McGelligot on the Spot

I just produced a new video on how to make cinnamon bread. My object is to get more professional with them. I find that the best way to improve is to do. “Practice makes perfect” as they say.

All along with my videos I have not been happy with the sound quality. The audio of my narration always sounds scratchy and tinny. I have purchased two or three fairly good microphones in an effort to correct this problem.

On the Cinnamon bread video I asked my wife about the sound quality and she said it sounded okay. I asked, “What about the narration?” She said, “Oh, you always sound like that.”

Funny how we listen to ourselves talk day after day and do not really know what we sound like. Of course, I have heard myself on answering machines, and video tapes, but I always attribute the muffled tones and the gravel in my voice to the low quality mics and ambient noise.

Now that I have found out the problem is just me, I am going to have to work on training my voice. Alternatively, I could try talking in falsetto, a la Rudy Vallee!

Ugh. I get so frustrated sometimes with this internet business. I have worked very hard on the new look for InDepthInfo. My objective was to eventually shift all of the site over to the new look. However, the two folios that I have turned over to the new look have dropped in traffic by nearly a half. This does not augur well for the new look. Also, I can’t seem to figure out why it is happening.

The structure of the code in the new look is substantially the same as the old, although the look is somewhat different. I was very careful to keep the same titles, descriptions and keywords. I did update the text somewhat, but this is always going on at InDepthInfo and never has such a drastically negative effect. The only major differences I can pinpoint are the fact that I now use style sheets. Which I did not before. Also, I had a navigation bar at the bottom of the page as well as the top, and do not now.

All of this seems very minor. I can hardly believe the smack down in traffic as a result. My next experiment is going to be to add an additional navbar to the bottom of the page. I am not one of those people who obsesses over Search Engine O****zation. But when my websites take this kind of hit after a structural and user friendly improvement I have to be concerned.

If you have any suggestions, let me know.

I have been recently upgrading folios on InDepthInfo to the “new” format. Anything over nine years old has been getting a facelift. One of the folios that I have been working on is Weekdays, which describes the days of the week, telling how they came about and any holidays that are associated with them.

In order to make sure that the new format does not effect traffic, I have had occasion to monitor the folio pretty closely. What I found was that Saturday gets the least traffic of all the individual day pages. Believe it or not Wednesday is the most popular. Now, all things being relatively equal, why would this be?

This is my theory, Saturday is also the day of the week that InDepthInfo gets the least number of hits. It is the day that many people are busy mowing their yards, going on dates, eating BBQ, or relaxing with a good book. (Not me, of course. I am always working.) People are too busy on Saturdays to click a Saturday link. Also being the last day of the week, anyone doing research on the days of the week, will be most likely to give that day short shrift. Another strange thing about Saturday is that it was the only day of the week to retain its Roman name after the Barbarian invasions of England. Even the Norsemen paid less attention to it!

Finally, I think Saturday has a certain mystique about it that most people don’t want to destroy by having too much knowledge. But then again, in my mind you can never know too much!

I have been researching gluten for an article on InDepthInfo. In the course of work on it, I was surprised to find that I manifest many of the symptoms of Celiac Disease. It is interesting how often, when I write or read of something, that I apply the information directly to my own case.

This, of course, is natural. But I try not to be too effected by it. However, in this case there were too many ahaa’s going off in my brain. I wrote the article yesterday and decided to try to go gluten free this morning, at least for a few days to see how it makes me feel. So far, I have a frontal lobe headache, but that may simply be due to not having had enough caffein for the day.

I try to put all the essentials about Gluten and Celiac Sprue in my article, but it is impossible to cover everything. I found a great resource for links dealing with gluten free issues.

I am also toying with the notion of adding a whole gluten free section at the BreadInfo site.

I make periodic sweeps of my previous writing, webpages, etcetera. The oject is to improve the site structure or update some of the ideas or facts. For the last week I have been taking an hour per day out to work on my “best selling” Real Man’s Cookbook.

I hit one particular article about bean soup. It is loaded with thinly, very thinly, veiled references to a particular scatological subject variously known as tooting, beeking, and cutting the cheese. At the time I thought it quite comic. Now, I still find it mildly funny. But that is human nature.

I remember a long time ago, while I was in college. I received a letter (yes, it was that long ago) from my brother. The whole thing was about fishing and the various words and expressions available for “dropping a load”, “taking a dump”, “pinching a loaf” or what have you. At the time, I laughed until water came to my eyes. I laughed some more, until water spilled over. I laughed so much that my stomach hurt. I thought this missive such a classic bit of humor that I tucked it away the way and preserved it the way a monastery preserves the bones of a Saint.

About a year ago, I had leisure to dig up this epistle from my hallowed files. I reread it expecting the laughter to come again. Yet looking it over left me rather flat. Perhaps my expectations were too high. Perhaps my juvenile sense of humor has been left behind. I don’t know. I do know that my sensibilities have changed somewhat.

On rereading the article I had written for the Real Man’s Cookbook, I debated on whether I should remove it from the website. (I can’t remove it from the book, it is published.) Then I decided that even though the harsh winds of change may blow, that something should remain behind, a mere whiff of vital essence to remind us of those days gone by, ephemeral as the passing of gas.

I keep this blog more as a notebook to myself than as an attempt to inform others about what I happen to be up to. That is why it tends to have a lot of code in it. A lot of it is stuff I am trying to remember or info I might like to look back on later.

This article treats a useful answer to a problem I have run into a few times before. It is centering a div in CSS when it is near the top of the page. I can’t take credit for discovering this. I found it at Zach Graeve’s website.

Anyway, here is the snippet of code that might prove beneficial:

    position: absolute;
    top: 0px;
    left: 50%;
    margin-left: (half the width of the div)px;

I needed the absolute positioning in order to force some code positioned far down in the document to the top of the page that appears in the browser. I have read that when document readers are enabled on browsers that they have to sort through all of the links before they can get to the content for handicapped readers.

I have some very old websites. Some were designed in the late 90’s. That seems like ancient history now. Most of them still do pretty well traffic-wise. Yet they seem to be drifting lower and lower in the search engines. To discover why this might be, I recently took a hard look at a couple of my sites. My, oh, my, what a mess!

When I first started out, I used a WYSIWYG editor from M-Soft that was an add-on to Word. “Holy Mixed Up Code Batman!” For some reason there are no header tags. Lots of center tags. All the code is in caps. No tags were closed unless absolutely necessary. AAAAAAghggh!

I decided to try to manually clean some of it up. I spent a day and a half on one site The Real Man’s Cookbook. Which is the online version of my best selling (for me) published work. I’m not sure if it’s worth slogging through. As it is the changes are not even cosmetic. That would take weeks.

What it really needs is a thorough re-design. But I have so many projects already in mind that this one will have to wait.