Getting the house in order when the visitors are already here

So it seems we have a few more readers now than we did a week ago, especially with a second LiveJournal linking to us. Yesterday and the day before, Da Blog had nine times more visitors than it did the day before that, so it seems some housekeeping is in order.

First: RSS feeds. The-zaniak has created a LiveJournal feed for Da Blog, and my response is: Um... you do know Blogger comes with its own RSS feed, right? If you have IE 7 or Firefox, you should see an RSS icon light up when you see the page. (I can only speak to IE there; I don't know how it works for Firefox.) Unless I get something else cool from having an LJ feed, it seems a bit unnecessary. This has prompted me to add feed links to the sidebar. (If you wanted to create an LJ feed, you'd have done better to create one for Sandsday. I'd create one myself if I knew how to create an RSS feed from a pre-existing MySQL database.)

I've also posted in the past on the idea of Da Blog as a collection of sub-blogs, and as such I've also added a list of all of Da Blog's labels to the sidebar. They come complete with their own feeds; this post explains how you can form them. Both those new sidebar items are right below the larger blog archive, which makes them, and Da Blog Poll, less visible.

I'm also re-opening and extending by one week one of Da Blog Poll questions, removing the Random Internet Discovery from the list of options and replacing it with the fairly self-explanatory "Explorations into History", which could include such things as my opinion on the presidents. Although I have saved the other results to a personal file, if you are one of the three people that have voted on the poll before, I strongly urge doing so again. If you vote "other" I expect you to specify what you have in mind on this post (where you can also learn more about the options) or this one. This is probably the last time I'm going to re-open this particular poll, which has existed in some form almost since Da Blog was founded. I'm also giving you until the end of August 16 to tell me whether you think I should post every time I put up a new strip. You can vote on any or all of the poll questions. I also encourage you to contribute to the poll on the front page of the web site.

Also, after nearly a year since the Web site was put up, I've finally deleted the long-dormant Da Blog Poll from the days when Blogger didn't have its own poll element.

Finally, I'm offering you the chance to have your name in lights, as long as you won't get paid for it, at least not right away. If you're a movie buff - and not just the "Spiderman" kind, but one with a real grasp of film history - I invite you to join my 100 Greatest Movies Project, my seemingly endless quest to create the definitive list of greatest movies from all the ones that have come before, to sing the praises of the movies that make the list. E-mail me at mwmailsea at yahoo dot com if you're interested and I'll show you a sample write-up and a list of movies that are either on the list or close enough to make it on when I retabulate the list (or at some point in the future when new lists come out). I used the same principle in creating the NFL SuperPower Rankings, and released lists for last year, but it proved to be too much work. If you're an NFL buff, and you're willing to put in the work, you can have it for your own website as long as you credit me with the idea, and I'll link to you on Da Blog.

And if you have any other ideas for what the web site or Da Blog could use, feel free to leave a comment on this post.

UPDATE 7/25: Okay, this is why I have long thought about leaving Blogger, because of unnecessary bullshit. Evidently for the last 24 hours the reposted poll and the two new features were at the top of the sidebar even though I had THOUGHT I had saved their moves. Then when I was told I had changes I hadn't saved, it wouldn't save, and then it would tell me "an error occured" no matter what I did after that. lk asfdasilnbg grlkldoe m,x bjfk dsndihtsgugvwbgjwhidxdyf