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So, if I have a MySpace page, it seems only natural that I join the Facebook crowd, too. And in just a short few days, I have concluded all on my own that Facebook is light years ahead of MySpace in terms of form and function.
Form: None of the MySpace DIY webpage formatting that creates graphic abominations. True, Facebook pages are boringly identical in layout, but you CAN READ THEM! SInce they are easily read and navigated, it seems to be a lot easier to find people and for them to find you in Facebook than MySpace.
Function: Aside from the clear navigational aids, I was most impressed by Facebook’s “import a blog” feature, which I immediately enabled on my page there. It’s not a particularly complex feature, so I wonder why MySpace can’t do it, too. Blogs have feeds (RSS, Atom, etc.), so you give Facebook your feed URL and you get to post in two places at once. Result: wider audience and more traffic to your site (perhaps).
That being said, I feel like somewhat of an interloper on both sites. The vast majority of Facebook and MySpace users are less than half my age! So I definitely stand out in those friends lists. (Actually, on MySpace, Sir Sean Connery is standing in for me. ) Then there is the fact that many of my students use either or both sites, which is probably kind of weird from both our perspectives. People tend to be remarkably frank on these sites, so I see a side of my students (and former students) that I don’t usually see at school. My own sites are kind of bare right now, so the sharing is a tad lopsided. Give me some time, kids!
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Sorry, no sex acts or nudity in these vids. You can find those elsewhere. Check out Anousheh Ansari as she demonstrates some zero-g effects while chatting with her husband, Hamid, from the International Space Station.
Ansari is by no means the first to perform somersaults in orbit or show how to spin an apple in zero-g, but of all the private citizens to have gone into space, she has done more in two weeks to humanize space exploration than all the world’s space agencies have done in 50 years. Read her blog posts. They are eloquent, heartfelt and at times darn poetic. Pretty good for an engineer!
Also, check her flightsuit, which features both the US and the Iranian flags. Rumors were flying before her launch that NASA had nixed her displaying the Iranian flag on her suit. If they were true, then Ansari effectively told NASA to go stick it. After all, it’s not like NASA could send her home.
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Yes, dear readers, ’tis true. I have joined the MySpace generation, after months of excoriating it as a graphic trainwreck and web navigation disaster. I have a modest, graphically simple (thank you) MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/wheatdogg. Why? Because, like nature, I abhor a vacuum.
Some months ago, while writing about Brittany McComb, the Nevada valedictorian whose overly Christian message alarmed school officials, I tried to contact her. McComb’s only presence on the internet was her MySpace page, and you cannot contact a MySpacer without having a MySpace account yourself. She never replied to my questions, but there I was, stuck with a MySpace page with nothing on it. Rather than request the sitemasters to delete it, I decided to use it as a way to direct people to this, my real blog.
In short order, I joined a couple of groups, including that of the high school where I teach. Before long, students got wind of it. Most were amazed, or at least amused, but I overheard one say to a friend that I was still using the default MySpace layout. Youch! My wounded web developer pride forced me to explore more tasteful (read, less busy and confusing) MySpace layouts. The examples I have seen (some used by my students, in fact) are worse than the default, with backgrounds that hurt your eyes, color schemes that make it hard to read the text, and layouts that spill off the screen. In other words, they suck!
This is a preview of The end is near! Watch for receding coastlines, icicles in hell! . Read the full post (473 words, 3 images, estimated 1:54 mins reading time)Possibly related posts:
Check this photo from Anousheh Ansari at flickr.com. It’s the view from her bedroom window. A more direct link to her blog from space is http://spaceblog.xprize.org/by-anousheh/
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Anousheh Ansari pulls no punches when she describes her trip to the International Space Station in her latest blog entry. She hurled twice, and had to resort to injections to quell her motion sickness.
Now the space agencies tend to de-emphasize the unpleasant aspects of spaceflight, especially if their professional astronauts/cosmonauts toss their cookies up there — which they have. So, Ansari’s honesty is refreshing.
Supposedly, spacesickness temporarily incapacitates only a few space travelers, although everyone should feel a little funny in “zero-g.” Ansari experienced all three symptoms.
- Vertigo and nausea. The semicircular canals in our skulls contain a fluid which helps us maintain our balance. Sloshing that fluid around — in amusement park rides, during tumbling exercises, on boats in rough waters — makes some people dizzy and ill. In orbit, you also lose your sense of down, since there is nothing pulling your body in one direction, while your eyes are telling you where the floor and ceiling are. The visual input and semicircular-canal inputs duke it out in your brain to see which ones win. Meanwhile, you feel green around the gills. Ansari compounded that problem by eagerly leaping out of bed and turning a few somersaults. She says, “As soon as I stopped I realized that what I did was not a good idea! I felt my internal organs doing a cha-cha inside my belly…” Motion sickness medicine and time eventually correct the problems.
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With all the worry about the Space Shuttle’s return to Earth, the media here in the States have given short shrift to the journey of Anousheh Ansari, one of the Russian space agency’s paying customers. Ansari’s beaming smile should convince anyone that visiting space has gotta be fun.
News reports have played it down, but it seems Ansari, 40, had a little spacesickness on the way up to the International Space Station. But in the videos of her arrival at the ISS today, the grin you see at right is still there. She is one happy customer!
Ansari, who made a boatload of money in the telecommunications business here in the States, was born in Iran and now lives in Texas. She’s the first Muslim woman to go to space, and has become a hero to thousands of Iranians and Muslims worldwide.
I spent some time reading up on her motivations, and have to admire her for her spunk. A fan of Star Trek, Ansari has channeled some of her fortune into the X-Prize, a competition for privately funded space ventures. She has reportedly spent another chunk, some $20 million, to buy a one-week cruise to the ISS. All paying space tourists have to train for six months, and by all reports, Ansari, an engineer by training, was a professional all the way.
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After some tweaking of site permalink and URL settings, posting sitemaps to Google, and other such SEO tinkerings, I have managed to get my posts into Google’s search engine. Before, I had no luck finding my posts, no matter how specific I made the search terms.
Strangely (or maybe not), my stats plugin reported almost simultaneously a dramatic drop in daily unique hits, from the 180s to 2. Pretty depressing, until I realized those multiple hits were probably from the googlebot trying to index the site, failing, then trying again. [UPDATE (82/06): The stats plugin was not compatible with the upgraded version of WordPress. I caught on when I saw it had clocked absolutely zero hits right after one of my posts appeared in the latest Tangled Bank. My other site counters registered dozens of visits, so I realized the WP upgrade must have broken the stats plugin. There was an update available, so the plugin (ShortStat) works now.]
So, here is what I have learned. Plain text permalinks are best. Trailing slashes on site URLs are important, at least to the w3.org validator service computers. Getting a sitemap with those permalinks into Google’s hands is a good thing. Tweaking your .htaccess file to allow bots to index your site is necessary, especially if your site dwells in a subdirectory, as mine does, of a different domain. (www.wheatdogg.com is forwarded to the “real” location.) Clearing up your .htaccess file also seems to help people find the site, especially if it’s tucked in an obscure corner of your main domain. Adding tags helps you get onto Technorati’s radar screens, and thus Google’s. Putting Google Analytics code on your site helps give you a real sense of your traffic, and maybe it convinces Google’s computers to pay attention to you.
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