I got 750 words but a bitch ain't one

Writers are often told, along with many other globules of advice - like, get a proper job you jackass - to start the morning by writing a few pages of whatever the hell comes into their head. Recently these appear to have been named 'morning pages', but the idea is well established, that a morning bathing in the stream of your consciousness allows you to unclog your writing brain and tone it up a bit. It's quite relaxing as well, feeling as if you are achieving something without too much effort. Sometimes it can help you think about what you want to write, sometimes it serves as a vent for your anger at the way the world is such a pile of shitcuntfuck, other times it merely gives you an opportunity to fail to string coherent sentences together, but it doesn't matter what you write, good, bad, beautiful or nonsense, and that's the point.

750 words is a run by a nice man in Seattle and its sole purpose is to help you write your morning pages. It counts and saves your output as you write and gives you a notice when you've hit your 750, which it estimates to be three pages worth. It has nice little icons to show you when you've written for a few days on the trot, for the primary school pupil in all of us, and it tells you how quickly you wrote what you wrote. It gives you an amusingly inaccurate 'analysis' of what you've written, comparing mindset, time orientation, primary sense and so on, so you can get an idea of your writing patterns. In time-honoured internet fashion, you can compete against complete strangers to see who can write every day, although nobody can read what you've written. You can search through your old morning pages as you wish, and that's about it. Privacy seems to be as secure as you're going to get, ie yeah he could just sell everything you write but probably he won't. Of course you could just do it yourself on Word or even - god forbid - paper but it's marginally more involving this way. Anyway, I recommend it.

Lifehacker post
Metafilter thread

Around the world in 480 blogs

Blogger has a next blog button, where you click and are instantly transported to a random blog somewhere in the world. You can probably see it up there above me. Since I've been trying to blog more and since I heard that interacting with other blogs is an essential part of blogging, I tried it out. It was not a success. Of course I have the attention span of a very small gnat, but still, not one decently constructed paragraph graced my screen the whole time.

After extensive searching I started to see that blogs break down into a few categories:

Religious nuts
People with young children
People who are sick and dying
People who were sick and dying but now have young children
Blogs in Portuguese
Blogs I don't have permission to read
Blogs with an entry dated months ago which says: "I've been away for a bit but now I'm back!"
Blogs where they say they've moved to wordpress or tumblr
Blogs with extremely dodgy poetry

Obviously mine only really fits into the last category.

I wouldn't say it was an entirely dispiriting experience, in that I don't have much spirit of which to be dispirited, but it was certainly telling how much shoddy can't-string-a-sentence rubbish is out there. No wonder nobody reads blogs, who the hell has the time or inclination to wade through that gushing fountain of old bath water? My vague idea that a blog might be a shop window where I could present my wares to rich media tycoons passing by would only make sense if I pictured a shopping street about two million miles long with every shop window smeared with shite and only two shoppers, both walking briskly in the other direction with their collars up around their ears.

Still, I'm still game if you are. Whoever you are.

Actually I lied when I said nothing readable came up. Have a gander at this, and tell me you aren't glad you aren't in that family.

Google Analytics Analysis

Who knows about google analytics? It's a tool website people use to measure traffic on their websites. I of course couldn't possibly measure traffic on my website, since it's so astronomical it is uncountable. But I check it anyway, now and again, to see if my blog has reached more people in a day than I could reach just by yelling out my window. Typically the answer is no I get quite a few hits and then an awful lot of them bounce right back off the page, presumably people who are looking for something else, or don't speak English, or wouldn't recognise good writing if it magically appeared on a computer screen in front of them. So the bounce rate, which doesn't much fall below 50% of visitors, is a sobering corollary to the individual visitors number beside it.

Yesterday wasn't a bad day, St George's Day being a topical theme and popular google search and I picked up a few people who'd searched for "St George's Day+racist". Most of them bounced straight back, as per usual, but what I didn't understand was why, when I myself searched google for St George's Day+racist, to see how high the post was in the results, it was so far down the list I never even found it. So these people had trawled google, painstakingly sifted through the great stinking piles of website nonsense out there, took a fine toothcomb to acres of chaff, finally unearthed my blog's small nugget of golden wheat, and then didn't even read it.

Which seems odd, but not as odd as the people who came to here after searching for criticalbills+blogspot? Five of them yesterday, of whom four bounced straight out again. What the hell else are they looking for apart from this blog? Or did it take one person (you can comment if you like) five goes to realise that they had actually found the right blog. Maybe all the new writing baffled them. Maybe getting rid of the embedded pornotube player confused them. Maybe, and this is what I'm really leaning towards, maybe google analytics sucks big bouncy bollocks. Anyway, if you're here, by whatever means you got here, thanks for dropping by.