The past two days I’ve been writing a ton, which is often a sign that I’m about to be away from my computer. I know I won’t be able to get some of these thoughts down over the next few days, so I frantically scramble to get them out while I can. There’s always next week, but I may lose them by then.

That and the fact that when I last redesigned my thoughts homepage, I included the latest entries from several other blogs. Which means there’s less than five or six days worth of entries at one time on my homepage. That seems so minimal, like people will be missing so much.

Those are just my impressions, but I don’t need to read my own blog, so I don’t know what it’s like for you, my readers. So how’s that new homepage working out? Do you like seeing what’s on my other blogs? Or is it annoying? I can say I’ve had more comments on my other blogs than I usually get, which says to me it’s doing the trick.

Anyway, just one last random entry before I head out this weekend. I’m going to Crosswoods camp with the youth group (and minus my spouse), so it should be a good time. Though no computer, no wife, no dog and today’s continual rain is kind of lame. But I like to have low expectations going into these things so then when it’s not that bad I end up having a blast.

Biz Stone, author of the upcoming book Who Let the Blogs Out and “Blogger Senior Specialist” at Google, posted a list of ways to promote your blog. It’s written for Blogger users, but the advice is transferable. He has plenty of good tips and includes a link to Eugene Volokh’s suggestions on pitching your blog via e-mail.

Pretty interesting stuff, though I find it curious that Biz Stone has no blogroll, no comments and no trackback, all of which are good ways to increase traffic. Apparently Stone isn’t interested in traffic. (link via Jordon Cooper)

(anybody else wondering if “Biz Stone” is his real name?)

Well, it took the better part of a Labor Day weekend, but I finally finished upgrading and improving my blog empire. I installed the newest version of Movable Type (As a business I had to pay for this upgrade, but the tech support was most worth it. I still recommend Movable Type, but it’s becoming more and more a real techie solution. I’m beginning to get over my head.) and had to rework a lot of my templates and CSS code to take advantage of some of the new features.

I also took the opportunity to give Quotables and ReViews a face-lift, basically folding them into the Monkey Outta Nowhere scheme to minimize my maintenance time. I also reworked these thoughts a bit. The biggest change will be right here on the home page. Using the amazing new Movable Type technology (OK, it’s not that amazing), I’m running the latest entries from all my blogs: thoughts, Monkey Outta Nowhere, Quotables, ReViews, Linkteria (do I ever update that? No.) and Spacebar (Speak’s blog) right here. I hope it’ll be a great way to check out all my latest content without having to visit so many sites. And it’ll make things easier on me when it comes to deciding where to blog about something, knowing that visitors to thoughts will get everything. Hopefully it’s not overload. Every now and then I’ll post a bunch of quotes at once to Quotables, which could be annoying, but hopefully it’ll be all good.

So there you go, updated blogging action. Let me know if see anything around the site that looks funky or doesn’t work.

UPDATE: OK, so apparently it wasn’t looking as good as I thought it was. Looks like we had some problems with Internet Explorer (of course), so I’ve tried to fix most of those. Hopefully you see a sidebar there to the right. If not, let me know. Those using IE might also see a grey bar at the top, just below my little pictures and above the actual blog entries. That shouldn’t be there. Let me know how things look so I can finalize this sucker and get it looking decent for everybody. Thanks.

Not that anyone’s commented, but yes, I do realize this site is all messed up. I’m in the process of upgrading Movable Type and I’m not done yet. They kindly neglected to mention how much of the new program doesn’t work with the old templates. So I’m rebuilding lots of stuff. Well, I will as soon as I sit down and put some time into it.

Until then I have a few distractions to occupy my time.

A few weeks ago I spotted the Wil Wheat book, Just a Geek, and couldn’t resist checking it out. The title alone is gold, and a confessional of a semi-washed up Star Trek actor is just too good.

The 60 pages or so I read in Barnes & Noble were pretty good. He’s a funny guy, and it’s great seeing his honest struggle with fame and pride. And of course the book stemmed from his blog, adding him to the pile of bloggers-turned-book-writers.

I empathize a lot with his struggle. Of course I never starred in a major TV show, but I have that same thirst to get some grand public slap on the back. It’s pride. And it shows up in the sneakiest ways, pushing me to be the kind of hip, trendy blogger who snags a book deal. Sometimes pride blows its cover with stupidity. I should really be downstairs with my wife.

One Washington DC insider with a total lack of morals. One blog. How long until she’s fired, looking at a reputation as the next Monica Lewinsky, posing for Playboy and signing a book deal?

Two weeks.

Wow. I’m not even sure what to say about this story. I thought about posting it on the Monkey Outta Nowhere main blog, but I wasn’t so confident in how a slutty blogger story would help the company. Probably a wise decision. (But nothing’s too slutty for this blog! Especially after Olympic butts.)

So yeah: Jessica Cutler. You can read her resurrected blog, the overly-long Washington Post article and the chat with the writer of the Post article. (links via bloggedy blog)

More interesting research on blogs, this time showing how often the media talks about blogs, with the frequency of articles on blogging skyrocketing in the spring of 2004 (follow the link and check out the nifty graph).

71% of blog readers are over 30.
79% of blog readers are men.
21% of blog readers are bloggers themselves.
82% of blog readers say TV is worthless or only somewhat useful as a source of news and opinion (55% say the same about newspapers, 54% about magazines).
50% of blog readers have spent more than $50 on books online in the past six months.

All of this comes from a Blog Ads survey of questionable scientific merit (an online survey advertised through select blogs; even the numbers seem questionable: their site said 61% of blog readers were over the age of 30, but when I added the numbers up they totaled 71%.)

A Brittish school has started an after-school blogging club with children as young as seven. The results are amazing: kids doing unassigned homework and performing as well as 14- or 15-year-olds are expected to when it comes to computer skills.