Four Island

I know what you're thinking. I'm going to start this post with my "Recently, I....." line that I've completely overused. Well, forget it. I've already written the first line, and it's not "Recently, I....", it's "I know what you're thinking." See? I've outsmarted you. The "Recently, I...." line is in the second paragraph.

Recently, I wrote a post entitled Lorelle Link and Comment Challenge which included a link to a post on Timbo94's blog, Dream Weaver. Timbo94 seems to have a strange habit of including special characters in his blog post titles, which mess up the permalink badly. In fact, when I clicked on the link in my admin panel, it just came up as 404.

Because of this, I decided to change his permalink structure to not include post titles. I discovered Wordpress' page on Permalink Structure Tags, and I was soon messing around, trying to create the ugliest permalink structure I could. In fact, I ended up with the monstrous:

/%category%/%author%/%year%%monthnum%%day%%minute%%second%
        %post_id%/

While that was fun, it made me think. If you're going to have a permalink structure (if you don't, I'll be scared of your blog), make sure it's a good one that you won't want to change sooner or later. Changing your permalink structure can make old backlinks fail, but a bad permalink structure (like special characters in post titles), backlinks will also fail.

In the case of Timbo, he should either have used a different permalink structure to begin with, or simply omitted the special characters from his post titles. And, the latter's probably preferable because, well, fourisland.com/blog/permalink-structure/ is much prettier than, to take the example of Wordpress' default permalink structure, fourisland.com/blog/?p=18 (or whatever this post's ID is).

But, you should also remember, that when picking a permalink structure, if you're going to make it obnoxious like the monstrosity above, make sure you actually like it before setting it in stone.

This post is an attempt to complete Lorelle's Unusual Blog Subjects Blog Challenge.

I'm here to talk about two strange things that I saw recently. One, is the fact that when I logged in to write this post, I had to solve a reCAPTCHA. That's normal. What wasn't normal, however, was the fact that the second word I had to type in wasn't, in fact, a word. It was "3" and then a "one over two" fraction glyph. Now, there normally isn't a fraction key on the keyboard, is there. I just put in "3.5"

The other strange thing is this blog I found out about recently (on Plurk, in fact) called One Red Paperclip. It's the story about this person who takes a single red paperclip and trades it to someone for something of higher value. He then trades that item for one of greater value and so on until he receives a house.

That is a pretty strange idea, I thought. But apparently, apart from getting a house, he also because Mayor for a day, had a giant red paperclip constructed right outside his house, received $500, got the Key to the town, became Honorary Lifelong Citizenship and had a local holiday created to honor his paperclip quest. Goodness, that's one big prize! And all for one measly little paperclip. 8D

NOTE: I am sorry about the double posting thing. I don't know what's wrong, and I'm going to check it out as soon as possible. Thank you.

I've been reading a blog recently called Lorelle on Wordpress. It's a blog about blogging, and it's UBER GOOD. I don't know why, but it's like a jinxed book. I can't get off of it, there's so much good content on it.

Even if you do not have a Wordpress blog (like me), I'd still suggest Lorelle on Wordpress. Not everything posted there is strictly Wordpress related (like the title of this post, for example). A lot of it is just blogging in general.

And that brings me to the second point of this post. Dually inspired by Lorelle's "Blog Challenge" series (a type of post challenging you to post something belonging to some criteria on your blog--besides being fun, it gives you post ideas) and the comment thread of Dream Weaver's Entry 2 - "Are all Angels bad?", I've created a challenge of my own. But, since I don't want to copy Lorelle completely, I've decided I won't do a blog challenge. No, I'll do a comment challenge.

I want you to find a post on some blog (not on your own blog!) with some content that you can really reply to. Write a very long comment on it, like the ones on the DW post. Make sure you fill out the "Post Comment" form with your website's address in it, because when you write your comment, you need to comment on this post with the URL to the blog post you commented on and the username you are going as. Then, if your comment strikes me as particularly well thought-out and long, I'll post a link to your blog on my blog.

This challenge expires in exactly one month. I think it'll be interesting to see who actually cares enough about getting their blog linked to to actually manage to complete this challenge within the time limit. After the 30 days are up, I will take a day to judge, and then I'll post the results the day after. And comments posts exactly 30 days after this post will be rendered invalid.

Sorry about the excitement, I'm just so happy to be back up again!!!!! It's taken a lot of hard work (read: begging), but we're finally up again! I hope you people still like Four Island, even with our killer downtime. However, there shouldn't be many more of those as now, Four Island lives on it's own dedicated server!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In other news, I was recently in the database putting the links to the hosted sites into the main HatNav when I noticed Color Pencils' assigned AID, "lonely". I thought it was pretty funny at the time, but then I remembered that Gryphic's blog used to be called "Lonely Ramblements". Funny story, but Gryphic's blog has changed it's names several times (most of them jokes, mind, I really do hope she was kidding with "Three Island" :) ), and the result has been the lovely name you see today. (Gryphic, I know you'll change your blog's name to something hideous after you see this)

Anyway, I am so happy to be back and to be able to run my website again with all of it's fun perks. This is Hatkirby, and my closing statement is:

 * Hatkirby is listening to Running by No Doubt

It's good to be back.

EDIT: Oops, sorry, I'm back. I wanted to mention that while I did post a hidden post (Yay me!), I did disable my pending post queue for the during Four Island's downtime. The Entrecard post accidentally slipped through. Anyway, I have re-enabled the pending queue so you can get your daily Four Island fix again! (TimTam, I'm looking at you :) )

....cries.... This shouldn't have been a solitary occasion.... cries

However, we are all still happy on this day, even though we aren't together. Happy Anniversary, Four Island.

I love this site.

EDIT: Four Island actually was registered on September 22nd, even though the first post, We're up! says "December 31st 2006", that is due to the fact that I did not add dates to my blogging software until October 15th. All of the posts before and including Mailchat say "December 31st 2006" though they were all really various times in late September and early October 2007.

Also, I'd like to say how proud I am of Four Island. It's grown a lot since I created it, and I'm happy to say that there are people who regularly go on it.

EDIT: And I'm so happy for all you Four Island-addicts. I really miss you.

Nothing to see here, move along.

I've recently started using Entrecard. Entrecard is a service that helps you to advertise your blog in an easy, fun way. And let me tell you, when I say easy, I mean easy.

To advertise your blog, all you have to do is find another blog who also uses Entrecard, click on their "widget", thus "dropping your card". Then, both you and the person upon whose widget you just dropped your card get an Entrecard Credit (ec). These ecs can be spent upon buying advertising on other sites, buying real things from the shop and much more.

And really, it's fast. I signed up for Entrecard, put the widget upon my site, and five hours later five people had already dropped their cards.

There's a good tutorial about using Entrecard productively on CK Marketing called How to use Entrecard to Grow your Blog, and let me tell you, it's really useful. Go read it. Nao.

One more thing before this post is over. If you want a whole ton of drops, you can sign up for U Drop / I Follow. It's an interesting service where you get a drop everyday and a link on a webpage that recieves tons of hits everyday. I you want tons of EntreCards, joining this would be a good idea.

Okay, okay, one last thing. If you decide to sign up with Entrecard, you can post your site's address here, if you like, and I'll drop you a card. 8D

Welcome to our prettyful weekly poll post.

I hope you've enjoyed this week's poll post.

(We were right. 8()

I do have iNet access, just our ISP is stupid. That's right. Blame Optimum.

Anyways, as you no doubt know (because at the time of writing, only Hatkirby can be on the site, and later, this post will be old and archived), the commenting system's changed. Now it's more of a threaded discussion section, instead of being flat.

You didn't see anything

On Plurk, recently, I read "problogger asks what's your coolest domain name that you've got that you're not using yet?". There's a link in there to a pending blog, Techgirlogy.

Currently, all it is is a Wordpress blog, automatically focused on an "Under Construction" page with one comment. One of the funniest comments I've ever read on a blog:

Hello... I Googled for girl on girl, but found your page about Under Construction... and have to say thanks. nice read.

Lebanese Girls

The "Lebanese Girls", of course, was a link to another website.

Strangely, I read about this type of spamming only just recently on Lorelle (Comment Spam Alert: I read a similar article...), and incidentally, the comment on the Techgirlogy site matches one of the prompts listed on Lorelle exactly (well, except for the filler word, of course).

Perhaps blogs should implement some kind of filter to filter out any comments with content that matches any of the examples given on Lorelle. I don't know, just a suggestion.

Um, sorry about the random poll for this week. In fact, I thought of a suitable, non-random poll just minutes after creating this week's poll, but it was too late. In fact, I think I've already forgotten the new idea.... Poop. Anyway, here are the results:

....and falls down a man-hole - 15 vote(s)! ....gets hit by a car - 4 vote(s)! ....eats an icecream - 6 vote(s)! ....trips and does a somersault - 2 vote(s)!

This week's poll was taken from Gryphic's Poll of the Week suggestion on the fourm. See, polls you suggest do get in sometimes. Sometimes. If they're good. And if I can't think of a poll for this week.

Also, since I'm moving tomorrow, this poll may be up for more than a week. Possibly two weeks. It'll be strange, and I hope it doesn't need to, because the POTWs are a handy way to tell how old Four Island is.