It’s my blogiversary. After a brief attempt at building my own blog from scratch, I opened a LiveJournal account on May 23, 2004. On September 8, 2007 I bought my own domain name and imported (with relative success) all the content from my LJ. So aside from that platform change, I’ve been blogging for 6 years.

I have written 1,873 posts. Since moving to the new platform, I’ve had 91,008 blog views.

The blog serves many functions in my life. At times, it has been an outlet for my inner editorialist, a method of keeping my family and friends aware of my antics, a way to meet friends and have some fun, and a form of therapy. Since the rise of Facebook and Twitter, I know I don’t spend as much time blogging as I used to, but I’m not planning to fully stop any time soon.

Thanks to all my bloggy friends for making me feel like this has been worthwhile.

Here’s to 6 years of making myself unappointable for high-profile and controversial positions!

Movies I saw in the theater in 2009:

• Avatar
• Nine
• Happy Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
• Star Trek
• The Hurt Locker
• Sugar
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Notable not-required-for-school Books I read in 2009:

• Snuff, Chuck Palahniuk
• One L, Scott Turow
• Foundation (Valdemar: Collegium Chronicles, Book 1), Mercedes Lackey
• Swallowing Darkness, Laurell K. Hamilton
• The Outlaw Demon Wails, Kim Harrison
• Touchy Subjects, Emma Donoghue
• The Phoenix Endangered, Mercedes Lackey

Places I’ve been (for more than a day) in 2009:

• Cincinnati, OH
• New York City, NY
• Salt Lake City, UT

Blog stats for 2009:

Month	Monthly visits	Avg. daily visitors
January	4,240	137
February	3,912	140
March	4,412	142
April	3,213	107
May	3,159	102
June	5,126	171
July	4,626	149
August	4,972	160
September	1,683	56
October	1,791	58
November	1,866	62
December	1,966	68
Total/Overall	40,966	113

]]> http://www.jerekeys.com/2009/12/30/2009-in-review/feed/ 2 http://www.jerekeys.com/2009/10/05/the-blog-is-back/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-blog-is-back http://www.jerekeys.com/2009/10/05/the-blog-is-back/#comments Mon, 05 Oct 2009 17:38:35 +0000 Jere Keys http://www.jerekeys.com/?p=4298 After about a month offline for being a deadbeat vacation, I got my blog back online today. Basically, this means I have my new credit/debit card in my pocket, my student loans in the bank, and a whole lotta unnecessary stress is over.

Now it’s time for the necessary stress to kick in again.

Anyway, first full month of law school = awesome busy. In fact, I’ve got about 2 hours until class today and coming off a weekend cold, I’m not really well prepared for today’s lecture and I need to be spending this time re-reading the cases. So, just wanted to say “I’m back” and “I’ll be back later.”

Witness this week’s calendar:

Note what is missing – the time spend studying and reading is not blocked out.

In the meantime, here’s a fun (language NSFW) video starring triple-threat and Buffy alum Tom Lenk. Incidentally, “Tom Lenk gay” is the third most common 3-word search term bringing people to my blog this month – after “Mario Lopez circumcised” and “vagina virgin gay” and coming in barely ahead of “Cory Monteith naked.” Now that I’ve used those phrases again, I can expect even more traffic!

Didn’t you realize that all the best blogs have mascots? Puntabulous has Felice (or Super Viagra, depending on who you ask), Hotel Tuesday has Richard Parker, Polt’s Palace has Emmett (down in the sidebar listed as “official pet,” although I think he’s still willing to take volunteers with hairthings for the position), Queerty has YouTube blog twink Davey Wavey, etc.

But the selection of a mascot is serious business, people.

“A good mascot has to be memorable. If it’s hard to identify or isn’t recognizable as something specific, it’s not going to do the job it’s supposed to. A mascot needs to stand for something. It needs to be more than just cute – it has to have a personality. Pro sports mascots are very much symbols of competitiveness and team spirit. With the Olympics, the competitiveness is certainly less aggressive. So the mascots tend to be much more in the spirit of sportsmanship and world camaraderie.”

Don Carter, creative director at Adams & Knight Advertising in Avon

So, to choose the new Blind Prophecy mascot we will be holding a reality show style competition to determine who is best suited to represent the blog.

Our contestants will be judged on five categories:

• Spirit
• Athleticism
• Character & Symbolism
• Creativity
• Popularity

Now, this is not a democracy, it’s a cheerocracy. And I’m the cheertator. So I’ll be judging the first four categories. However, as we move through the contest, you get to vote, America (and Canada, and the one reader who consistently accesses my site from Egypt)! You can leave comments and suggestions as to who you believe should win each challenge and try to sway my ultimate decision.

But who, exactly, will be competing for the title of Blind Prophecy Mascot? Let’s meet our contestants:

Toby Dog
Toby Dog dates back to my childhood. Adopted as a Cabbage Patch Pet during the tail end of the Cabbage Patch craze, Toby is all innocence and love. He’s a good Mormon boy who may be more than a little naive, but he has a strong work ethic and never wants to let anyone down or hurt their feelings. He’s also cute and has floppy Zac Efron hair. Asked about his chances to win, Toby Dog said, “Well, that depends on who does the voting. I think I’ve got a lock on the Christian vote and that was enough for Kris Allen to win his contest, right?”

Gay Moose
Gay Moose is really gay. No, gayer than that. Like so gay he’s done the musical version of that really gay thing your really gay friends do. Don’t mistake his obsessive infatuation with pop culture for shallowness, though, as he has survived a lot of bullshit from haterz in his time and he’s stronger, smarter and more determined that you would suspect. Gay Moose hails from the North (somewhere in the Alaska-Canada border region) and may be Sarah Palin’s “gay friend” because he knows everyone. Asked if he had a strategy to the game, Gay Moose replied, “Imma be like a certain dee-VA who everyone was ready to write off, but even with all the haterz, she pushed forward and made some of the best music of her life. Thatz right, Imma go Barbra Streisand on this contest.”

Elle is for Lizard
Elle is for Lizard isn’t a nice mascot. In fact, she’s about the meanest mean girl/lizard since before Lindsay Lohan was a lesbian. But before you peg her as the villain, Elle isn’t out to hurt people’s feelings just for the fun of it (well, not usually), she just tells it like she sees it. Cynical, calculating, cunning and subtle, Elle is usually thinking three steps ahead of everyone else. She doesn’t suffer fools for long, but she’s not such a poor strategist as to reveal everything she thinks, either. Her first impression of the competition? “Yeah, Doggy Osmond doesn’t have a chance and the queer deer–are those fucking fairy wings?–will be distracted every time a shirtless twenty-something walks by. I’ve got this thing in the bag.”

Leave your first impressions in the comments below and check back next week when we have our first challenge for the contestants. We’ll continue on for 2 or 3 more weeks or until I become bored with this and announce a winner.

It’s that time of year. The third anniversary of my twenty-ninth birthday. You may leave your offerings in celebration of my ability to be birthed in the comments below.

No huge plans this year. For the last two years I’ve splurged on short personal vacations (to Manhattan in 2007 and a rental car trip to Marin County and a hike through Muir Woods in 2008) to mark my birthday, but this year has included an excess of “me time.” And only 80 short days until I’m back in school with a student body at an average age of 25… which doesn’t sound so bad until you realize average means roughly half of all students will be younger than…

My birthday also tends to remind me that I’ve passed another year anniversary as a blogger. Five years I’ve been boring people with rantings certain to bar me from ever being appointed to the federal judiciary. That’s taken me through 4 cities, 7 jobs, 1707 posts, and too many wonderful online friends to count.

Anyway, I’ve always tried to make my website projects ADA compliant, but since my sum total of classroom training on web development is less than 48 hours, there is a lot I don’t remember and a lot I don’t know how to do.

Some tips I have learned, though, and do my best to remember (and this will serve as a refresher):

1. Always use alternate text descriptions with photos and graphics (<img src="the-image-url" alt="short photo description" />). Also, not using graphics as navigational elements or buttons (without also including alt text).
2. Links should stand out from regular text and should generally having meaningful descriptions (i.e. don’t have a link that says “click here” or “more” – instead, the link should indicate what the link points to)
3. Use relative font sizes (% or em) instead of absolute or fixed font sizes (px or pt). The same is also true for table dimensions and various other elements.
4. Use contrasting colors. As someone with color blindness (red/green), this drives me nuts. If I see a blog or website with pastel pink text over light green background, I assume it’s drivel written by an idiot. You can check to see if your text/background colors meet compliance with the colour contrast check. My black on silver in the main body was compliant. My light gray on medium gray sidebar was not (so I changed it)

Any other thoughts on keeping the web accessible to all? Are there other things I could do to make my site visually interesting but also accessible? Hopefully I’ve fixed enough that my 84-year-old Grandpa can still keep tabs on me.

p.s. I looked for a design with a black background specifically because of this article about the environmental impact of google’s white background.

What do you all think? I spent the most time, of course, working on the header, but now that I’ve got it up, I can periodically change it around just like I would a real corkboard.

Please let me know if you continue to have problems posting comments by emailing me at jere@jerekeys.com. Also, if you want me to link to you on the blogroll, leave a comment and tell me why I shouldn’t hate you.

First up is Alan Bennet Ilagan‘s self-titled blog. Voted “best dressed man” last year in the DC Metro area, Alan is a multi-talented journalist, short story writer and photographer. He’s also not shy about showing off his hot body. We hate him (in that way we hate talented, good-looking people who make life look easy).

Next up is Cincinnati local Jason with Let’s Say You’re Right. Jason first came to my attention when he recognized me from a photo he snapped at the Obama rally we had a few months back. While not exactly prolific, his posts are often fun and interesting.

Photoshop Disasters may not be the most traditional photoblog, but it cracks my shit up. One of the rare blogs that actually had me LOLing and meaning it. To the point where my laughter made my side hurt. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but with all the years I spent photoshopping crappy ads for clueless bar owners, it made me happy.

(Reflections reveal the truth)

(His hand has the ability to pass through the magazine)

(I expect The Advocate to understand naked male anatomy a little better than that)

Last, but not least, A Snapshot of Ken. Ken’s partner SML was a super-volunteer at Utah Pride when I was in charge (by which I mean that he took on a lot of leadership, not that he wore a cape or anything). I’m not sure if I ever actually met Ken, but we seem to have several friends in common. Anyway, Ken and SML have since moved to Boston, where Ken gets to complain about the weather a lot. Ken also has a wicked sense of humor.

Go… check them all out and tell them I sent ya!

One of the relatively recent additions to my blogroll is Hotel Tuesday by Enrico, who also makes a point of leaving comments despite my inability to fix the coding errors that plague his attempts.

We originally “met” online though Puntabulous. I started regularly reading his blog because Enrico tells great stories in the most creative ways.

Recently, he has been sharing stories of his trip to Mexico including lots of photos. Yesterday’s post was filled with all sorts of cute animals like bats and howler monkeys and lizards.

But with a little photoshopping, I think this little guy would make the perfect pet, so long as you don’t insult Britney Spears, because that’s not cool.

Richard Parker better watch out or he might get out-adorabled (shut up, it is too a word).