The Untitled Title Page

A woman is waiting in line at the grocery store. The checker scans all her items, and as she pulls out her credit card to pay, music starts playing, balloons fall from above, and the store manager runs up to her saying, “Congratulations! You’re our one millionth customer! You get free groceries for life!”

Did that ever really happen or is that just something I think I saw on TV once? Not sure.

This is sort of like that. Kind of. Maybe.

On our relatively new wordpress platform for blog publication, it keeps track of the total number of comments. We’ve been approaching 600 (for a while… why have we had so few comments the past little bit while I’ve been paying attention? It’s a watched pot situation I feel), so I thought we’d do something fun to mark it. Now, this is assuming that all the old comments came over correctly when we ported the blog. I don’t have time to find out and add them all up, so we’re going to trust wordpress and just assume it really is 600.

So I waited and waited and the 600th comment came from…

Lesley!

Hooray! Lesley is a frequent commenter; however, it also seemed fair to figure out who leaves the most comments. So I went back to comment 500 (we can do this all from the admin area, I didn’t actually sort through the last months worth of posts) and tallied up every commenter’s comments. Some people only had one, some were more impressive. On this we have a clear winner…

Kara!

Hooray for Kara, too! So Lesley and Kara will be receiving in the mail these nifty coasters I made. It was a project bug floating in my head, and I made enough to share (does anyone else get project bugs? This one came the day after I had put my sewing machine away, thinking I’d make a little room on my desk. It’s apparently pointless to do that).

You’ll each get four of these. I need to figure out the sets still, but this was the best picture I had. The backs are pieced, too, but with all regular fabric, not the linen, and in between is a layer of thin interfacing so they’re not too floppy. My favorite is the contrast zig zag topstitching. That thread was the only element that I didn’t already have in my stash.

[Lesley, I need your London address... I'll email you or something.]

I think Adrian thought I was a little crazy for doing a comment contest, even one that no one knew about. I may or may not do one in the future. It really probably depends if I have a project bug that fits a blog-related winner. So we’ll see. In the meantime, I hope you guys enjoy a little handmade-ness from me.

So do you remember this post that I put up when we first made the big changes to our blog back in February?  Probably not.  It had new URL’s for the feed for our blog and the comments.  Previously, when we were using Blogger, if you had our blog on a fancy shmancy blog roll that showed when we were last updated or what our last post was, it wouldn’t work.  Why not?  Because we were hosting the blog on our own servers, and not on Blogger itself.  Does that really make a difference?  Not at all, but Blogger, in their infinite wisdom, disabled the autoupdate of your blogroll for our site.  Now you may ask why we had our blog hosted on our own servers, but if you have to ask that, then you obviously don’t know much about me and should really read more of the blog to find out why.  :)

Well, with our new site, and new URL’s, that problem is no more.  Thanks to Kara and her blog, we’ve been able to verify that everything will work all hunky dory for you and your fancy blog rolls.  So, I know there are many of you out there that have us linked on your blog, I’ve looked.  And I know you all have the old URL, I’ve also looked.  That URL won’t work forever (unless I pay for it forever) so update your links and enjoy the goodness that is The Untitled Title Page.  Or don’t.  Just trying to make it cooler for y’all.  Or not.  :)

Have you ever noticed Google Ads? I’m sure you have. And I’m sure that you have noticed them on any and every website. No matter what you’re doing, we all encounter Google Ads every single day. I have been able to practically filter out even seeing them while I browse the web. Seriously. They do not even register to me. I’m sure advertisers love people like me.

Now, a lot of people (ie. most people) would use Google Ads to make money. Take a look at your highly trafficked websites or blogs (insert your own definition of a highly trafficked website or blog) and odds are, they have ads on them. And odds are, they are served up from Google. They may not look like your generic Google Text Link Ads, but trust me, they probably are. There are only a few big players in the game, and Google corners the market. If you get a ton of traffic on your site, you can make some serious cash. There are some ads where you only get paid when people click on them, but then others pay when they are simply presented on a page. I mean, how do you think Pioneer Woman operates? When you have over 10,000 people seeing your site a day, sometimes multiple times a day, and you have deals where you get paid just for page views, even if you are only making a penny a page view, add it up. Not bad for doing not much, huh?

Well, here at The Untitled Title Page, we do things differently. We’re odd folks. Did you know that we serve ads on this site? We do. They don’t appear on the main page (I intentionally restrict where they show up), but if you drill down to an individual post, you will find them. But why Adrian? Why do you have them? It really boils down to one simple reason. For fun. Have you ever looked at your gmail and see a RIDICULOUS ad being served when you are checking your mail? Of course you have! Have you ever seen something that was TOTALLY applicable to what you were just doing, or searching? Yep. And why is that? It’s a little thing called “what you do really isn’t a secret on the internet.” Google knows. Why do you think they make so much money? Because you search, they track that. You browse, they track that. They have DATA. And with that data, they can tell what people will do, where they will go, what they are likely to have interests in. That’s why they can target advertisements so well and according to the people who pay them to do it, so effectively.

So really, I want to see what ad Google will place on our site in relation to the blog post content it’s being served within. And usually it’s pretty applicable.

Fantasy Baseball Help when talking about Fantasy Baseball? DUH!

Unusual Baby Names in a post talking about how we named Morgan? Absolutely.

Sanitizing your toothbrush in a post about cleaning dishes? Okay.

Free Sex Offender Report when discussing people invading your personal space to touch your newborn baby? Um…no?

How to cure your yellow teeth in Emily’s roasted veggie pasta recipe post?

I rest my case.

So have fun. Play the game too if you want. I just like seeing what they come up with. I might add it to more places on the site, just for more laughs for me personally.

I totally came up with that one myself.  

Okay, so if you are reading this post, you have noticed that the blog has changed dramatically.  For those of you that subscribe to our feed, you will have to resubscribe using the links at the upper right of the blog.  You now have 2 options for subscription: 1) you can subscribe to the posts like usual or 2) you can subscribe to the comments feed.  #1 will be nothing different for most of you.  #2 are for those of you who would like to know when people are commenting.  There seem to be some performance issues with the site and the web hosting right now, so if you notice anything that is probably why.  Shortcuts to the feed are 1) http://TheUntitledTitlePage.com/feed/ and 2) http://TheUntitledTitlePage.com/comments/feed/.

One good thing about these new feeds is that they publish the ENTIRE blog and comments, not just the past 25 like most blogging engines.

I could go on for hours about the changes to the blog, so maybe I will, maybe I won’t, we’ll just have to see how much I put into this post.  It’s a work in progress, but I have been working on it for a good month or two now, I just wanted something a little fancier for Emily, and I wanted to have more control over things.  I did not go the route of actually having my own server host it ala the St. Clairs, but with the performance issues I’m seeing from our web host, don’t think I am not thinking about it.  :)

Okay, so we’ve gone over the feeds, let’s go to the top left of the page.  There we have some new pages and categories.  If there is a post or more in a category, it’ll appear up top.  So if you want to see everything under Morgan, you can just go to Family -> Morgan and get your fix.

You will notice that I was able to import everything over from our old Blogger blog.  This was, of course, a little bit of an ordeal, but I’ll give a shout out to a little application I was able to track down to convert a Blogger export file to a Wordpress file for importing.  It is called Blogger 2 Wordpress and it does exactly as named.  For those of you that use Blogger, under the Settings -> Basic page, there is a link to export blog.  What that does is create a Blogger specific XML file of all of your posts and comments.  They just recently rolled this out to users.  Part of us moving to a new blog and getting more control over things means that I needed a blogging solution that I could host myself.  What that means, is that not only are our files and photos on our server (and not Bloggers) but so is the actual blog engine itself.  There are a few solutions out there, but after a while investigating, the best seemed to be self-hosted Wordpress.  It is an open-source platform, which means you are free to change what you want and how you want it, plus a ton of people are out there making themes and plugins for it.  It always seemed a little difficult to find a good amount of themes and plugins to use on our Blogger blog, especially plugins that would work outside of being hosted on Blogger.  Okay, so Wordpress can import Blogger blogs, but of course, for some unknown reason, ours wouldn’t import.  In come the Blogger 2 Wordpress application.  I was able to take that Blogger export XML file, throw it into that little web-hosted application, and voila, a Wordpress XML file all ready for importing.  OF COURSE since we have over 200 posts, it would only import 90 or so at a time, so I would have to run import a few times, but other than that it was pretty easy.  We are slowly going through and adding our old posts to categories and properly tagging them, so that will take a while.

As you can see as you scroll down the left, you will see a Search Box..  Then we have a snapshot of our 5 most recent posts.  Pretty straigh forward.  Below that are recent photos we have uploaded to our Flickr stream.  We will be publishing all of our photos to Flickr now.  Why?  Well, they have a better unlimited usage plan that Picasa, and it’s always good to have an online backup of what you have on your computer in case of an earthquake or who knows what.  We’ll slowly be uploaded pictures to that, and of course all of the photos we put into our posts will be hosted there as well.

Next we have the Tag Cloud.  As I mentioned, we will be going through all of our old posts and tagging and categorizing them.  As we find new categories, the links on the top of the blog will grow.  Ans our a keyword is tagged, it will appear in the Tag Cloud.  The bigger the link, the more it has been tagged.  So you can see what we blog about the most, or the least.

Now come the polls.  The first one will be what people think about the new blog.  It’ll change every now and then, if Emily doesn’t like it, we’ll remove it.  So it’s there for now, but who knows, maybe we’ll have new polls sometimes, maybe we won’t for a while.  It’s dynamic like that.

Of course we had to continue to include translation for our friends and family overseas.  It defaults to Italian, that should be a surprise to nobody.  :)

Finally on the left, we have another link to Archives but broken out by month.  It also shows you the number of posts in that month, so that’s cool.  There is also the option to show you a calendar with what days you posted highlighted, but what if you post every day?  Then you just have a highlighted calendar, and I thought that didn’t make any sense.

Okay, on to the right side.  We have a bunch of link categories.  Actually, they are Google Reader folders that we set up for a bunch of feeds we are interested in.  If you are not on there but would like to be, it’s because I missed putting you in.  Drop us a line on the Contact Us page and we can do a little “you add us we’ll add you” peace agreement action.  As we add/remove feeds, you’ll see the changes magically reflected before your eyes.  These are a work in progress because they appear to slow down the loading of the blog in general, so give us some feedback whether you like them or not.  Maybe you’ll sway us in one direction, maybe you won’t.  ;)

Well, I guess that’s really it for the right side.  The Site Administration section is for us to login and post and do stuff like that.  It also has a handy dandy extra set of links for the feeds.

As you view the posts, you’ll notice that we now have ratings, 1-5 stars.  Maybe you people only care about when we blog about Morgan and when Emily talks about crafts.  This will help us know, and may give you a better sense of what others find interesting or just plain boring.

Comments can now be threaded.  What that means is that not only can you comment on a post, but you can comment on a comment.  So you can start little conversations in there too if you want.

There are also a bunch of handy little icons at the bottom of each post to help you bookmark and share if you want.  Avid blog readers seem to find that useful, so I thought hey, might as well.  It looks cool anyway.

Each post will also show you what category(ies) it lies within as well as what we have tagged it as.  Again, just makes it easier for you to find related content and for us to sort of “bucket” everything, rather than just having a blog of “stuff.”

So, we hope you like what we’ve added.  If you don’t, we can always make changes.  So let us know what you think, and if you see any problems, drop me a line and we’ll work on them.  We have new “hosted” email addresses specifically for blog communication too.  Thanks to our friends over at Google, you can now reach us at Emily@TheUntitledTitlePage.com and Adrian@TheUntitledTitlePage.com.

Oh yeah, so we have a new domain name too.  We still have AdrianAndEmily.com but now it will redirect to TheUntitledTitlePage.com.  So please, update your feed readers and your bookmarks.  You will be forwarded here if you navigate to AdrianAndEmily.com but your feed probably won’t work anymore.  :)

I think that’s about all I can remember for now.  Sweet.

The old blog url is supposed to start redirecting to here sometime today. It’s kind of mean of me to put up this post because Adrian is the genius behind all of this newness. This way I get to laud him, however, and he can put up his own post later! Anyhow, we’re still working on the details, but Adrian has put lots of work into getting everything working. He’s spent many, many hours on this, just so we can have more fun with the blog/site. We hope you enjoy it.

As a note, sorry for the lack of pictures but I actually haven’t been taking too many. The days seem to run into each other and little Miss Morgan has recently decided sleeping isn’t fun. She’s not upset, just awake to the point of seeming too exhausted to even fall asleep. Or something. Maybe it’s just me who’s that exhausted…

Regardless, enjoy the new site!