At this moment, my flight leaving the United States should have just taken off.

I say “should” and not “has” because I’ve handed off primarily control over RumorsDaily to my cadre of eager robots. From this point forward, unless I say otherwise, updates to RumorsDaily are being made without my direct control. I’ve asked the robots to keep you mildly up-to-date as to my travels, but they’re an unpredictable bunch, so who knows what they might decide to put up in my stead.

As a formal goodbye to RumorsDaily’s human master, here’s a picture of some of the currency I’ll be carrying with me:

Alright. All robots from here on out. Go go robot webmaster!

My favorite search engine query that led someone to find RumorsDaily yesterday:

how do armenians in glendale get their money?

They were drawn in by this spirited discussion.

67 86 responses to a four word post with a misspelled title is weird.

CNN has added a ridiculous new feature which allows you buy t-shirts printed with current headlines. Exciting, right? Well, what’s even better is that the system is based on easy alterable URLs, so instead of a shirt that says ‘Hips Don’t Lie’ Singer Pushes Education (a shirt that I’m sure you all wanted to buy), a quick change to the URL produces this:

Want to make your own? Just insert your own text into the following line of code, using %20 as a space:

http://www.cnn.com/tshirt/?headline=INSERT%20TEXT%20HERE &date=1208818653000&hash=4064bc5a5b643b3a01c4dfc651c1f538 &return_uri=http://www.cnn.com/video/%23/video/world/2008/04/21/verjee.shakira.int.cnn

So now you too can have official CNN brand t-shirts that say Watch FoxNews or We’re Know Where Osama Bin Laden Is And We’re Not Telling or Larry King is Boring even the the blunt Fuck Lou Dobbs. Ok, one more, CNN Reads RumorsDaily.

Ok, now go hack up your own. What’s your favorite?

I’m still in the process of getting all my old pictures online, but I’ve updated the navigation system. You can access it in the Pictures link at the top of the page, or right here:

I’m going to have to start working on maps for New Zealand, Australia, Thailand and Japan.

Today is DC Emancipation Day, celebrated on the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the 1862 bill ending slavery in the District. I’m on a Lincoln kick lately — I just fished reading a book about him and I’m dying to take another trip out to see his monument… it’s been a while.

On another topic, this is my 1000th post on RumorsDaily. Thankfully, it’s on a slightly more auspicious topic than my 100th post or Jacob Grier’s 1000th post.

Some stats for my thousandth post?  Sure!  RumorsDaily has been online for nearly a year and:

• has had 189,420 pageviews
• has had 113,659 visits
• has had 99,583 unique visitors
• has had 2,164 legitimate comments
• has had 5,151 spam comments rejected
• has used 1,528 tags
• the most popular page is Internet People, Who Are They (56,496 pageviews) followed by Not The Daily Show (22,986 pageviews)
• the most popular browser is Firefox (54%) followed by Internet Explorer (34%) and Safari (7%)
• the most popular operating system is Windows (80%) followed by Apple (15%) and Linux (4%)
• the most popular referrer is Google (21%) followed by Reddit (18%) and Stumbleupon (7%)
• the most popular keywords used to find the site were “internet people” (3.11%) followed by “internet people list” (2.87%) and “clockwise dancer” (1.67%)
• the most popular foreign country to be from is Canada (7,345 visitors) followed by the United Kingdom (5,528 visitors) and Australia (2,580 visitors)
• the least popular foreign country to be from is tie between the following unlikely countries: U.S. Virgin Islands, Angola, Djibouti, Libya, Uganda, Cape Verde, Armenia, British Indian Ocean Territory, Afghanistan, Mozambique, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Anguilla, Turks and Caicos Islands, Tanzania, Togo, Reunion, Haiti, Namibia, Botswana, Moldova, Grenada and Kyrgyzstan.
• has been of no tangible benefit to me, or anyone else

Let’s do another thousand.

Emancipation Day via Due Process.

Here’s a quick collection of some of the titles of articles I wrote for RumorsDaily back when it was a dull local college thing (not this modern day, stodgy blog):

• Why I like Hazing
• [My] Ethnocentric Journey
• Are You Homosocial?
• White Face v. Black Face at the Oscars (I’m still talking about this 9 years later)
• Haircut Advice (a barn burner, this one)
• Is the Non-Discrimination Policy About You?
• The Slow Internet, The Truth and Napster (the Truth!)
• Res-Life is Not Fine, Res-Life Should Not Fine
• National Coverage: Is Attention Really What You Want?
• Damn Commie-Nazis 
  
• What the Hell is Hazing Anyway? (I’m not sure where I was heading with this)
• An Open Letter to the World (do you think the world read it?)
• Cops, Donuts and the Mafia?
• Freedom from Electronic Censorship?
• Who Wants to be Racist? (I still ponder this one, as do others)
• Smoking is Cool, or Why Armand Mickune-Santos is Not (now it’s nine years later and I feel bad for having mocked him, he appears to be coaching a softball team today)
• Where Are All the Controversies?

Yeah, I’m starting to think I was looking for trouble back then.

As you may have noticed, I’m futzing with how my blog software handles photos. What that means, in the short run, is that a lot of the old links aren’t going to work. I’ll probably never fix that. But in the coming weeks I’ll get the photo galleries back online in a more convenient (for me) fashion. Sorry.

I’ve upgraded my blogging software to WordPress 2.5, mainly in order to have access to newly implemented image gallery functionality. Unfortunately, the upgrade is causing some issues with paragraph layout. I haven’t yet been able to pin down the problem.

Please excuse any oddly formatted text.

When I asked for input about this site’s redesign, jbg replied that it wasn’t displaying properly on his computer and included this screenshot to show what he was seeing:

Safari 3.1	MSIE 6.0	MSIE 7.0	MSIE 8.0	Firefox 2.1	Firefox 3.0

The issue doesn’t show up for any other browsers, as far as I can tell, and I’m simply not well equipped to fix it. Is anybody else having the same problem?

I’m starting to think I definitely made the right choice on not going down the whole “gossip site” path: Juicy Campus under investigation by New Jersey prosecutors.

Any input/comments on the new site layout?

I’m in the midst of futzing with the design of RumorsDaily.  Things may look goofy or off for the next few days.  Some things might not work.  Sorry about that.

I wrote about this before, but CNN has another story about Juicy Campus:

So what is Juicy Campus and who is behind it? Juicy Campus is a Web site, founded on August 1, 2007, which claims to have “the simple mission of enabling online anonymous free speech on college campuses.”

The site allows and encourages posters to anonymously post uncensored gossip and rumors — the juicier the better — about others. There is a separate section on the site for each college or university, over 60 campuses at last count.

RumorsDaily, back in the day, had a different bent (less gossipy), but it was basically the same idea.  I talked about expanding it nationwide, campus by campus, but never actually did it.  Based on what they’re doing with it (discussing the otherwise anonymous, which I was never a fan of), I think I made the right choice… but when I see that someone out there is causing havoc on campuses nationwide, I can’t say there’s not a little bit of envy.

Of the top 100 websites, there’s a surprising number (38) that I’ve never heard of:

• 8 – Hi5.com
• 14 – Fotolog.net
• 20 – Skyrock.com
• 23 – Megarotic.com
• 24 – Mail.ru
• 26 – Seznam.cz
• 27 – QQ.com
• 35 – Youporn.com
• 40 – Megavideo.com
• 41 – Wretch.cc
• 42 – Free.fr
• 43 – Sina.com.cn
• 44 – Yandex.ru
• 45 – ImageVenue.com
• 49 – Onet.pl
• 50 – Vkontakte.ru
• 51 – MetroFlog.com
• 52 – Uol.com.br
• 54 – Allegro.pl
• 65 – Odnoklassniki.ru
• 66 – FC2.com
• 68 – Netlog.com
• 71 – RedTube.com
• 75 – Rambler.ru
• 76 – WP.pl
• 77 – Nasza-Klasa.pl
• 78 – Lwiw.hu
• 81 – 163.com
• 83 – Taobao.com
• 84 – VNExpress.net
• 86 – Yourfilehost.com
• 89 – Fotka.pl
• 90 – Sendspace.com
• 94 – Badongo.com
• 96 – Badoo.com
• 97 – Terra.com.br
• 98 – 6.cn
• 100 – Globo.com

Various local versions of Google.com are in the list 22 times.   RumorsDaily is ranked 433,041.

I’ll be away from my computer for the next two or three weeks, so there will be very few updates on RumorsDaily. As I’m presently on an airplane, I’ve instructed the robots to give you one last video in celebration of my time away:

The robots might have another post or two in them, but not much. I’ll be back in early/mid January.

This is the 500th post on RumorsDaily since I converted it from its myriad of previous iterations into this boring, mundane blog on May 11th, 2007. Along with the 500 posts organized into a disorderly array of 703 tags, there have also been 1,173 real comments and 1,864 attempted spam comments (go Akismet!). According to Technorati, RumorsDaily is now the 81,370th most popular blog. Top 100,000! Look out number 81,369… I’m gunning for you.

According to Google, RumorsDaily has been visited 69,989 times since it relaunched, producing 120,746 pageviews (1.73 per visit). People spend an average of 1 minute and 58 seconds per visit… presumably most of that time is spent waiting for pages to load.

There’s a lot more boring stats (top ten lists!) after the break.

Read more »

Tufts students are always out for a good time, I tell you.

Two enterprising Tufts students have undertaken an homage to the Stinkymeat Project, a twenty day experiment to determine what would happen if you left a plate full of unrefrigerated meat in an unsuspecting neighbor’s backyard. The results, while tantalizing, were fairly predictable. The two anonymous Tufts students have undertaken a slightly different challenge:

we will be conducting our experiment above a shower stall in a Tufts dorm. This particular shower is located in a building adjacent to our own, in a suite populated by our arch-enemies. In this way, we will not only be examining the rate of decay of various meats. We will also be testing the amount of time it takes before a group of unwitting residents try to seek out the source of an unbearable odor in their bathroom.

They’re currently up to day 5 day 6 and the meat is just starting to turn fragrant.

Man, this is great, it feels just like the RumorsDaily of yore. Can anyone figure out from the pictures which dorm it is?

Via Neatorama and Joel’s Blog.

This Podcast Sucks episode 14 is now online in which jbg discusses my afore mentioned remarkable suggestions.  I would have been on the show if I had understood jbg’s cryptic “call me” email.  Call me?  What does that mean?

In another note, I’ll be away from my computer for the next few days.  Anything that gets posted in this space is being posted automatically so don’t expect any responses from me.

Would anybody like the ability to post on RumorsDaily?

My favorite search engine query that led someone to find RumorsDaily yesterday:

chip dale rescue rangers banned episode

Similar to my previous favorite. I really hope there actually is a banned episode of Chip & Dale’s Rescue Rangers out there.

My favorite search engine query that led someone to find RumorsDaily yesterday:

when is talespin going to come up with new episodes? 

I’ve upgraded my Wordpress to 2.3 and am in the midst of fiddling with a few things. The webpage might look wonky for the next 24 hours or so.

UPDATE: The site looks crummy (crummier?) in Internet Explorer.  Use Firefox so I don’t have to feel guilty about how it looks in IE.  Of course, with browser stats like these, it probably doesn’t matter all that much:

RumorsDaily has climbed the ranks and is now a top 100,000 blog.   Woot.

Metroblogging points out a site that lets you create your very own modified Hollywood sign. It’s really rather pointless.

Really pointless.