Category: Site Info

I posted a while back about the random comments on this site. Recently, I’ve gotten a few weirder ones, and they seem to be on the same posts that they came from before.

And apparently people think by posting on my site, they will get their message to the celebrities. Observe:

From this post where I just happened to mention Eminem’s name:

Eminem if u read this i would like to tall u i LOVE you and ur music. ur music puts a picture in my mind of excatly what u must of gone through or at least what ur singing about. well if you dont see this marshall i love you but to any 1 who does see this hello

My post on Michael Jackson’s face and the fact that he says he never had plastic surgery still bring fun comments:

i love michael jackson it doesn’t matter wats on the outside there is a person in there and he has feelings too. He has had a troubled life and everything and ppl still discriminateee against him and stuff so dont be mean to him (not that i said u did but other ppl really are:( )

And another:

i think everyone should leave michale jackson alone. I mean it’s a free world what did he do to everyone else, i mean he has alot of talent, geez i bet that the people trying to destoy “THE KING OF POP”couldn’t dance half as good as he could and they don’t like him i think he is the best thing that has hit the face of the earth, to all you michale jackson haters out there go and get a live and wake up and smell the coffee.

Another:

Hi! I think Michael Jackson rules!! He IS the King of pop and that’s what he’ll stay! People should STOP saying how ugly he is! Who cares what colour he is or what he really looks like? Does it really matter? Does it matter that he has changed himself for himself? He is a great singer and he doesn’t need to be critisized!

And yet another:

just leave michael jackson alone let him get on with he’s life.he is the king of pop and that wat i like about him.he would not hurt a fly.he has a heart of gold.michael jackson is the best and you or anyone ase can beat him.he is a good singer.good dancer and now one well every beat him.he can beat you any day.so read this and you well understand that u well near beat him ok I LOVE YOU MICHEAL JACKSON AND I WELL ALLWAYS LOVE YOU I WILL LOVE TO MEET YOUUUUUUUUUU

I think the most entertaining part is that before I deleted the comments and rebuilt the site, each of the above comments were posted at least two times (some as many as four) by people who are impatient and won’t wait for the page to reload — they just hit the “Post” button until they felt better.

So how are all these folks getting to the Michael Jackson entry? Well, let’s look through the logs. Apparently, if you spell Jackson’s name wrong (even in another language), you’ll get here (thanks to one of the comments above). Or if you’re looking for his home address. Or if you’re just looking for information on his face.

But what about Eminem and his fans on this site? Apparently people are looking for his house, too. Or they’re hoping to find his e-mail address.

Granted, it was for Ken’s site, but at least it appears that their site’s (sort of) working. If you’re on my Bloglet e-mail update list, you probably haven’t gotten an e-mail in a while because Bloglet’s site has been up and down, and seems to have trouble occassionally connecting. The problem is that when it tries to connect to a fully functional site, but can’t, it puts the e-mail updates on hold until you log in and check it out — without letting you know that it’s broken.

Anyway, my previous query still stands: Does anybody know a different solution for this that I can install on my server?

If you look down the right-side navigation of this site, you’ll notice a form and link to Bloglet. The service (when it works) sends e-mails nightly to a list of subscribers. Those e-mails contain the headlines and text from my entries for the day.

The problem is that it’s very unreliable (though I would pay a few bucks for it if it worked right), and anybody who’s on my list, probably hasn’t received an update for a couple weeks or more.

I’m obviously not the only one with this problem. The site is up and down like a kid on a trampoline (sorry, bad analogy), and I was wondering if anybody out there has a better solution? The e-mail features in Movable Type are less than stellar, that’s for sure, and I don’t know if they’ll get fixed or not.

Does anybody else have their own Bloglet-like system? Need a beta tester? 😉

Don’t mind me. Just claiming my blog on . I’ll remove this one they find me. Saw that a pile of people were linking to this, so I’d figure I’d check it out. I even back-dated this thing so it wouldn’t be sitting on the top of my listings.

For some reason, my .htaccess file has been owned by root, so I can’t edit it. So if you go to www.utterlyboring.com without the trailing slash my image-protection will kick in. I wanted to go in and fix that, but it’s getting blocked. Needless to say, if you’re having image troubles, just ignore them for a bit. Thanks :-).

I originally posted an image a while back that apparently has been mentioned in the New York Times, among other places. But the problem is that when everybody searches for “1 Weekend a Month My Ass” on Google, they come up with the image on my site (and I’m sure I’m not the only place that has the image). And then they post the image on their site without copying the image to their server, causing me to have to pay for the bandwidth. Be smart, like this guy, and learn how to put images on your own server. So far about 100 referrals in the last 48 hours from Google for that search, so I’m sure I’ll find more people using the image from my server once I look through my logs.

I’m glad that you’ve found my site, but please save my bandwidth. Thanks 🙂

Update on 9/30/03: A full update on all of this, and what this picture has been doing online, and who has been linking to it is available in this recent post.

I’ve added Lucky Star to the blogroll. Why? Because she sent me a few dozen hits from this post on her site (which, from what I can tell, is the only reference to my site on the entire place), so I think it’s only fair 🙂

I got a link of MoveableType.org’s site (as I’m a supporter of theirs) when the Blogshare’s spider was reindexing, so my site’s value has become horribly inflated. Hell, Neil’s is $10,000 more, and I know he’s an MT supporter, and he doesn’t even have that MT link on his incoming links — he just has about 100 others.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Neil has way more friends than I do. At least I have more than Ken.

Would you mind putting him in touch with this “11-year old girl” who posted a comment here? While a 11-year-old should never in their right mind have the e-mail address “[email protected],” that’s another debate for another time.

Got this link via Chris Pirillo’s site. If you notice, next to where it says “Trackback” for each entry on my site, you have a bit of text that says “Read It To Me.” Click on that to get a WAV file of the text in the entry, read by the AT&T Research Labs Text to Speech Converter. The original site had a bit of code there that displayed a button to pull it off, but I couldn’t stand having a button in my entries, so I hacked it a bit to write a text link. Here’s what I did:

In my <MTEntries> tag, I put the following:

<FORM METHOD="post" NAME="demoForm<$MTEntryID pad="1"$>" ACTION="http://morrissey.naturalvoices.com/tts/cgi-bin/nph-talk"><input type="hidden" name="txt" value="<$MTEntryBody words="49" remove_html="1"$>"><input type="hidden" name="voice" VALUE="crystal"><input type="hidden" name="rate" VALUE="8000"></FORM>

I limited the MTEntryBody length to 49 because the converter chokes on more than that, so longer entries will get cut off.

Then, my bit of text to display the link looks like so:

<a name="SpeakButton" href="javascript: document.demoForm<$MTEntryID pad="1"$>.submit();">Read It To Me</a>

This link does not have to be within the <FORM> tag to work properly, just as long as it's in the same <MTEntries> tag.

I've also put the MTEntryID in the form name and in the JavaScript call to it, otherwise you'll have a pile of forms on each page that all have the same name -- and JavaScript doesn't like that.

What do you think? I know it's a stupid feature, but so what? 😉