Trivial Matters

I’m taking today to update Trivial Matters itself. I created a page for TNT, which I will be adding to once I get the fundraising page setup tomorrow (this weekend at the latest). I also updated the FAQ page with the last post, and updated the About the Author page to reflect some recent changes.

I’m still waiting for the new site layout to take effect here. I don’t know what Today.com’s schedule is for the final switch, but they have a beta theme up that people can switch to while they test things out. I decided to just wait for them to finish the beta and switch at the end. That way I only have to fix things once (hopefully) instead of every day.

I also added the RSS feed for Trivial Matters to my Facebook page. Right now, it shows the full post on Facebook, which doesn’t help my stats very much. The admins here are going to change that soon, and only the first few lines of text will show up on FB. In the meantime, it would be appreciated that if you are reading this on FB, please click over to the site so that I can keep track of how many views I’m getting.

It’s not just a money thing either. I’m constantly checking my stats after each post to see how many hits a post gets over time. Some of my posts get a mention on my Twitter feed, and I can see a spike in traffic from TinyURL or something related. If people start clicking over from FB, I can monitor similar effects when the RSS feed updates over there (it’s not a quick as I’d like).

The Meetup Email Lists post was a huge hit. It has had 79 hits so far (73 in the first 24 hours), not including hits from the main page (as many as 14 additional hits). The avergae daily visit count doubled overnight, bringing Trivial Matters into the top 350 on Today.com. My hope is that the traffic generated by my fundraising will help bring those numbers up even more. I’ve already pledged all of the money earned by this blog to TNT/LLS, and a sudden spike in visits could result in a payment bonus to that end.

So, the TNT stuff should be up this weekend. I’m still hammering out the details for the raffles. My plan as of now is to offer a different item each month (February - June) and add a bonus item if we surpass a set goal amount. For example, the first item could be an iPod with a iTunes gift card thrown in for going above a certain amount.

Traffic to the blog has slowed the last few days. It’s not like I was getting thousands of hits a day anyway, so when an average of 10 (per day) turns into an average of 5, it kinda stings a bit.

I know… I should write something interesting every once in a while, and “they will come.” But how do I know what is interesting? I check the searches and I seem to get hits on “pub quizzing,” “music trivia,” and “heroes” which is great, but I’ve already written about those topics. (Yes, I know there are more FAQs for me to write, but I’m pacing myself.)

Obviously, the searches only tell me about things I’ve already written. If someone does a search for “puppies,” they are not going to get to here unless I’ve already written about puppies. So, I’ve installed a new widget on the side called Skribit. People can add a topic suggestion and then others can vote on them.

Honestly, I’m not too concerned with the voting part, just the suggestions. I don’t think there’ll be too many that I won’t be able to write about them all. Voting may just help prioritize.

So suggest away. In the meantime I will continue to search the interwebs for interesting stuff to talk/rant/blog about.

So Iraq is halfway to agreeing to kick out US troops by the end of 2011, with a large exodus to start next Summer. It will be interesting to see if we can abide by that. Of course, President-Elect Obama had campaigned on withdrawing from Iraq and focusing on Afghanastan, which is what I think prompted the Iraqi Cabinet to make the motion for withdraw now.

They don’t have to listen to Bush, lame duck that he is, and Obama doesn’t have the power to go back on his statements quite yet. By the time Obama is in office and calling the shots, Iraq will have the “Mission Accomplished” banner prepped to hang at Baghdad International Airport as soldiers, marines, and airmen board their chartered flights home.

The problem with this is that Iraq is now a “friend” of the U.S. And we like to maintain bases in countries that are our “friends” because they are usually within earshot of countries that are less than friendly. So the question is not whether we will leave Iraq, but how many other countries where we currently have SOFAs (status of forces agreements) will we be withdrawing from in the next four years.

Will America retreat to it’s own borders and start to deal with it’s own problems before taking up it’s role as international beat-cop yet again. Or will we bully our way into staying in Iraq, and give the international community another reason to lothe us.

I couldn’t sleep last night and wound up surfing the interwebs for a bit. I made my way over to kgw.com, which is the website for the Portland NBC affiliate. I started reading the local news stories, and after about three of them I kept getting a registration page. It seemed that I could no longer use the site without registering. WTF?!?!

It’s not like they wanted to charge me to read the news. That much I could understand. But they just wanted my information for marketing purposes. The site is already covered in advertisements, and the font size is barely large enough to read in order to give them maximum ad space, and they want more.

If they want to prompt for registration once, that’s fine. There should be an option to to decline it and continue reading. But that’s just my opinion.

About two weeks ago I got a Blockbuster Online account to help with my “classic” movie catch-up. I used to have a Netflix account, but let it end before my last deployment. I went with Blockbuster this time because of the recommendation of friends, but so far I’m not feeling the love.

Netflix was very fast. The one-day turn around they advertise is pretty accurate. I had heard that Blockbust was just as fast, logging your movies back into the system the moment they hit the post office. As of now, though, it’s taking up to four days to receieve, process, and send a new movie, and an additional two days to recieve the new movie. That’s up to six days! In two weeks I’ve only received seven discs, and one of those was an in-store exchange. And it’s not like these discs are traveling far either. The address listed on the return envelope is a Portland PO box. They must have a processing center in town.

This isn’t to say that it is all bad. The in-store exchange feature is nice. I wanted something to watch Saturday, so I took in one of the discs and traded it for a new release, saving me $5 in the process.  I also noticed that they are currently processing a disc that doesn’t come out until tomorrow. I don’t know yet if it will ship today, to arrive on or after the release date, or if they’ll wait till tomorrow to ship it (adding another day to the wait). Update: According to the site, the disc shipped today with an “estimated” arrival date of Thursday.

I also don’t like the fact that their download feature only works on Windows (and only in IE or Firefox with an IE plugin). Where’s the Mac love? You know we can handle it. (And it’ll compete with iTunes, which can only be a good thing.)

I’ll hold onto the account for another month and see if there’s any improvement. After that, I may just go back to Netflix (and lose the in-store trade-in ability).