Google Analytics and Censorship

A bit of a meta post this one. Google analytics is a free service that anyone with their own website, even just a simple hosted blog like this one should give a try. google analytics is basically a site usage reporting tool - a big step up from the hit counters of the internet's infancy.

The statistician in me loves to pour over the reports it offers and it's always interesting to discover how people find this blog and also what they check out while they're here. I usually check once a month or so and see how the latest ran has been received etc and to see where I get he visitors from. I've linked the blog from my facebook profile, my Twitter and other social bookmarking sites so the majority of direct traffic comes from there. the other traffic comes from search engines like good ol' google. i can reveal that the most popular searches have been along the lines of "gym motivation" thanks to the couple posts I did on that and also Jonathan Ross whose podcast I wrote a review of - I guess the scandal with Russell brand has kept those searches going. There is of course some gaming and f1 searches due to my leaning toward writing about those subjects. in the past I've tried those search terms which have led people here and fair play to them digging deep through the search results as they didn't show on the first couple of pages for me!

Red Hair Revelation

I've been meaning to put together the very first episode of Your New Favourite Podcast for what seems like ages, and thanks to unexpected events this week, it has still not been possible. So, I'm going to offer up the content of that planned episode in a blog post which I'm gonna put together over my lunch break.
I was going to cover a fair few subjects in the podcast, but here I'll stick to something which has been at the forefront of my mind for the last few days, well when I haven't been in a terrible mood, but that's gonna be left for another time.
I was in an absolutely fantastic mood at the start of the week, I was dropping some suggestive hints through my twitter tweets. The reason being that I've developed a crush - it's a good time at the moment, right before I become far too obsessive and self-destruct my chance.
Yes, an upside of this crush has been the elevated mood, it's strange (well maybe not that strange) that music seems to get me incredibly pumped, like it's never resonated so strongly it what seems like forever. That being said, I think doing some of the vocal stuff in Rock Band has also encouraged me to sing along with the songs.

I'm not going to go into the details about the crush here, it seems a little wrong to tell the Internet before I tell the poor girl. Anyways, I'm not sure it's just the crush, I've been feeling a little more susceptible, being more aware of the laydees, although it's probably down to last weekend's festivities, going out with the Kidderminster crowd. Friday evening consisted of a gathering in the infamous Red Man, and Saturday we went off to Wolverhampton for some alternative (read: metal) goodness at the Planet. The weekend was overall very good, although as I've felt before, I don't have much in common with a metal crowd. That being said, as mentioned above I was defintiely feeling attraction to a fair few girls over the two nights.
On top of the crush, there was Jill, one of Neo's exes on the Friday evening. Now, she came over late on in the evening and insisted on touching my fringe. I'd rather not have strangers coming up and entering my personal space like that, but there was nothing negative about it, if anything I only consider a good thing, my hair was obviously of such interest that she couldn't help but be curious.
On the Saturday, I remarked to Wilson via a typed message (it was far too loud inside the club) that this girl Deb (or Debs) was quite hot. Apparently that makes it 2 for 2, although it is possible to find some people attractive, but not actually fancy them. Plus on reflection she was a tocuh naked, and OMG she has red hair! For those not in the know, on DiggNation they covered a story where they found that people with red hair have the healthiest sex lives, and possibly more eyebrow-raising is that people who dye their hair red are subconsciously sending out a message that they are looking for a partner. So maybe that helps explain my initial thoughts towards Deb.

Strangely enough, during Sunday I was ironing a shirt ready for work and I popped on the TV to have some background noise/sights whilst I ironed. As it turned out Scrapheap Challenge was on. It used to be a staple of earlier years but I've outgrown it a little, although the odd episode every now and again is pretty enjoyable. Anyways, for the unintiated the show is hosted by Robert LLywelyn (Kryten from Red Dwarf) and Lisa Rogers. Now, the show has been running for quite some time - 10 years if Robert is to believed, and Lisa Rogers is still very attractive. She would be even more so, if she didn't put on the exaggerated voice to be more in fitting with the show. Anyways I was watching the show, this week's challenge was to build some boats. Now in tradition with the show, any boats built have had the tendency to either not work, or plod along really slowly. It turned out this week, that one of the teams had built a machine which could travel at a fair nick. Anyways, they had Lisa Rogers in a boat for the "trackside" view and once this speedy racer got going, they literally couldn't keep up and then the strange thing happened.

in fact she was looking out of my TV at me, who by now was transfixed onto her smile

The boat Lisa Rogers was in had to really push to keep up with the action, and there was Lisa staring into the camera, and she looked so incredibly cute. It was as if she wasn't staring at the camera, but in fact she was looking out of my TV at me, who by now was transfixed onto her smile. Her expression was of pure delight and excitement - like holding each other, swinging around in a meadow. It sounds ridicolous reading it back but it stunned me, but in a good way.

EDIT: I'm not sure if now knowing that red hair, whether that be natural or artifically created, is the indicator as described above is now affecting how I look at ladies now, but my head seems to turn in their direction much more. Actually on a recent trip back to Shropshire, there was one red-haired girl on the way down on Friday, and then another on the way home on the Sunday. Hell, even the lead female singer of my "solo" band (Bobion the 3rd! yeah!) in the World Tour on Rock Band had, until recently, red hair, mmmm.

On closing, I need to pluck up the courage to do something about this crush and maybe sometime soon I'll be able to put together episode 1 of the podcast. I'm sure once I get started it'll be easier to keep going.

Cool Twitter Visualisation (self-explanatory!)

Whilst wasting time on the Intenets browsing for third-party twitter apps and the like, I spotted this site www.wefeelfine.org. What can I say it is pretty cool, sometimes a little haunting, but just proves what can be done with a bit of imagination and of course the twitters that are happening right now.
It's basically a set of interesting ways to view some of the twitters going on - I find the Murmurs option is those twitters that start with "I feel" and some of them are shockingly honest. I almost feel a little guilty reading them.

These visualisations are all based off twitter, which for the uninitiated is a micro-blogging platform. You send one line messages and people following you will receive the message. I think it's pretty awesome but then again I'm quite into all this blogging malarky so no surprise there. So far it's pretty big in the US and Japan, but there is some penetration (hurhur!) in the UK. I like to think of myself as a trend setter - there are in fact only two people in Kidderminster who use it, myself and this guy called Tim.

I like the idea as I can throw out little snippets and thoughts which aren't worthy of a full blog post but still worthy enough to throw out there. You can check out my tweets (I believe that's the technical term) at twitter.com/jimiminar. If you like it then join up and follow me, I make a promise to follow anyone that follows me automatically (unless they're some kind of spambot) so help spread the word.

New blog stuff

Hey ho! Here I am putting off doing some work so I thought I'd waste time by playing about with the ol' blog.
Couple of changes, some more noticable than others. First one should be pretty obvious if you were to scroll down, and that's the inclusion of two tag clouds. It's probably the only thing lacking from Blogger when compared to Wordpress is a native tag cloud implementation (oh, and trackable statistics, but that's really for us admin folks). Of course there are a couple of scripts out there that can parse the standard "labels" list; I probably could have knocked up something myself, but why reinvent the wheel??

Yeah, so I found two scripts out there that can do the job, and not wanting to commit to one just yet, I've thrown them both into the sidebar to see what they look like. Also, I'm trying out the (semi-)new blogger widget, the poll widget! Yeah, so it would be great if you could place your vote and after a bit of time I'll commit to a cloud and remove the rather lame looking current list.

Another change is the inclusion of the twitter badge. I've been aware of the micro-blogging tool but had been hesitant to adopt it. Saying that, I was over on Major Nelson's site(Xbox live updates + other news) and noticed he had the twitter badge up and running and thought it actually looked quite neat. It's very much like the "status" feature on facebook, and I usually try and have a bit of fun with that, so thought I'd chuck it on the blog as well - in a small effort to try and get me back into the blogging routine. I have a few more interesting pics taken on my phone which I may well share, but the quality's not great; especially with my shaky arm LOL.

Another small change, hardly noticable, is my swapping of my Last.fm profile. I've been slowly adopting "Jimiminar" for every online handle/identity out there and well my last.fm profile was lagging behind. Cue a shiny new profile and I've just swapped over the quilts/recent tracks but it should be business as usual...

Here's trying to find something else to put off work...