FeedBurner: The Review

So I've given FeedBurner some extra time to sort itself out. I'm not 100% happy, but I've decided that It May Stay. (However, if it puts its feet on the couch, leaves the toilet seat up, or eats my Tim Tams*, it's O-U-T-the-door.)

Here's a play-by-play.

Reliability: 4/5
Setup: 4/5
Features: 5/5
Ease of use: 4/5
Integration with Blogger and Google: 5/5
Syndication speed: 3/5

In the reliability stakes, I'm still getting messages telling me my xml page has "failed", which stops syndication dead. However, half an hour later I get a message that all is well, without me doing anything. FeedBurner seems to have issues with server lag. I hope it's temporary.

Setup of any new system is a pain. The downfall for FeedBurner is the sheer number of options. Fully-featured is sometimes a bad thing, and some were impossible for me to understand. As for the options I want, it has them all, and I'm happy with them.

As far as integration goes, only products owned by Google can earn 6 out of 5, however, it's not yet 100% integrated and sometimes pops up a Blogger window inviting you to paste code in manually. I expect that in time this will be seamless.

Now... speed? Or should I say... lack thereof. FeedBurner has never spontaneously syndicated my RSS feed within 4 hours of posting. Left to its own devices, the posts appear in Google Reader well after 1pm. The site post time is always 9:XXam on the blog, however. This is frustrating. However, as long as they still arrive each day I will accept this as the one truly abysmal part of FeedBurner.

* If you don't know what a Tim Tam is, or you've never had one, you MUST seek out a local seller and try them. Also sold as "Arnott's Biscuits" overseas, they are biscuit orgasms. When I say biscuit, it's like a cookie but not. A Tim Tam is two chocolate malt cookies (not as chocolatey as Oreos) with a creamy vaguely chocolate filling (but not strong or sickening sweet) and covered in milk chocolate. And no matter how it's described, it doesn't do the food justice. A favourite pastime of Australian talk show hosts is to make American guests eat these, and the guests are regularly reduced to wordlessness and/or expressions of blissful disbelief. "Mmmmmmmm!" and "Ohhhhh!" and "That is Soooooooo good!" are fairly regular comments. So yeah. Go find them somewhere like Google. It is soooo worth it.

Lost Visitors

The following numbers of visitors were (presumably) severely disappointed on discovering my blogs:

1 passing strange spike lee
1 body odor ban for zurich workers
1 bubble snuggly 2
1 elderly lady hits man on scooter to go to hair appointment
1 dorrah january
1 gaming delight
1 celcius to farren (hey, at least *I* got ONE of them right)
2 kitchen implement
2 aqua slave for the paper
2 homemade deal or no deal
2 can u freeze baileys irish cream (No.)
4 zoo sex
5 bag pipe player
5 talented artist
5 caught wanking

Feel free to vote for your favourite.

Personally, I liked "zoo sex".

Antsy.

I'm getting antsy. I love the template on No Added Salt, because I can customise it (and I have) by adjusting colours, adding links, changing menus and so on. Here on Weird Search, I just chose a standard one. I'm certainly not known for my love of all things pink. But it does the job, seeing as how this blog is, and will remain, predominantly about the text and what's written.

Unfortunately, Crazy Odd in particular is not all about text. It's a multimedia blog, so having it sit in a run-of-the-mill standard No Frills template is eating at me. I'm getting antsy. I hate changing templates on anything though, what with the joys of adjusting stuff everywhere and editing all my future posts because the colours don't match... and then there's my loathing of the limitations of most of the three-column templates I've seen... so I've put it off. I'm the champion procrastinator.

However, today my search in Intarweb Land found me at a blog that has.. GASP!.... four, count 'em, FOUR columns and was designed effectively to give the main blog area plenty of room. Oh, how I swoon at good web design. How I lust at lickable widget placement. How I long to... erm, never mind, it's probably not appropriate for me to share.

So I went looking at more templates. I think I'm leaning towards Gabfire Maq. I don't like the colour scheme, but that's easily remedied. I also don't like that it makes me think of Macs, but I might have to learn to deal.

Decisions, decisions.

Miserable Failuer is Me

Apparently, I'm years behind Intarweb-Land in hearing about the Miserable Failure Search.

I laughed. Quite a lot. Reminded me of www.nochucknorris.com and its similar Google bombing.

I wish people would Google bomb my blogs ;)

What was interesting though was that there have been a few more creative attempts in the past, including "nigritude ultramarine" and "seraphim proudleduck". So... maybe I was onto something when I spammed twitter with "protectrix cowpuncher quickthorn".

Scowl...

Mutter.

Since the last post went immediately to where it belonged, I am grudgingly going to give FeedBurner another day to prove itself useful.

So far it's been a 48-hour+ bad, bad, first impression.

So. Make with the goods, Google!


Image: some random intarweb chick shaking her fist. Possibly at FeedBurner, possibly at Microsoft, maybe at George W Bush? I dunno. Sorry about all the venting here of late. It is just that. And yeah, I'm aware that shaking one's fist at a free service is a bit like ordering a low-fat soymilk decaffeinated iced mochaccino with artificial sugar, dairy-free whipped cream, and a carob stick instead of the chocolate wafer... and then complaining that it tastes bad.

Perhaps I should blame Canadia*! Yeah. Just as effective, but far more satisfying.

{wink}

* "Canadia" is not a type-oh.

Oh yeah! Before I forget. I laughed. It was a geek thing. Red (aka Deimos) was having huge issues with access to his website. Ports, IPs, NATs, router, his ISP, and apache were all suspects because he couldn't connect externally to his home-hosted site. During his investigation a lot of us were throwing suggestions and helping troubleshoot. And then he says...

[Red] So, I don't understand intertubes much..
[Elisa] you put them inside the tyres on your bike, duh
[Qwyxzl] teh intarwebz are for porn, Red. That is all you need to know.

...haha imagine something in that came up in a weird search! hahaha

* goes to watch the internet is for porn for the billionth time *

* laughs, and then recoils in horror as her 12 and 13yo sing along *

* poofs*

posting at 9.52pm

It would be interesting to see how long it takes for this to end up in the rss feed. If I were a betting girl, I'd probably put ten bucks on it being more than three hours. If.

Ode to Feedburner

Oh Popular Utility
Have you ever had a clue?
Must you suck so royally?
Did Google buy and ruin you?

Did your feed burning ever work?
Was there a time when you kept time?
Will my timestamps remain dirt?
And did your automatic ping once chime?

I resync and cry
My RSS still dry
I slap resync again with a clout
This time you say "time out..."

Here in sorrow I now mope,
Hoping this is just a two day glitch
How dumb to move three blogs! I'm a dope...
Wondering if I should bite the bullet and switch

...off

Feeling A Bit Frustrated

I am still battling with my RSS syndication. The feeds cut off at (255?) characters. I did this to encourage readers to click through to view the site - this gives me a better idea of who is reading the blog, and it lets them see it in its technicolour glory. I acknowledge that my blogs aren't at the cutting edge of artistic design, but, it also allows things like html, pictures, embedded objects (like games) and links you can actually click. (I know, some readers can cope with these things, but some can't.)

However, setting the short syndication is also a pain. It cuts off mid-sentence with nothing to tell the reader it was done on purpose, or to click the title to see the whole post. Quite frankly, it just looks unprofessional.

So I have a bugbear in Blogger! Who would have thought?

I may have to investigate other feed options. Watch this space, I guess. Or, don't?

The Latest Weird Search Results

Ok, so it's not so much that the search results are weird, but the actual search terms people plug into Google.

I've blogged about this before, on No Added Salt, including the fact that on-and-off I am nabbing the #1 through to #4 search results for "jay leno egg beater guitar" and consistently have #1 and #2 for "religion nonspecific". But, here are some new entrants.

• offbeat travel (well... different)
  
• jay leno egg beater guitar google (ok, someone's trying to see if I'm telling the truth?)
• happy religion (joyful joyful - hot tip: avoid Scientology)
• fireys (perhaps related to a fire station burning down recently)

Now, none of those are particularly bizarre. But wait. There's more.

• sucky sucky long time
• scout facelift 2009
• dr elisa dumbest criminals

I don't think I've ever been called Doctor before.

And "bat poop butt paste" is still a winner for... some strange people... coming in with a #3 result.

I'm... proud?

cross-posted at some point to No Added Salt

Sympathy?

You'd think I would deserve some, seeing that the temperature has been in the high 30s for the last two weeks or so. Sweat just drips. (That's Celsius, kids, since only stupid countries* use Farhen- Fahrenh- Farren- that stupid archaic temperature scale.) But my dearly beloved just said it was lucky he didn't buy us a house in Lapland (where it's about 25 below right now). How kindhearted! ;)

At least he was nice enough to point out that I'd re-nabbed the #1 Google search result for Jay Leno Egg Beater Guitar. Which is kinda bittersweet, because it only happened after I lamented its loss on Twitter.

~ Elisa (who had to put her name today because there's an asterisk below)

* Just kidding about your country being stupid. Please don't hurt me. It's not our fault our ex-PM is a retarded moron just like your soon-to-be-ex-president.

PS. I bet you're surprised there was an asterisk!

A Thought About Helium

I really should be posting some of my brilliant Helium work somewhere. There was a livejournal community for Helium writers, but it seems to be dead.

* ponders creating a new blog for spamming Helium articles
* unfolds plan for Taking Over The World™
* stands at front doorstep to laugh maniacally at the neighbours
* runs from a vicious pelting of mud

~ Elisa ~ is not going to bother to sign her name most days

PS. * growls that her preferred text colour is a pita to set

I like to ramble

This blog doesn't have rules like my other two. I might not post every day. I might post ten times on some days. I might go a month without saying anything at all. And when I do post it might be a load of crappy rubbish that only I have any interest in.

You have been warned.

Something I found amusing is the search results where my other blogs come out as the top result. It got me thinking and wondering if the most interesting one (religion nonspecific) might have anything to do with the fact it was cross-posted on two blogs (which are #1 and #2 in the results).

They link to each other. I wonder if that's why. Maybe I'll spam a few of the other blogs' posts and see what happens. Something like the "boiling urine" post. We'll see.

~ Elisa

PS. Blogger has 8 choices for font. Arial, Trebuchet and this one (Verdana) are quite similar. Courier sucks unless you want it to look like a 1980s computer printout. The last four are clones of Times New Roman. Death to serif fonts.

About this blog

I wrote this entry on the 10th of February 2009, but I've shoved it to the oldest entry.

I've realised rather belatedly that apart from a very vague post about this blog having no rules, I haven't said much about what this blog even IS.

My "About Me" page is rather generic and common to all three blogs. So, here's what Weird Search is about.

As the title suggests, primarily I wanted somewhere to note down the odd things that people search for in Google (and elsewhere), especially the things that they search for that somehow lead them to one of my blogs. I found some of these search strings amusing and figured others would. I have also moved a lot of my geek-like stuff out of No Added Salt and into here (so you'll see things like how I choose a new template, how I deal with blogging tools, and so on).

But as a bonus extra, this place has also become my random vent place, and hosts odd snippets of my life. The truly bizarre thing is that people are subscribing to this blog. I honestly would have thought the other two were far more worthwhile to read. There's no accounting for taste, huh?

My contact email:


Feel free to send funny pics, beautiful pictures, or feedback.
Feel free to stick hate mail up your ass.

:)