My greatly shrinking online footprint, mixtape for my brother, and 3000+ visits to DoaB

(20:19:19 CDT)

My greatly shrinking online footprint, mixtape for my brother, and 3000+ visits to DoaB

Let's do this in reverse order. Today, Dickens of a Blog (this site if you are on it, or this site if you are somewhere else) reached 3000 hits, since I started track per-page hits late December 2009, today. The main page. The total thing (thing = hits for all pages) is double that, maybe more, with some of the entries having 100-500 views themselves. But, well, my front page hit 3000 views. Which is not really bragging rights, I do not suppose: 3000 hits over five months? That only comes down to, what, 20 a day or something? Still, though, for a little site/blog out in the wide big net, that's not too bad.

Second, have been tweaking and hammering out a mix-tape for my brother, Danny. He mentioned needing some new music, which I think he meant as "I need some new music that is like the old music I like". I choose to interpret it as "I need some new music unlike what I normally listen to". He normally digs on Rush, Steve Vai, classic rock and guitar rock. The tape has some Clutch ("Soap Makers"), and Darkest of the Hillside Thickets ("Innsmouth Look"), and some Explosions in the Sky (I forget the name, but the first track of All of Sudden, I Miss Everyone)—which should be right up his alley—but it also has some Jolie Holland ("Mexico City") and some Granddaddy ("A.M. 180") and some Miike Snow ("Animal") and something like two or three variations on blue grass (including Gangstagrass, though Redneck Girlfriend did not make the cut, simply for time) and even a little bit of Tuvan throat singing. A little bit of rock, a little bit of soul, a little bit of country, a little bit of pop. It brings me to a question, though: if you had someone in the musical doldrums, what would you recommend? If you could make a mixtape to bring them out: what songs would you include?

Now to the shrinking online footprint. Or buttprint. However that term works best. True to my last post—Eight and a Half Reasons Why Tomorrow Will See the End of My Facebook Account—I closed my FB account last night at midnight. I'm slightly in the "twitch" stage, where I feel like I am missing something. My heart is telling me that I have already missed untold numbers of friend updates, but my head knows the truth. The thing is, I know that there won't really be the kind of udpates that make me happy. I mean, some have probably posted new pics, which is nice. A few have probably posted some new statuses. Overall, though, I could probably go a week or two at a time without missing anything of great importance. I probably only updated something of real importance about once a week, myself, and most of my friends seem to be in a similar boat. If FB had opened the friends' feed up as an RSS feed, or something, that I could filter and whatnot off-site: it might have been perfect. As it was, too much flack, too much drama, too much painful information about who liked what. I've been over it before (see recently leaked post) so I won't rehash.

FB isn't the only thing I closed. Myspace went. My Yahoo! account went. I've even in the process of shutting down my, in Internet terms, ancient Hotmail account (something I may stop, since I have had it since, wow 1998 or so, making it the single longest account I have had on the web). Livejournal and Twitter, I am keeping. As well as Delicious and, for now, Goodreads. I am pretty active on the Delicious, Twitter, and LJ accounts (not day to day, per se, but active at times). I am thinking about starting a Tumblr account, because Delicious is not quite what I am looking for as far as links go and more than one friend has suggested an interesting in a small, close-knit discussion group. Oh, and I still have my Orkut account, though there is nothing on it but a single status update that says something like "Oh, I haven't used Orkut in a while".

The "zeitgeist" of Facebook deletion already has its complainers, I notice. I read this tweet today: '"I deleted my Facebook" is the new "I don't own a TV"'. I guess that's about right, since most are using it as a sign of emotional and even spiritual superiority. I am mostly just using it as a sign of I am tired of putting up with lots and lots of crap for those single moments of light that I get in return. A twelve to one ratio (or, in the case of the deleted e-mail accounts, hundreds to one ratio) does not justify keeping it.

Ok, I am off to e-mail a couple of friends and see if I can beg them to come back over to LJ.

Si Vales, Valeo

file under Me in 2010
and Linux and the Web

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