a shout-out to Alltop

We were recently added to a blogroll service called Alltop in the Humor section.  Of course, you have already found our blog if you’re reading this, but I just wanted to let you know about this service, in case you’re looking for more humor.  Plus, I wanted to give a shout-out to Alltop.com for adding us.

The site lists the last 5 articles at each blog, and you can usually get a preview of it by putting your cursor over the title.  But be forewarned that there are links to many blogs there, and the content is not regulated.  Some of the material there you might find offensive, but if you can look past those links, you might find some new humor blogs to check out.  (Just don’t forget about us while you’re roaming the blogosphere!) 

possibly related posts

There’s a new feature of WordPress blogs now, which means it applies to this one.  When you’re on the individual page for a post, you may see some links after the article.  They will be prefaced with this statement:

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

As it says, these links are “possibly” related, and they are “automatically generated”, which means I have nothing to do with them.  These links may be to external sites, and obviously I have no control over what content is provided there.  (If I ever get to rule the world, I would have such control, but my time has not yet come.)  So in the meantime, peruse such links at your own risk.

I thought about disabling them, but then it would remove this blog from appearing on other people’s blogs in their “possibly related posts”.  And we’ve already received several new visitors from other blogs in this way, so I’m going to leave it up for now.

This has been a public service announcement from Buffet o’ Blog.  Thank you, drive thru…

update on iBlogCup for April 2008

Regarding the iBlogCup I mentioned last week in a post, there’s some good news and some bad news.  So let’s start with the good news : we got the 4th most votes out of the 32 blogs.  However, the blog in our “bracket” was one of the three that got more votes than us, so we didn’t advance.

That doesn’t really seem fair, but so it goes.  Also, some blogs got 0 votes but got to advance because their competitor got 0 votes, and the one that was nominated first gets to advance in case of a tie.  So it’s too bad we weren’t up against one of those!  But either way, a few people came to the blog from iBlogCup.com, so hopefully they’ll stick around.

Another thing that doesn’t seem fair is that the blog we were up against in the first round finished 2nd overall in the previous month.  But I guess there’s no rules against re-entering, so maybe we will too.

vote for us in the Blog Cup

This blog has been nominated to participate in iBlogCup, which is an International Blog Cup Competition.  The only way for us to get votes is if you go to their site and vote for Buffet o’ Blog.  Here’s the link : April 2008 competition.

You can only vote once per round, and it checks your IP to make sure you aren’t voting multiple times.  This round is open from April 1 thru April 7.  I would really appreciate it if you’d take a few seconds to go there and vote.  There’s no prizes, but it would get us more recognition, which might translate into more regular readers.  The more, the merrier. 

[ Edit: I've been informed that the vote button doesn't always show in IE, i.e., Internet Exploder (that is, Internet Explorer).   See the pic below for how it should look.  Also, note that you have to enter a password at the top of the page for your vote to count.  This keeps people from using bots to automatically vote for them. ]

two years of blogging

This month marks the two-year anniversary of Buffet o’ Blog.  And what a time it has been!  Randomness reigns, and traffic is skyrocketing.

Now, after two years, our stats are :

• 412 posts
• 1,564 comments
• 29,901 spam comments
• 40,740 page hits

I’m really thankful for Akismet, which catches most of our spam comments!  (FYI, the spam comments don’t count toward page hits.)

As you can see by this chart, traffic is growing at a significant rate.  (Click the image for a larger picture.)

Thank you to all the readers here, who partake of my ramblings.  And thanks for all the comments, because it helps make this into more of a community, with all of the recurring “characters”.  :)  It’s exciting to have this kind of traffic, and I enjoy producing this site.  And we’ve got some new features in the works, which you shall see and experience shortly.  It’s just an exciting time!

To celebrate, I’d like to take all my regular readers to Larry’s Pizza, where we will conquer the seemingly endless buffet of pizza.  However, there is a flaw in the slaw — our budget.  So while I’d like to buy pizza for everyone, the funds are at $0.00, which doesn’t buy much pizza.  So you’ll just have to pay for your own (because I still plan to go).

how to get your own avatar

You may notice that I enlarged the avatars (pictures) in the Recent Comments in the sidebar.  The gravatar.com site is finally working correctly, so pictures are now showing up for your ID.  The idea of global avatars is really neat, and I’m glad that feature is available in WordPress.

Do you want your own?  It’s really simple.  Just go to gravatar.com, create an account, and upload a picture to go with your e-mail address.  Then when you write a comment using that e-mail address on a WordPress blog (or possibly others, too), the image shows up next to your name, if they have avatars enabled.

One thing I’ve noticed is that I had to use all lowercase when putting my e-mail address in the comment form.  Perhaps that will get fixed, but try doing that if you’re having any issues with it not showing up.

an interactive Christmas card for you

It’s almost Christmas here, so for all my regular readers (and whoever just happened to show up here), I’m linking to an interactive Christmas card.  You get to make it start snowing, and there’s various other things you get to do, too.  Have fun.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

And let us all remember the real Reason for the Season…

adding site search tags

I’m going to start adding tags to the end of posts to help with search engine optimization.  Or, in other words, to help bring more people to the site.  The more, the merrier, they say.  (Whoever “they” is.)  You’ll notice it as links after the post.  In most cases, they will just search this blog for other posts with that word or phrase in it.  The tags have to be a link, hence the search capability.  The words will just be “tags” that specify what the post is about.

Hopefully this helps more people find the random goodness that is Buffet o’ Blog.  If it helps, I’ll keep them.  If there is no difference in traffic, then they’ll go the way of the dodo.  So it’s like an experiment.  And I just wanted to let my regular readers know what’s going on.  They’ll be visible, because they have to be.  Google penalizes your Page Rank if you hide text behind pictures or make it the same color as the background.

And the experiment starts now… 

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Site search tags: tags, using tags, tagging, add tags, search, Page Rank

baseball announcers who don’t know what they’re talking about

I watched part of the Cardinals versus Braves game on ESPN last night, and Joe Morgan was one of the announcers.  Near the end of the game, Scott Rolen stole second off Bob Wickman, and Joe Morgan explained how Rolen had been studying Wickman’s delivery and got a great jump and it wasn’t even close.  But when the replay was shown, it became obvious that Rolen was out at second.  The umpire missed the call, but my point is how Joe Morgan was clearly wrong.  At least this time he acknowledged it after they’d watched the replay a few times.

Here’s another thing Joe Morgan said during a game which sounds crazy to me :

Slow motion makes it look worse than it really is. … It makes it look like he swung farther around than he really did. ~ Joe Morgan, on slow-motion instant replays of a checked-swing

No, the slow motion replay shows what actually happened.  Maybe he doesn’t like it because it reveals he is wrong sometimes.

How can baseball announcers like Joe Morgan and Tim McCarver get away with spouting their incorrect ramblings so many times?  Usually, no one even calls them on it.  Are the other announcers scared of offending them because these guys have so many years of experience?  Regardless of how well they played back when they were players, that doesn’t mean they know what they’re talking about.

It’s one thing if they accidentally get a stat wrong or say the wrong word, but to conduct baseball analysis based on clearly incorrect information is not right.

Lest you think I’m the only one who thinks this stuff, I’ll provide links to websites devoted solely to such things (if you want to read more) : Fire Joe Morgan and Shut Up Tim McCarver.

(BTW, I know this isn’t necessarily funny or random, but it’s my blog and I get to rant once in a while.  :)  Besides, listening to these characters during a game can be random — because you never know what you’ll hear, and it may be something you’ve never heard before.)

finding us at Larry’s Pizza

Today the Buffet o’ Blog staff had lunch at Larry’s Pizza in Conway, AR.  We all highly recommend this place.  Not only is the pizza really good, but it’s all-you-can-eat, and they bring the pizza out to your table (at lunch and on certain nights, I think).  There’s usually 3-4 waiters/waitresses walking around with various pizzas, and they’ll announce what they’re carrying, and you just motion that you want one and they’ll put some on your plate.  (They call this a “pizza parade”.)  They even get you drink refills.  And the pizza isn’t just one-topping stuff — it’s all kinds.  My favorite so far is the chicken bacon ranch.  It is excellent.  They also have a “meat madness” pizza, and chicken alfredo pizza, and cheeseburger pizza, and one called Fat Larry’s pizza, among others.  Another convenient feature is that the beverage glasses are large enough that you don’t need refills often.

It’s a great concept, if you think about it.  You get the benefits of a pizza buffet, but you don’t even have to get up.  It’s a great dining experience.  You get to rest while you’re digesting large quantities of pizza.  You don’t have to fight through the crowd like at certain other popular pizza buffet restaurants.  You can be lazy.  And there is usually some pizza on the buffet if you happen to run out of pizza or are looking for one specific kind.  The staff puts what’s left of the pizza on the buffet after they’ve walked around the restaurant.

We’ll be going back regularly, although perhaps just once a month because a few of us need to lose weight.  If I still had a high metabolism (or any metabolism), I’d go there every week.  But eating there is not conducive to losing weight.  Anyway, so if you want to meet us in person, that’s one place we’ll be on a regular basis.  Now, I’m not gonna tell you which day we’re going… that would make it way too easy.  But it will be during the work week.  Here’s another tip : if you’re in there, look around, and if you see three really cool guys who are laughing a lot and eating a lot of pizza, it might be us.  Of course, there could be other groups of three guys laughing and eating a lot, so I’ll narrow it down further.  If, after further observation, you realize these guys are the coolest guys you’ve ever seen, then it’s probably us (unless you don’t get out much, and thus aren’t an adequate arbiter of cool).

If you see us there, feel free to pull up a chair and enjoy unlimited pizza with us.  It’ll be a good time.  We always have great conversations.  What you see on the blog is only a fraction of our daily discussions.