David S. Atkinson's Blog, page 155

An Ad Involved Me!

How often do ads actually make you happy? I saw one that did. I came across the below. Suddenly, I realized…it involved me!

It was about tall…ish Pure Slush Vol. 11 and my story “Tony Robbins Told Fred to Follow Others’ Dreams Instead of His Own Because They Thought Bigger” included therein. Maybe you should think about checking it out to celebrate:

paperback – http://bit.ly/tallbk

ePub eBook – http://bit.ly/tallepub

iBook eBook – http://bit.ly/PStall

Kindle eBook – http://bit.ly/tallkin

NOOK eBook – http://bit.ly/BNtall

Kobo eBook – http://bit.ly/tallkb

I’ll Be Presenting “Publishing More Stories” This Saturday July 16th ­1:00pm-2:30pm at the Aurora Public Library

Hey, I’ll be delivering a seminar titled “Publishing More Stories” this Saturday, July 16th ­1:00pm-2:30pm at the Aurora Public Library, 14949 E. Alameda Parkway, Aurora, CO 80012.  You should come out if you’re in the neighborhood. I might not know much, but you’re welcome to everything I do know.

I might even manage to work in a mention of Not Quite so Stories.

I’ve got to mention the book somehow, right? I’ll have copies with me at least in case anyone wants to pick up a signed one.

I’m Finding Tropical Fried Rice Better Than Simple Fried Rice

I do enjoy fried rice, but I’m thinking tropical fried rice is generally a better thing. This is a vast generalization, and obviously individual recipes can differ highly, but this is what I’m finding.

I am fond of fried rice as I usually find it at Chinese restaurants, particularly the port variety. However, it can often be somewhat dry, consisting many times of just pork, fried rice, and a couple (mainly decorative) green onions or carrot shavings:

However, then I tried tropical fried rice as I’ve found it at a couple of Thai restaurants. This is highly flavorful, not dry, and tends to have a bunch of things in it:

I don’t know why, but this is what I’m finding at a number of different, unrelated Chinese and Thai restaurants. Obviously recipes can differ a great deal, but my experience is suggesting that I’m going to dig ordering tropical fried rice at a Thai place much more than I’m going to enjoy fried rice at a Chinese place (or particularly a place pretending to be something related to Chinese cuisine, such as P.F. Chang’s). Perhaps there I should go for something different and save fried rice for the Thai restaurants I visit.

This Isn’t Helping

This isn’t helping.

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I guess the dirt must be on the outside.

New Dumb WordPress Feature

I know WordPress is free and I shouldn’t complain, but they’ve introduced a new feature that is useless to me and is really annoying me. They’re now sending me a notification every time a post I schedule goes live.

Now, some WordPress notifications are useful. I use them to know when someone comments and I need to respond. That means I kind of need to care when I see a notification. However, when I see the “scheduled post” notification, I don’t care. I’m caring less and less when I see I have a notification because mroe and more frequently it isn’t something I need to know about.

Shouldn’t I already know when a post I schedule goes live? I’m the one who scheduled it! Of course I know! Seriously, I use scheduling almost every day because I write posts when I get time and want them to go live at the same time every day.

That’s can be a ton of useless notifications.

Seriously, I wish just once WordPress would end up introducing a new feature that I noticed and actually liked instead of hated and got annoyed by. Just at least once. I’m sure someone must like these changes, but it really makes me wonder what’s going on over at WordPress development.

It really does.

(Side note: if anyone knows how to turn these notifications off without turning off others, feel free to mention it. There might be, but I don’t feel like using up my time to look when WordPress put this on me without asking if I wanted it. Seems like if it was something that could be turned off then they should have popped something up the first time I signed in after and asked if I wanted it turned on or not rather than just force it on me.)

I’ll Be Featured At The 2nd Annual Flash Fiction Festival!!!!!

The 2nd annual flash fiction festival presented by the F-Bomb is Tuesday July 19th at 7:30PM at The Mercury Cafe, 2199 California St, Denver, Colorado.  Nancy Stohlman is hosting and the features include Christopher Bowen, April Bradley, Mathias Svalina, and ME (promoting, of course, Not Quite so Stories)!

The theme is Elvis Luau, though I’m not sure what luaus have to do with Mr. Costello:

Anyway, you should come out. Hear all the featured readers and/or read something at the open mic yourself. It’s going to be packed though, so get there early to sign up for the open mic portion, and be sure to keep whatever you’ve got to read to 3-4 minutes or less so there’s time for everyone.

Start getting excited!

Denver Billboard: Who Run Barter Town?

Um…

Who run Barter Town? Apparently, Master Blaster runs Barter Town.

My Most Common Spam Comment

I get a lot of spam comments on here. I think WordPress’s spam comment blocker claims to have blocked over 50,000 spam comments so far. Mind you, I still had to go through the spam queue and delete all those. Of course, we are talking about since 2009.

That’s not too bad.

Regardless, this one (with the link useful to the spammer removed) is the most common (perhaps upwards of half of all spam comments I get):

Hello Web Admin, I noticed that your On-Page SEO is is missing a few factors, for one you do not use all three H tags in your post, also I notice that you are not using bold or italics properly in your SEO optimization. On-Page SEO means more now than ever since the new Google update: Panda. No longer are backlinks and simply pinging or sending out a RSS feed the key to getting Google PageRank or Alexa Rankings, You now NEED On-Page SEO. So what is good On-Page SEO?First your keyword must appear in the title.Then it must appear in the URL.You have to optimize your keyword and make sure that it has a nice keyword density of 3-5% in your article with relevant LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing). Then you should spread all H1,H2,H3 tags in your article.Your Keyword should appear in your first paragraph and in the last sentence of the page. You should have relevant usage of Bold and italics of your keyword.There should be one internal link to a page on your blog and you should have one image with an alt tag that has your keyword….wait there’s even more Now what if i told you there was a simple WordPress plugin that does all the On-Page SEO, and automatically for you? That’s right AUTOMATICALLY, just watch this 4minute video for more information at.

Seriously. Don’t they realize the overabundance of their comments make it less likely their link will get through? I’m supposed to be taking web strategy advice from them? I’m guessing, based on how quickly they screen themselves out long before I get to anything that they’re actually offering, that they don’t know their a-hole from their elbow.

Picture From Our Niagara Falls Trip

Here’s a picture from our Niagara Falls trip a few years ago where I got to see the Tesla Edison Monument:

Good times, man. Good times.

You Know The Drill

You know the drill:

Happy Easter!