I’m confused. I’m not sure what I should do with this blog. For some time, I’ve written five articles per day. And the average length of the articles has been about 600 words. That makes for 3,000 words per day. That sits very well with me because my first novel had chapters that were all about 3,000 words long. It seems like a proper amount of work for one day, even though each chapter took me quite a lot longer than one day to write.

But for whatever reason, the articles I’ve been writing recently have been much longer. Articles and coming in at about a thousand words. And I don’t think this is because I’m padding. I think I’m just going into a little more depth. And in the three articles I’ve written today, I’ve already reached close to 3,000 words. Do you deserve more? Well, of course you do! You don’t come to Frankly Curious for in-depth analysis. So I will continue to try to put out five articles per day.

Just the same, it can’t just be five articles per day. I actually have a problem with posts that are just an image or a video. That’s all fine for people who are on the cutting edge of what’s happening. But if I present a video to you, it probably dates from the 1950s. But there is another option.

I’ve long thought what it would be like to be an Atrios kind of blogger. His is the kind of blogging you can do only if you already have a huge audience. It is rare that he writes more than a paragraph, and usually he writes only a sentence. For example, where I wrote a thousand words about Jonathan Chait’s apologia for football, Atrios would have written, “When I read this, I thought some people never get over high school.” That’s not to say that Atrios doesn’t have keen insights that he communicates pithily. But it does seem like a bit of a cheat. It seems like idea aggregation. And the commenters rarely discuss what any given blog post is about. Each could as easily be open threads.

Regardless, I don’t have it in me. Even when I try to be brief, I find that I manage 500 words of lead up. Anyway, all of this is to say that I don’t know quite what I’m doing. What comes, comes. It is the nature of Frankly Curious anyway. It was never intended to be consistent. That’s why I can go days talking about nothing but politics and then go days not talking about politics at all. More and more, I’d like to spend my time not talking about politics. There isn’t much to talk about anyway. And what little there is makes me wish that I had been born into a more enlightened time and place — perhaps into a Neanderthal tribe on the coast of the Mediterranean.

Most likely, Frankly Curious will continue on as it has gone on. Because above all else, this website continues to be a kind of addiction for me. Some men feel a compulsion to kill people and have sex with their dead bodies. I have a compulsion to write five articles here every day. And even though some of the articles are really little more than filler like this article, I think we can all agree that this is a far better use of my time than serial murder. For one thing, there’s the whole ten thousand hours that is required to become an expert in anything and I haven’t even spent a minute murdering people. Do you really want to wait for five years while I perfect my craft? No. I think I’d better stick to what I know.

I don’t know if you have seen this Verizon Wireless commercial about trading in your iPhone 5 for the iPhone 6. I seem to be getting this commercial everywhere. This has got to be a glitch in the ad serving software. I don’t have Verizon. I don’t have an iPhone. I have never had an iPhone. And I’m on record as being pretty negative toward Apple, which I think is one of the very worst high tech companies.

The problem is not just that Apple has spent the last 25 years doing little other than suing every other high tech company under the sun for copyright violations they are only taken seriously in the United States where the judicial system is strictly pay-to-play. They also are not not not innovators. I don’t know how people can miss this. They are at best a packaging company and at worse a branding company.

At least in the old days, their hardware products were well built. Their computers came with the very best components. This is not so anymore! As other companies have come out with computers that are arguably as sexy, Apple has responded by putting out worse products. I don’t know why. I remember reading a quote from (I think) Steve Wozniak in an old book that went something like this, “Apple isn’t a computer; it’s a lifestyle.” He meant that in a good way. And God knows, this fact is good for sales. So let the lemmings have their overpriced devices and I will still be getting work done with whatever happens to be in front of me (which sometimes is an Apple product).

So I think the fact that Verizon is advertising the hell out of this iPhone 6 upgrade is yet another manifestation of this. Given that the iPhone 6 is not a fundamental improvement on the iPhone 5, you’ve got to sell it as the best thing in the world. It reminds me of grim years when Microsoft kept the world enslaved to MS-DOS. Oh! My! God! Version 3 is out! And it is better than Version 2 because… Did I mention Version 3 is out!

Now this commercial might be great for the kind of people who just have to have the latest and greatest Apple device. It just fills me with guilt and regret and anxiety. In it, Paul reads about this great new deal where he gets to upgrade to an iPhone 6 for FREE. (That’s right: it is all in capitals.) And Paul’s phone acts like the girlfriend who thinks she is about to be dumped. It ends with, “Sure, you loved you old iPhone. But you’ll love your free new iPhone you trade it for even more.”

I hate this commercial because I think breaking up with a lover is one of the worst things in the world. I would much rather be dumped than have to dump someone. I have to have a really good reason. (Sadly, I have.) And this guy is dumping his lover-surrogate for what? Because the camera in the iPhone 6 has a true-tone flash? Because of the supposed 10% increase in battery life? Because of the supposed 20% increase in CPU speed? Because the base model has exactly the same amount of memory? As Trusted Reviews says, even while salivating over the phone, “There isn’t an objective reason, at this stage, to upgrade from an iPhone 5S.”

But am I alone in thinking the commercial is also vaguely sexist? The female voice on the phone sounds like a battered woman. “You’ve always treated me horribly, but please don’t leave me! I’ll be better!” And Paul seems very much like a lot of guys I knew when I was that age who were constantly worried that they was “settling.” When they were in relationships, they were always looking around to see if there wasn’t some other woman who might be better.

Don’t take this as me not getting the ad. I get it. I think it’s clever. I also think it appeals to exactly the market segment that Apple is most dependent on: people who think they can make up for the total lack of a soul through the purchases they make.

There are three ways that one can format a blog post. The way that Frankly Curious does it is by far the best. But before I get to that, let’s discuss the different ways. The most common is what I call, “We don’t need no stinking pictures!” This is what you get from smaller blogs. They are just trying to get their messages out. They don’t have the time or the resources to add imagines to their posts. And there really is no need for the images. That’s especially true for people like Digby who we all read because she’s brilliant.

Three Kinds of Image Layouts

This kind of format is also found on Bloomberg blogs. I assume this is because these posts are going to be reprinted elsewhere. Also Political Animal includes no images. But interestingly, when Washington Month publishes guest posts, they include a small caricature of the writer in the upper left hand corner of the article. I rather like this. One of my complaints about websites generally but blogs especially is the lack of author images. Readers like to have some idea of who they are dealing with. I don’t think I’m in the minority on this one.

The second kind of format is generally done by large publications. In these cases, the article starts with a headline, followed by a large image that has to be scrolled past to get to the content. A typical example of this can be found with New York Magazine. But sadly, this is also how Vox is displayed. This is a huge mistake. First, it requires that the reader click to the page and then scroll down just to figure out if they want to read the article. Second, the idea of images is to break up the page. Having a big image that simply pushes the entire text flow out of the way doesn’t do that. So the images get in the way at the same time that they don’t make the pages more pleasant to look at.

The Frankly Curious Way

This brings us to the correct way to layout pages: my way. What’s strange is that not more people do it. My standard scheme is to put a single small (150×200 [Now 225×300 -FM] pixel) image in the upper left hand corner of the article. Sometimes it goes on the right. And sometimes I use a large image if I think it is important enough. But that is the exception. There are various things that this accomplishes. First, it shows rather clearly on the main page where the articles start. It also makes the page look nice and not so desperately dull. Think of it as the spice of the article. I also think it makes people more likely read the article because it gives them another reason to be interested in the subject.

I perhaps have a different outlook on the web than a lot of people. I set up one of the first websites in the world. And at that time, one of the very few things you could do was to include images on pages. So I’ve always seen it as a publishing platform. But it isn’t like a book. It is like a magazine. And it should appeal like a magazine. Just the same, I don’t claim to be any kind of a layout artist. And that’s kind of the point: if this stuff is obvious to me, what the hell is going on with professionals at popular sites?

Layout for Ads, Not Content

Well, I think I know, actually. I think they are far more interested in maximizing the number of people who click on the ads they liter their pages with than they are with the content they are providing. Washington Monthly, for example, is more ads than content. Because of that site alone, I’ve turned off flash content on my pages. And the site still annoys me.

There are many other problems with the way that webpages are displayed. Many of them have been eliminated by blogging software. For example, you just don’t see blog themes that have virtually unreadable text scrolling all the way across the screen. Just the same, the blogs have also created a great deal of monotony. Right now on Frankly Curious, I’m rather unhappy with the excessive amount of white space. This is something that seems especially typical of WordPress. And every time I look at this blog, I think, “That’s so 2009!” Just the same, it isn’t terrible. But I don’t want to be saying that in 2019.

Blog Images Take Time

What I think goes on with most blogs is that people don’t have all that much time to devote to them. What’s more, they aren’t that technically savvy and so once they get something that doesn’t totally suck, they stick with it. Also, the blogs really do limit you. I’ve only been using my current theme for a month or two, but I know that I can never upgrade it. I’ve gone in and hacked the code to make it do things it was never meant to do. So I don’t blame people for playing it safe. And I never complain that a lone blogger isn’t dazzling me with graphics. But the professionals really are to blame for not only leaving me flat with their designs, but getting in the way of my consuming their content.

I was looking at my site statistics the other night. The truth is that I don’t do that as much as I used to. It seems that the more traffic you get, the less you care about who is linking to you. But I continue to be semi-obsessed with spam. And so I’m always very interested in how many people are coming here from Latvia. Because here’s the thing: I know that no one in Latvia is reading me. If traffic is coming here from Latvia, it is because they are some of those spamming bastards.

But last night, I noticed something very interesting. In my country statistics, I know how many pages have been requests as well as how many total hits I got. Well, that tells me a lot. The reason is that most pages represent three hits: the page itself, the header image, and the little image in the upper left corner of the article (cans of Spam in this article). Now this is not always true. If someone comes to the home page, they will see ten articles and so there will be twelve hits: page, header, and ten little images. But as a first pass, I can say that for every page, there should be three hits.

Based upon this, I can determine how many real visitors (R) come from any country compared to how many spammers (S) come. This is because spammers are desperate to use as little bandwidth as possible, so they don’t load images. So given that P is the total number of pages requested and H is the total number of hits the site gets, we can solve for the following two equations:

Based upon this, I was able to determine, within two significant digits, how much real and spam traffic the site gets based upon the first four days of traffic this month:

I’m not sure what exactly that tells me. It is interesting. I’m especially struck by the fact that India is all real people. And that China is no real people. I’m also surprised that Russian is about half real people, because in the past, I’ve gotten an enormous amount of spam from Russian and other former Soviet countries. But this period is a on the light side in terms of spam. It goes in waves and there are months where I get three times as many total visitors, all of the extra ones being spammers.

It is still a great frustration to me that these spammers exist. In terms of this website, they get nothing for their efforts. But they waste a tremendous amount of my time. I wouldn’t mind it so much if it wasn’t all so useless. And the truth is, they don’t even seem to try. Half of all the spam I get comes in from the user name “porn.” I’ll bet 95% of all spam comes in with no more than ten standard terms such as “sex” and “minecraft.” Eventually, I will get around to filtering it automatically.

As for now, it is just nice to know where the spamming bastards are coming from.

As many of you surely noticed, the blog was down for about six hours today. It was quite a complicated problem that more or less required that I create a whole new database and import the old data back into it. I’m happy it is back up. These experiences are frightening, because Frankly Curious uses Nucleus for its blog, and Nucleus is no longer supported. What’s more, the word is that once we upgrade to PHP 5.4, it won’t work at all. This thought weighs heavily on me.

The fact is that Frankly Curious has really been taking off. Its three-month Alexa rating is about 1.3 million right now, but its monthly and weekly rating are quite a bit lower still. That may not seem that great, but there are roughly a billion websites on the internet. Even if you take the active websites, our little site is well inside the top 1%. What it means in people terms is that the site tends to get about 500 people per day reading. (And about 1,500 spammers.) I think this is due to the fact that I create an enormous amount of content—roughly 3,000 words per day—a novel per month. And that means almost by random chance, there will be things that attract some attention. It also means that people know they can always stop by and I will be ranting about something—maybe even something they’re interested in!

As a result of this, I do not like down time. And the thought of the site being down for a few days is horrifying. But we are going to have to move to a different blogging platform. The problem is how I can do this while retaining the links that currently exist to the site. And I have an idea for how to do that! I think we will moved to Word Press. And I think I can move all of the current blog’s articles and comments to it. Once that’s done, I’ll create a simple PHP script that will detect whether an old style (Nucleus) or a new style (Word Press) request has come in. If it is the old style, it will change to the new format and send it to the Word Press blog. Otherwise, it will pass it straight through.

So this weekend, I am going to experimenting. But not on Frankly Curious. Andrea, who is very hot to move to Word Press, has graciously offered to left me monkey with one of her blogs, Nice Atheist Girl. That is much more manageable. And far less harm can be done. And if all goes well, next weekend, we may put Word Press up here. If everything works as it should, there really shouldn’t be any down time. Of course, my idea may not work out. If that happens, well, I’m sure other things will occur to me. I will be providing updates.

Update (15 August 2014 8:40 pm)

I’ve been working nonstop on this problem and it looks like my basic approach will work. I will be able to keep the old Nucleus stuff around as it is. This will probably require that I update to a new flavor of of Nucleus that doesn’t have many of the plugins that this version has, but at least will continue to work. All of these articles will be transferred over to the new Word Press site, but they won’t include the comments because that is just way too complicated to make it work. And then we will be running entirely on Word Press. This should allow us to add some things that people have requested like email alerts when comments have been made and maybe threaded comments. This will probably happen over the course of next weekend.

As regular readers know, on the first of April each year, I write an article that is silly and (what I think is clearly) untrue. And I was really pleased with this year’s entry, Miracle Reagan Toast Discovered. I’m still kind of amazed that no one seemed particularly taken with it. While it’s true that some of jokes are groaners, and most of the jokes are too sly by half (“the companion piece of toast, which interestingly contains an image of Jane Wyman”), the very idea is funny. We’ve seen images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary on toast. So I was very pleased when I came up with the idea that conservatives would find Reagan on a piece of toast.

Well, friend of the site Madeleine “Mad” Kane brought my attention to this article, This Selfie Toaster Can Burn Your Portrait Onto Your Morning Toast. I was immediately skeptical. It just had to be from a satirical website. As I’ve noted before, they aren’t always that clear and if it isn’t The Onion, no one really knows. But it is true: for just $70, you too can have a selfie toaster.

But don’t get too excited. The toaster is probably not what you are thinking. It isn’t like you plug in an SD card, select and image and it burns it. Not at all. Instead, you send the company an image, it creates a special metal plate that is put in the toaster and sent to you. So you can create a toast with your image on it and your image alone. I guess for $70, that’s about all you could expect. But it strikes me as kind of pathetic.

How I originally figured it worked was that you stick an SD card into the toaster, select an image, the computer inside converts it to grey scale, and burns whatever image you want on the toast. Is that asking too much? I don’t really think so. I’m already working on a far more interesting project, but I don’t think it would be hard to make such a toaster. You would simply have to design it such that instead of one continuous heating coil on each side, you’d have to have perhaps a thousand that are controlled by the computer. That would make the toaster expensive. But if one could bring it to market for $500, I’ll bet it would sell.

As it stands, the Selfie Toaster is narcissistic. Do you want to look at yourself on your toast every morning? Or your wife? Or even your kid? Not to mention that the bread isn’t properly toasted. I suspect that people will use the toast to give out as gag gifts or as a form of marketing. And then, within a week or two, the toaster will find itself stacked on a shelf in the garage. Perhaps a better name for them would be Shelfie Toasters.

Earlier today, I wrote what I thought was an unexceptional article about a David Weigel column. The only thing that worried me was that the last time I had written about Weigel, he retweeted my article announcement. The thing about this is that when I’m ragging on a public figure, I don’t mean anything personal. So I make a point of not including their twitter handles in the tweet. But somehow, they always find out. This time, I figured surely he wouldn’t do so. After all, the article isn’t even really about him. But I was wrong. I don’t know quite know how to take it. It is either that he is a far better man than I am and really wants an open conversation; or he thinks I’m such an idiot that retweeting me makes that fact sell-evident.

Whenever this kind of thing happens, of course, the small trickle of Frankly Curious “readers” becomes a deluge. I put the scare quotes there because I wonder how many of these people click, see that the website is not decorated with animated gifs from Evil Dead and leave. But I got a really cryptic tweet from Abenomix. This is not unusual. I generally think I was not meant for the last two centuries, I’m certainly not meant for Twitter. So a lot of stuff just goes by me. But his profile read, “Math dork…” Well, that was all I needed to read so I asked for clarification. For the record, the original tweet was, “Why? Access. Acela=Hollywood for ugly people, & in showbiz sometimes gotta pretend the turd is a blossom, for work, nbd.”

After a two-part tweet, what he meant was crystal clear. He was saying that since Weigel has to report on the conservative movement, he can’t come right out and say that they are a bunch of bigots. He needs to see them in the best possible light. And Abenomix added that this probably isn’t something that Weigel is doing intentionally. That makes sense. It’s easy enough for me to imagine followers of Chris McDaniel to be drooling racists who could have been extras in Deliverance. “Squeal like a pig!” But Weigel actually deals with these people and I’m sure they don’t come off as any more racist than anyone else.

It makes me think of the film Flock of Dodos where much time is spent interviewing proponents of Intelligent Design. They are stone cold wrong and in their way, disingenuous. But they’re nice people. They are like my Christian conservative aunt, who has some of the most vile opinions in the world. But on a personal level, she is nice as could be. And let’s face it, I know where the Mississippi Republicans are coming from. When the Republicans did more or less the same thing to Ned Lamont in 2006, I was mad as hell. Not that this doesn’t excuse what is often explicit racism coming from the Mississippi Republicans, but I understand the anger and it is certain that politics is more racially polarized there than it was in Connecticut.

There is, of course, the other issue: the JournoList scandal. That was how Weigel got fired from The Washington Post (A good career move!) because he had made private disparaging comments about the right wing fringe, which of course, is just the right wing. Weigel is what I call a bleeding heart libertarian—the kind of libertarian I was when I was young. Libertarians of this ilk tend to think that they aren’t conservatives and so tend to disdain Republicans. (Note: Weigel is a registered Republican and even when I was a libertarian, I hated the Republicans and always thought it was better to have a Democrat in office.) So I can see that Weigel would be extra sensitive to the feelings of the conservatives that he covers.

Just the same, apologia is apologia. I never said that Weigel was a racist—in fact I explicitly said that I thought he wasn’t. But I think the facts are very clear in this case. Most of the support for the Republican Party is based on racism and misogyny. When given the chance, state Republicans have made it harder for minority groups to vote. They aren’t interested in courting the black vote, for example; they are interested in stopping the black vote. If David Weigel feels that he has to report this behavior in such a way as to make it seem reasonable, that’s his choice. He has to work with these people. But in terms of the country, it isn’t healthy to pretend that fringe groups aren’t fringe. And I will continue to make note of it when I see it. Because I care a lot more about the country than I do Weigel’s career. I suspect he doesn’t see the same danger as I do. Cognitive dissonance. Regardless, he is right to be concerned about his own career.