Makiko Itoh : Not a nameless cat.

Well, forget the last post. Just Stuff I Like hasn't worked out at all, because other things have gotten higher priority now. For the moment Twitter is where I spout my short thoughts, and I'm back here for longer stuff, eventually.

Some people can keep all the diverse aspects of their lives together in one big container. I am the opposite: I prefer to compartmentalize my different interests into smaller chunks. I think my lifelong fascination with old typeface trays is related to this.

I find dealing with small chunks of information first, then looking at the whole (and back and forth) to be easier to handle than a whole-at-once approach. I also realize that I tend to like to only present parts of myself to other people, and hold back on others.

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?)

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.