Tourists at the DC Cherry Blossom Festival, taken at 2 second intervals from various locations around the Tidal Basin and Jefferson Memorial:
how now @brownpau
Update, April 2: Okay, those of you who hate stupid April Fools Day web pranks can come out now; the Skittles Twitter Search plus MormonJesusRoll gimmick is over. I’ll do an actual redesign sometime soon; CSS Naked Day 2009 is right around the corner, after all.
You may have noticed that How Now Brownpau has been languishing of late — I rarely post, the design is stagnant, and I have yet to turn comments back on. I’m reluctant to move forward till I have improved my site as it currently stands (a classic case of the perfect as enemy of the good) but all my internet time is taken up these days by “microblogging.”
Obviously it’s time for a change — one which folds my site into the Twittersphere, where most of my web presence now resides, and where conversation can continue. So say hello to my new website, how now @brownpau.
By pointing to a Twitter search for my username, both my posts and my friends’ replies and mentions join the stream, filling the role of comments and providing an ever-present rainbow of conversation. The nav box at upper right provides links to the old, deprecated sections of the site, plus a recent Flickr photo.
I hope you enjoy the new HNBP, a bold new step out of the Blogging Age. If you have any feedback, well, just leave me an @reply on Twitter.
(If you’re reading this in a feed reader, you’ll need to visit how now @brownpau to get the full effect.)
Harbingers of Spring
Some photos from the last few weekends, as Spring made itself felt across our latitude. I especially like that I was able to get photos of Bradford Pear buds and the flowers that bloomed from them a week later. And squirrels on the National Mall are always eager to come right up to you, hoping that camera is full of nuts.
Views of the Capitol
Above: photos of the Capitol taken over the course of a picturesque spring week. (Click for larger photos on Flickr, of course.)
Caturday!
Here is Pandora, looking hopefully to the future — or perhaps looking dazedly at our five-headed floor lamp with its daylight-like full-spectrum CFL bulbs. (Three Caturdays in a row means three otherwise weeks of unjournaled web ennui. Sorry.)
Caturday!
You can tell I’m either really busy or really unmotivated when you get Caturday entries in a row from my never posting. Anyway, here’s Bootsy, a neighbor’s cat whom I have been petsitting for the week. I love the blurry shot, caught mid-meow.
Caturday!
So how close can we get to Pandora while she’s sleeping? Today, pretty close:
My SEO Level is Over 9000
It all started with my 99 character SEO seminar, in which I challenged the bloated world of search engine optimization (SEO) with just a few simple rules which had always worked for me:
(1) Write compelling content. (2) Use descriptive headlines. (3) Link judiciously. (4) Get linked.
Josh (whom some of you may know better as “cortex” from MetaFilter) took mock-umbrage at my pretenses to expertise, and responded that my advice would cause “your website’s face to explode” — his claim to authority being an SEO level of “over 9000” (a satirical Dragonball-Z reference popularly used in imageboard circles). Sure enough, within hours his Flickr photo and weblog entry were at the top of Google for the term — though of course, no one else had ever before said that his SEO levels were over 9000 till now.
So I’m taking my own SEO advice and making the term more relevant by writing compelling content about the issue, with a relevant headline and a sprinkling of informative links. There’s also an associated video (really just a mildly tweaked rehash of the original “Over 9000” clip, with a description that of course links back to this entry). If I’m right, this should rocket to the top of Google in a day or so, showing cortex who his SEO daddy is.
DC Snowstorm, March 2009
Some scenes from last week’s snowstorm, a parting shot from a DC winter that was almost completely snowless till its very final week. As I walked through the snow to work, I was especially torn up by the homeless man huddled in a corner of the Columbus Memorial, half-buried in drifts of snow. Hopefully the DC Hypothermia Van picked him up as it regularly does all the other homeless in the area in weather like this.
The pièce de résistance of my morning snow-walk was this 360+° panorama from the middle of the National Mall: Capitol to Washington Monument and back, with a few extra bonus degrees providing an extra Capitol at far right.
The 500px wide version is, of course, tiny since the photo is so wide, so you have to see the full size image to get the full scope.
Icy Grant Memorial
I’m cheating a bit here and showing photos from the last winter storm DC got, back in January. Pictures of the current Northeaster are on their way.