New Era, new Look

Welcome back, everyone. I hope you like the new look. I've been thinking for a while about changing the template and this one is my favourite - I first saw it on Siris blog and grew green with envy. Still, Blogger forced my hand on this. When you spend a couple of hours editing your links and try to save the template, and Blogger saves only the top half of the template, the only solution is to pick a new template and start from scrach. Hopefully, you are smart enough to have the whole thing saved as a Word file.... I see a lot of people complaining about Blogger and even moving to other hosts. I agree it can be fishy, but its price is priceless - FREE! Also, being a computer idiot, I do not intend to do much fancy stuff here: no animations or other clutter for which I would need a better system. I like lean clean blogs anyway.

Anyway, the election is over, the year is almost over, my Dissertation is almost done, a whole new life is ahead, so it is time for a new blog look. I have received 5000 hits, went over 100 hits per day on average, and am proudly a Marauding Marsupial in the TTLB Ecosystem. I will be hosting the next Tangled Bank, too. I've made it! I have no idea how it looks to you, though. I have the bloody AOL and all my links are on top, and all my posts on the bottom of the blog. How does it look on a decent system? I'll check it on my office Mac tomorrow. AOL will have to go soon, and be replaced with something high-speed. I am sick of paying for dial-up that gets interrupted by every phone call, just as I am in the middle of posting something.

I hope you like the new links - you'll notice much more science and miscellaneous fun than before. I have separated the Big Fish from the other blogs. Of the Big Fish, I go only to Kos, and even there, more to read other people's Diaries than to wonder what the local God, Markos Moulitzas, has to say. I have discovered that these Big Bloggers, the Guys-Who-Made-It, are not that interesting. Perhaps they lost steam. Perhaps they are conscious of their large audiences. Perhaps they aspire to become real journalists. Actually, some of them ARE real journalists who also write a blog. Many have gone Pro or semi-Pro. They tend to comment on the articles in mainstream media and on each other. I never see them coming to the smaller blogs, linking to them, commenting on them.... The Big Fish are for all practical purposes now a part of the mainstream media. I don't feel like going there, not just because their blogs tend to take forever to load, but also because, if they ever write something worthwhile, it inevitably gets linked on other, smaller, more interesting blogs.

As for the links to Real Blogs, the order is not entirely meaningful, but it is not completely random, either. If your blog is listed there, closer to the top you find it, more likely it is that I check it frequently and read it carefully. Top 20 or so are in the top 20 positions, the rest are more random. Of course, my tastes change over time, I get bored with some blogs and excited about new ones. But for now, the order will remain like this.

I love the Moon-Phase thingie on the bottom - if you want one for yourself just click on it. It's so cool. The Map is not too reliable, though. I know I had visitors from Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Sweden, Serbia, Poland, Netherlands, France, UK, Indonesia, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, etc., yet not everything shows up on the map. Also, by far the biggest circle there is not in North Carolina, as I would expect, but Washington DC. Why? I always get chills when my sitemeter shows me that a person spending two hours on my blog comes from DOD.gov or army.mil. Who knows who is reading this blog that I may not like here....

OK, good night for now. I'll think of something smarter to post soon, I promise ;-)