what about the plastic animals?

Learn to Blog

Rather than pay someone to learn how to blog here's my free lesson in three easy steps:

1.  Today:  Write something.

2.  Tomorrow:  Write something else.

3.  Repeat steps 1 and 2.

Good luck!

Best comment ever

As if to celebrate today's first anniversary of this site, a spammer has posted the best comment ever (I removed their links) on a post from last January. My apologies to all the real people who've posted real comments!

I've posted 375 times and there have been 396 comments.

Counting the photos there have been 536,928 hits on this site in the past year. 448,859 of them have been to the abandoned bicycle photos and 35,539 to the text pages. My trip to Dinosaur Land have been criminally neglected by you readers and google searchers. The site is currently running at six times my allowed bandwidth (it has already doubled this month's limit). That's not because of my popularity but because the photo in this post comes up on the first results page when you do a google image search for "apple".

What's next? I'm likely to migrate this to a different server, with my own domain name, and start using Movable Type. Sooner or later I'm going to be hit with excess bandwidth charges from Six Apart and, more importantly, there are things I want to do with static pages that I can't while using Typepad. I'm nearing a hundred abandoned bicycle photos. The bikes are starting to all look the same, so a hundred will a nice round number to stop at. I'm pretty sure there will still be pictures of New York, weird signs, and food.

Thanks to all of you who take time out of your busy day to take a look at what oddness I've come up with. Although sometimes I'm not much of a correspondent I have enjoyed corresponding with those of you who have left comments or sent me email, and I've really, truly enjoyed meeting a bunch of you over fried chicken, chicken wings, cheesecake, pizza, beer, barbecue, etc.

Not loved in Sweden

Early this morning the Abandoned Bicycles gallery was posted on http://buzz.bazooka.se/. I don't read swedish, but it looks like people get to vote thumbs up or thumbs down on whether the link should be kept. There were many Swedes looking at the bicycles. Unfortunately, they voted thumbs down by nearly 3 to 1. Now I know what Joe Lieberman must feel like today. :(

Taxi!

Last night I went to a get-together called the Big Apple Blogger Bash. I’m way too introverted to enjoy such an event, but I recently met Tien and Rachelle, and wanted to at least go and say hello to them. I did get to briefly talk to both of them, as well as meet a couple of other people.

The bash was at AZ, a pretentious bar that kicked everyone (40-50 people) out after about an hour (as far as I could tell they just didn’t like having customers. The bartender was completely befuddled by the manager's decision to stop serving everyone.). It was decided to meet at another bar about 20 blocks uptown. There was talk about getting a

taxi. Here I have to admit to being in my own little world. I did not immediately comprehend what that meant. I’ve never taken a cab, except to go to the airport, so the idea that you can use one to go just a few blocks never enters my mind. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to the next bar and needed to get some fresh air and grab a bite to eat so I started walking uptown. Along the way I relaxed a bit and walked to Siberia, the bar at 40th and 9th where everone else wound up. Siberia was much more to my liking than the pretentious place.

Lots of other people have already posted about the bash. For more details, check out the post on Gothamist and the links to other posts from there.

I should mention that you can see the back of my head and my shoulder on Jake's site.

A busy week

It has not been a quiet week on this here website. The Abandoned Bicycles gallery was listed on A Whole Lotta Nothing, MetaFilter, The Morning News and Gawker. Those links resulted in a ton of hits -- 160,000 and counting! Before last Sunday that gallery had 3000 hits total. On Monday the gallery was getting upwards of 5000 hits/hour. Lucky for me Typepad has yet to work out a pricing policy for such events and I didn't face an exorbitant surcharge. Later in the week, this main page was listed in Yahoo's Weblog directory

Several bicycling forums linked to the site. The cyclists were saddened by the pictures and had great advice on how to properly secure your bicycle. To all those who said the same could be done for Toronto, Richmond, Urbana, Cambridge, and especially Amsterdam, I say "do it!".

The gallery was also linked to from sites in the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, Korea, Brazil, England, Canada, Australia, Brooklyn, and from a charming street in Greenwich Village. One posting on a Hungarian site resulted in 25 comments on that site. A *special* thanks goes out to the Japanese and spanish-language porn sites that linked to the gallery. On an Australian forum someone wondered if I was a complete loser for taking the photos. Generous to a fault, I do not consider him a loser for looking at all 41 photos (dude, they're called referrer logs and I can see the files you looked at). To be fair, he later changed his mind and said he enjoyed the site.

It was pointed out to me that there is a collaborative Street Mattress site.

Thanks to all who have visited! A couple more, possibly controversial, photos will be posted later today.