Morbid Romantic

bringing you quality randomness since 1981

Did you guys know that Morbid-Romantic.net was ‘born’ today, on this very day, in 2002? Yes, today is Morbid-Romantic.net’s sixth birthday! I have been at this domain for a total of six years. Can you believe it? Pretty soon, we are going to celebrate the decade together.

I bought his domain when I started college. It was sort of a treat to myself to get one, as I had a blog hosted at other places for a while up to that point. I chose a name from one of my favorite Anne Rice book quotes and set off on the purchase. I can still remember very clearly sitting in the computer lab of the school, checking my URL to see if it worked. And I can remember how happy I was to see it and know that it was mine. I also recall very clearly how upset I was when I almost lost this domain. In the six years I have had it, I haven’t once thought of buying a new personal domain. This is my domain. I want no other name but this and I can’t imagine ever wanting another one to identify me.

This blog/site has gone through many changes, but so have I. Okay, so it has little more purpose than it did from inception, but it makes me happy and that is all that counts.

I just wanted to mark this occasion by announcing and by declaring my ever lasting love for this domain.

And the count begins again.

Popularity: 1% [?]

A family member gave me this link because he knows how much I love to send post cards. I love trading cards of any sort. When thefanlistings.org holds their annual Christmas card exchange, I ALWAYS sign up because it gives me an excuse to give and send cards. I’ve done that for the past two years and I have beautiful shoeboxes filled with cards from around the world. I love it.

So, when I heard about Postcrossing, I signed up instantly.

The deal is this. You sign up and put in your information, including your address (how are they going to send you a postcard without one). When you’re ready to send a card, you click on ‘Send a postcard.’ So easy, right? You get the address of a person and a special ID number. When you fill out your postcard, you include that ID number because the person who receives the card will identify it by that number and mark it off on the website that way. This is the sites way of verifying that you sent the card. Once the system has it that you’ve send a postcard, your address is put on the list for someone to get when they want to send a postcard. So, for every postcard you send, you get one sent in the mail.

They also give you the option to upload the postcards that others have sent you to make an online wall. If you have a scanner or a digital camera, that means you can share all of the postcards you’ve gotten. I’m so doing that, too.

It sounds like so much fun to exchange postcards from around the world. I am going to go out and buy tons of cute VA postcards. I can’t wait to put my mail box to good use.

Sign up, guys. I made a blog post about this because I think it’s just such a neat idea.

Popularity: 10% [?]

I’ve been busting hard to get my blog ranked high.  Since doing PPP has all but destroyed my chances at Google PR, I have to reply on other ranking standards. I’m really proud to say that I was able to pick my RealRank up from the 6,000s to around 720.  That’s a definite improvement!  I was shocked when I first saw it.  I thought that it was a fluke.  In the Women’s category of the top 100, I am ranked 13 and growing.  This is a real confidence booster.

Let me tell you how I did it.  It was quite simple, in fact.  All I did was install the Wordpress Plugin Platinum SEO.  Now, when I make a page or a post, I give it some distinct keywords.  Instead of my site having a list of important keywords, all of my pages are individualized so that I can target searched my directly to specific content.  Right after I did that, my RealRank, Page Views and Unique Visitors shot up exponentially.

I try not to assign generic keywords, though, because then my site is likely to fall in line with a list of millions of sights and there will be no reason for mine to be viewed.  For me, being that I am at the learning stage, it’s really a matter of trial and error.  I try something, wait for the results to roll in and them modify based on feedback.

I guess it’s hard to be interesting sometimes!  I want my blog to be informative, but my brain doesn’t always corporate.  Ambition and action are controlled by two different brain functions entirely.

Halloween is coming!  As I travel across the United States these coming days, I will think of as many good Halloween ideas as I can.  Then, when I return, I can share lots of good ideas for parties and costumes.  Halloween is definitely my favorite holiday.  If I could, I would keep my home perpetually decorated like it’s Halloween.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Jenn and Nurturing Beauty are holding a giveaway for a $40 Restore Care skin care package! Participating in the Nurturing Beauty giveaway is as easy as creating a blog entry that links to the giveaway and to naturallynurturingbeauty.com. For more information, see the official contest blog entry: Nurturing Beauty giveaway!

Popularity: 5% [?]

Everyone who has a website knows of the importance of traffic. Whether you’ve personalized that importance such that you design your site to maximize your traffic is your own business; some people care a lot, some people care not one bit and proclaim, “I don’t make a public website for anyone but me.” This always makes me wonder why even brother with a website that is public. Why not make a website that’s not published.

Obviously you want to be heard, seen or noticed.

I track my stats by RealRank. I like the system and it helps me out with other sites. So, I checked out my RealRank last week and look at what I see:

What happened on August 7th!? Do you see that dip? I went from the lower 2,000 range to the 6,000 range in the span of two days. I was like, “Oh crap, this better be a fluke and not how it is going to be from now on.” I couldn’t think of anything to disrupt my traffic so drastically. My site worked fine and there was no extended downtime. Was everyone preparing for the Olympics and not at home on the computer or something!?

I was freaked and concerned. I tested out all of my scripts and even my theme to see if it worked in all browsers in case it was what was keeping people from visiting or return visiting (since you’d still be counted even if you came to a page that wasn’t viewable to the best of my meager internet knowledge).

As luck would have it, that was the worst of it. My RealRank has been slowly going back up and is even a little better now.

But, I have NO idea what caused everything to avalanche like that so quickly. I just hope like mad that it doesn’t happen again.

Popularity: 5% [?]

I really AM getting work around the ‘net done. I redid Marius-deRomanus.net just like I said I would. I have a horrible track record with saying, “I am going to redo the site,” but then I never get around to it and I continuously put it off until months have passed and I’ve done nothing.

But, I kept to it! I didn’t put it off, I just worked steadily and hard. At the end, I came up with this:

It took me about 48 hours, you know, around eating and sleeping and watching movies (I watched 3:10 to Yuma, good movie!). What really took so long was that I had to update a few scripts like my quiz script, as well as install some that would make running the site easier. I tested it out in the newest version of FireFox and Safari, as well as in IE 6. It looked fine in all of the above, yey, but IE. But, everything is always a little off in IE as far as I a concerned. So what if the quotes are a little off. If I center it right in IE, it won’t look right in FireFox or Safari. And since those two are the two that I use most often, those are the two that I care about.

All in all, I am really proud. Now, I can get on the others. Once you start the ball rolling, you just have to keep up with it… right?

Popularity: 8% [?]

Let me tell you… when I took over the Play It Loud music rotation webring, ringsurf.com was still the best thing out there. A FAR cry better than webring.org, which had gone down the drain with ugly, impossible to customize ring codes and crappy forced ads. Ringsurf.com was like a haven to all of those who loved their webrings and the beautiful simplicity of running one through the service.

But, Yahoo bought ringsurf.com and turned it into a crap hole. Gone is the ability to have a pretty customizable text code with various features of what to surf. Heck, you can’t even link to a ring home page with your code or through your webring page. The new ringsurf.com pretty much forces you to use a cruddy, boring, non-customizable scheme. A lot of the options of making a webring were taken away.

So, I decided with Play It Loud that I would run a script from the website. A quick search at Hot Scripts and a visit to some reliable message boards led me to VS.Hive. So far, I LOVE the script. It only took me about 5 minutes to install and customizing it is simple as I don’t know what. Moving to a hosted script is totally the best move for Play It Loud. Come on members! Come back to meeeee.

I emailed at 300+ members of the webring. Hopefully they will rejoin soon so that we can rebuild our community.

Speaking of which, the Yuki Eiri Gallery is about to reach 11,675 members. I sure didn’t expect that to explode like it did… well, I suppose I should have. Gravitation is HUGE and I happened to be building my gallery when all of the new Genzo tracks were being released.

I took my old music rotation, Genetic Bomb, and redid it. In fact, I moved it, renamed it and redesigned it completely. I am starting from scratch here, too! To be honest, though, Genetic Bomb was gone so long that it didn’t seem worth resurrecting. It seemed the best move of all to remake something entirely new. So, I did… Blood Music!

I did some work around here. I cam addicted to plugins. That is probably pretty obvious… but I had to replace some when I upgraded to Wordpress 2.6. And, I wanted new stuff. New stuff for me like post ratings and post views and a site map. It’s all so cool on the backend. You should see my Wordpress Admin panel. It’s insanely cramped full of stuff.

Next up!? I am making a totally new layout for Marius de Romanus.net. It was about time that it got an overhaul. I want something a little… darker than what I have now. Elegant, for sure, since it IS Marius that we’re talking about and he’s just not your typical vampire. It is coming along great right now. I am about half way done with the layout itself. Afterwards, I will have to work on the coding. But, I’ll worry about that when I’ve created a layout that I can happy with. And then, it’s on to revamping Yuki Eiri.com.

First my domains and then some of the subsites. Once the main domains are finished and redone, I’ll work on my subdomains because A LOT of them need to be redone and updated as far as content information goes.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Guys, episode 11 of Vampire Knight has been subbed by Shoku-dan. Well, it was done a few days ago. I linked it, but I haven’t watched it yet. I want a good time to sit back and really enjoy it.

So far, I really like what they are doing with this anime. It’s no secret that I LOVE the manga, especially Zero. There’s no promise that if you like a manga, you are going to like the anime. It’s like any sort of book to screen adaptation where actors might not be right for the part or things might be changed around in such a way that important thing are missing or just out of whack. So, I was hesitant but excited about this anime, even more towards excited now because the anime is so great.

If you like the music, I’ve got some of it here. The official OST won’t be out for another… week or so.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Fatima sent me an invite to a site called Plurk a few days ago. I checked it out and decided to join, so ALL OF YOU SHOULD, TOO! And then add me as a friend, please. I like looking like I am popular. Plurk is sort of like Twitter because you can put how you are feeling in short snippets, but unique in that it shows your Plurks and all of your friends on a nifty little timeline. Visually, it’s just so much cuter than Twitters single page of posts back and forth.

And while you’re at it, friend me on Twitter. I have a Firefox plugin that allows me to post to Twitter by typing in my address bar and hitting a button, so it’s a lot easier for me to update Twitter. I forgot about it for a while, but now I am back into it.

Popularity: 9% [?]

I was the Featured Site on SocialSpark yesterday. A small thing, really, but it was awesome to log on and see my site there.

Did it increase my hits? No. Did it bring me new friends? No.

But it was still kind of awesome.

Popularity: 9% [?]