Makiko Itoh : Not a nameless cat.

As the owner of a couple of mildly popular blogs (not this one,obviously) I, like many others, get my daily dose of PR email. I usually skim and dump them. Most of them are barely worth that amount of attention. (I don’t even count the lame ones sent to the address where the domains are registered, asking for a ‘cooperation’ (translation: link exchange) with a “top rated web site with a Google PR of 0”. Huh?)

Recently, a few PR pitches came in that really illustrated examples of good, bad, and really, really bad PR things. They are presented here in case they may be of help to the universe. Actually, I just wanted to bitch.

Amen.

I’ve had the pleasure of being informed that my pages do not validate a number of times. I suppose it’s because way back then I used to write about web design and stuff, and my old articles are still floating out there on the interwebs. Guess one reason why I’ve basically stopped writing about such things.

(I know exactly where and why my pages don’t validate. Go away.)

I recently got an email from yet another site that wants to rank blogs. Yawn.

Their pitch went something like this: “We rank blogs according to how many incoming links they have from other blogs. We do not count sidebar links.”

In other words, yet another thing that attempts to rank how much inner-blog circle crosslinking/circle jerking there is.

This kind of thing totally ignores the fact that a blog is not necessarily a platform for inner-blog conversation anymore, if it was at all in the first place. Blog programs nowadays are used for easy publishing and updating of any kind of web site.

I occasionally like to post polls on my food blogs. Polls are an easy way for the comment-shy reader to express their opinion. So, I recently put up a poll on Just Bento, What kind of recipes would you like to see more of on Just Bento? , just to get a general idea of what people wanted. Now, the way Drupal polls work is that they restrict votes to one per IP address. Simple enough.

A Happy yet sad web comic, NetNewsWire is free!, and more.

I’ve been doing a sort of year-end clearout of my computer stuff. One of the things I’ve been clearing out is my RSS feed list. Some feeds are simply dead, and others I’ve lost interest in just because I’ve moved on. There are a few whose topic I still care about, but which has just deteriorated to the point where they are no longer useful.

I’m not talking about the sites which have withered away due to lack of updates. These sites are still busily updated, but the quality has gone down so much that they aren’t worth reading anymore.

Just in case you are the odd type of person who reads this blog but not my food blogs, both Just Hungry and Just Bento are offering prizes this year for Menu For Hope, a charity fundraising even that last year managed to raise more than $62,000. This year it will earmark funds towards the World Food Programme’s school lunch programme (or program, if you’re USen) in Lesotho, Africa.

The Just Hungry prize is for the hedonist: 53 bars of Swiss chocolate (code EU13). And the Just Bento prize is for your favorite bento lover: a box of bento goodies plus a book with English translations (code EU14).

Go ahead and buy tickets for both! It’s for a great cause, and will give you warm fuzzies all over.

I run ads on my two food sites. The ads pay for the server, some site related expenses, and a little bit more.

If only I didn’t have to run any ads. Ads clutter up a site, even the most discreet ones. Ad insertion code is often gimpy. Ad code is often invalid. Some really bad ad code can even make a browser crash, a server crash, or break a page design. Mostly, ads suck.

My online life has evolved quite a bit, but I started out on the interweb blogging- and writing-wise being primarily a techie type, writing about web design, JavaScript and stuff of that nature. I don’t do that much any more for various reasons, and I don’t follow those types of sites much any more either except for a handful. But I do get my information about what is supposed to be new, hot and awesome from the few of those techie-person blogs that I do follow. That’s how I found out about things like del.icio.us, flickr, Twitter, Vox, Myspace (way back when), Facebook, Joost, and so on and on and on. Of those I only still regularly use the first two (where I secured the username maki, as I like to do on any new site if possible).

None of those cool hip techie type blogs has ever really talked much about StumbleUpon, and I don’t know why. Because, StumbleUpon is awesome. It is the best way to surf the interweb waves, through thousands of sites that have been pre-selected for you (aka Stumbled Upon) by other people, and filtered according to your interests.

Back in early November, I wrote about using my food blog, Just Hungry, as a lab or experimental platform for operating a monetized, sort-of-commercial, blog.

Since then I have put some more effort into deriving an income from Just Hungry. Here are some of my observations and such.