and here on the blog. Sometimes my excitement prevents me from using better judgement. To try and counter that, at least here on the blog, I’ve created a simple spoiler tag.

On the site, the spoiler tag will simply black out the text in question. Should you want to read the spoiler, all you have to do is put your mouse on the text and all will be revealed. Check it out:

You’re reading this text and all is really cool but all of a sudden I decided to drop some really revealing information that you weren’t expecting. Now, thanks to the spoiler tag, you don’t have to see if you don’t want to.

Should you want to implement this on your own site, all you have to do is add the following CSS to your style.css template file:

.spoiler { background: #000; color: #000; }
.spoiler:hover { background: inherit; color: inherit; }

Then, the next time you decide to write something that could contain potentially spoilerific details, just wrap the text in a spoiler span:

Juicy information goes here.

I’m sure there are other things you could use this for, like making your blog posts look like something released under the Freedom of Information Act, but I’ll leave that up to you.

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The Internet Overdose Song

Justin — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 04:32:57 +0000

It’s possible to have a little too much of the internet these days. Seems like there’s constantly a new social site to join, blog to read, person to connect to, and, well, you get the point. I came across this (embedded below) the other day and, well it kind of strikes a chord. I mean, I do use 1Password to keep track of the some 30 different web passwords I use. I do use less than 140 characters for an awful lot of communication and, well, I do remember when I was trying to manage two or three different emails at once and thought myself rather 1337. Yeah, that’s right. Anyway, this song is pretty funny. Enjoy.

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One Spam Comment to Rule Them All

Justin — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 02:07:50 +0000

Being a blog on the internet with open commenting I get a fair amount of spam comments. The various WordPress features and plugins I have generally do a good job of keeping out about 99.9% of these spam comments, but there is the occasional one that gets through. One such comment made it through earlier today and cracked me up enough that I had to share it.

Lie down on a car accident and char do everything gigantic boobs else would take five.

That’s it. Obviously some random word generator went haywire and created a sentience to get past spam catchers. I don’t really have anything else to say about it. It just cracked me up.

What’s the funniest spam comment you’ve ever seen?

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End of the Journey

Justin — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 19:57:29 +0000

Well, here we are, the end of the journey. It’s been 31 days since I started the Blog-O-Rama Challenge and it’s finally come to an end. As crazy as it sounds, there was something posted every single day in the month of August. Sure, everything (and I do mean everything) was written at least a day before it was posted, but the fact remains that it was written and it was posted.

Going into this I thought it would be a pretty tall order and that, should creativity run out, I could always post a link to an interesting find on the internet with a snarky comment, sort of what Gruber does. Of course he posts a half dozen a day, intermixed with his content, but he makes money off the deal. Either way, I didn’t end up doing that. Sure, I posted some links and some snarky comments, but everything was — in my mind — solid content. This was a big surprise.

Will I do this again? Yeah, maybe. We’ll see what happens and if the mood to delve fully into mindlessness and creativity strikes. What I think will happen, almost immediately, is the frequency of posting will increase. It’ll be pretty hard to go from sometimes writing four posts a day (which I did) back to zero. But who knows. I am lazy so there’s always that.

What was your favorite post during the Blog-O-Rama Challenge? Let me know in the comments below.

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An Award and an Answer

Justin — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 15:29:02 +0000

The other day I noticed that fellow blogger and Twitterer Oh My Seven decided that I deserved this sweet little token of appreciation:

Yeah, it’s pretty cool. Now, after reading her blog post a second time — it was all about me the first time — I realized that Seven had given it to three bloggers (myself included) and her brother had given it to four (Seven included). Here comes the problem. I don’t really know who to pass it on to. You see, because of this award I realized why I’m such a bad blogger: I don’t read other blogs.

I mean, sure, I read a ton of topical blogs — things like Destructiod, MacUser, and TV Squad — but I don’t really read people’s personal blogs. It’s not really that I’m too self absorbed to be concerned with other peoples lives (maybe it is, what do I know?), it’s really that I find it odd reading about other peoples daily lives. It seems a bit invasion of privacyish — which is why I don’t really talk at all about my own life here. It’s all observations and topical things, because that’s what I read and find interesting.

It’s funny. You see, back in April I asked what blogging is all about. Who would have thought that my August Blog-O-Rama challenge would bring that answer. Warning: introspective content ahead.

For me, blogging is all about topical issues and not about life events. Life events are private things that don’t really need to be shared with the whole world. I call this site Mindless Chatter because it’s my incoherent ramblings about topics that interest me. It’s why you’ll find plenty of posts about Apple and not many about what I did yesterday. It all makes sense now.

But this touchy feelly crap doesn’t get me out of passing this award along. No, that’d be too easy. Instead, I’m going to pass it onto two topical blogs that I do read and enjoy that aren’t owned by a giant media conglomerate (since Seven’s brother went with four and Seven went with three, I figure I’m supposed to give it to two):

Two Slashes
Two Slashes is written by Nick Tabick and is basically his views on tech related issues. They are always interesting and I find myself commenting more there then anywhere else on the interwebs.

Hummer Guy
Hummer Guy is written by Brian Dooley, my college roommate. It’s about, you guessed it, Hummers: industry trends, new products, racing, everything. I don’t know how Brian gets all his information and it’s possible I don’t want to know, but it’s well written and deserving of a read — if you’re into Hummers of course.

So there you go. It was a long road to get to the point where I could share the award with others, but I learned something along the way. Did you? What defines a good blog to you? Topics, personal stories, jokes? Let me know in the comments.

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Blog Action Day 2008: Poverty

Justin — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:16:14 +0000

October 15th is Blog Action Day, a day where bloggers around the globe commit to talk about a single issue facing the planet. This year’s topic is Poverty. This site will be one of thousands participating. If you have a blog I suggest you commit your blog to join the conversation.

Have any suggestions for what I should focus on for my Blog Action Day discussion or have a blog that will be participating? Let me know in the comments below.

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August Blog-O-Rama Halfway Point

Justin — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:44:19 +0000

Two weeks ago I started the Blog-O-Rama Challenge. So far I’ve actually been able to post some form of new content every single day. Granted, all of it is written a few days prior to it actually posting, but it’s still daily content. In fact, before the Blog-O-Rama began it took nearly three months to see fifteen posts. Since August 1 there have, obviously, been fifteen posts. That’s a big difference.

I’ve noticed a few other big differences that I actually didn’t count on before starting this project. Namely traffic. There has been a large increase in visitors here and in turn, comments left on posts. I guess it shows that new and interesting content breeds activity and conversation. If I cared about trying to make money off this site then that’d be good to know. But I don’t. I’m not undertaking the Blog-O-Rama challenge to pimp my stats or try and become one of the blogging elite, it’s just an interesting result.

Another interesting thing I’ve noticed is that I talk about Twitter an awful lot. Of the first fifteen posts in the Blog-O-Rama, nearly a third of them are carrying the Twitter tag. Considering prior to August 1 I had only tagged three posts with Twitter, that’s a large number. I have also ranted twice. I haven’t ranted in, well, who knows how long (I cleared out the Rants category at some point for some unknown reason). Back in the sites heyday I ranted a lot. It was fun. Perhaps there will be more ranting in the future.

So far the Blog-O-Rama experience has been pretty good. It’s been challenging to come up with interesting topics to cover and fun to actually cover those topics. The second half is going to be much more difficult though. When this posts (I’m writing this on the 10th) I will be out of town for the weekend and will be leaving at the end of the month for PAX. So the challenge will be to create enough content to cover these days while I’m away. But that’s why I’m calling this the Blog-O-Rama Challenge. Alright, enough rambling. I’m going to bed.

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1982 in Pictures

Justin — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:02:09 +0000

Today I noticed OhMySeven has an oddly named post. Just a simple 1982. Having been born in 1982 I was curious. Evidently it’s one of those web games that goes around the blogging world. This one lists pictures found on a Flickr search of your birth year. Since I needed some content and because this one was actually interesting I decided to play.

Sweet Van Halen Guitar by vintageguitarz

Johnny Mac at the Wimbledon Final by ~Its_Me!

Sharp MZ-700 by Sameli

Cool huh?

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