Feel free to reply with more links! Since I own the complete set, I'm not familiar with looking for it myself, feel free to fine tune and share your searches.
Lurk or join in chat on SyFyDesigns.com There are two chats, old style chatbox (requires SyfyDesigns forum registration to view and participate) & Twitterchat (login via twitter or facebook, no other registration required) You can try out both, give us feedback
Easter weekend was cool because the weather actually got kind of nice. I can't get over the camera quality in my droid. I might never go back to a regular camera. Spent some time outside with the chickens. We were all relieved to get out.
This was my first video upload onto youtube from my droid.
The groundcover is popping out.
I was able to open windows and my house was filled with the scent of hyacinths blooming. They grow wild around here.
March was a pretty rough month after a really rough winter. I tend not to talk about my stuff while I'm in it, prefer to curl up in solitude, so anyone who actually knows me is probably surprised I managed to stay kinda public through a lupus flare up affecting my nervous system, and even now nearing the end of some pretty rigorous physical therapy. I built my first Lexx fan site in full blown illness and no one ever knew I crawled through my nights practically wearing sunglasses while I worked on my coding. I confess I have a little more trouble nowadays staying that dedicated, so my Lexx film study went on hold. Didn't help that photobucket's new beta flipped my way of mass posting pix upside down.
My chickens had it rough, too! In all the years we've lived here, we've never had a parasite problem with our chickens. Not sure what the crap, but they got a big bad mite infestation in their nests this winter and were eaten alive while the mites chewed their feathers to the nubs around the oil glands above their tails and the vent area where their skin is moister. It looked like we took an electric razor to them and buzzed their bottoms bald. This happened so quickly that it was mind blowing and very surprising. So we got the chicken house and pen all cleaned out and dusted real good, and their poor feathers are trying to grow back. Feathers don't grow continuously like hair does, so we may have to wait till they molt to see if the damage is repairable. Some of them are getting some fluff back, but the pin feathers were just destroyed. How To Protect Your Chickens From Mites - BackYard Chicken This isn't the best video for assessing mites, but you can see what I mean, and this is after treatment and some recovery, so you didn't see how bad it got.
We didn't have a big to do for Easter, but I went ahead and made yummy food. This is glazed ham and candied butternut squash.
Kinda needing to assess where I'm at now since I started this blog back up, kind of surreal being so detached during my not feeling well stuff. My widget box on the left side of the main page (you can't see it on individual post pages) says I've gotten over 7000 clicks just inside the box since I installed it. My sitemeter says I've had 6900 extra views on top of initial main page hits, but it doesn't count redundancy, like people visiting more than once in one day or even week. My Xanga tracker shows me that stuff, though, some of you are pretty dedicated. Actually, Xanga says I've already got over 2000 hits just this week so far, so my site meter numbers must be extremely conservative.
And believe it or not, Lexx fans, this isn't my highest traffic blog. If I combined all my blogs hits it would be pretty impressive.
Does this matter? Not really, but I use it as incentive to keep going and to assess what sorts of things I maybe should be concentrating on. Remember, I'm the one who deleted all the old Lexx stuff in the first place, never told anyone how sick I was, and I assumed when I came back that no one cared and that was all in the past. Apparently a lot of you do care, and the past is swirling all around us into the future. It helps to see those numbers when my days get rough, because it's easy to assume 'no one' reads something if numbers are low (and easier to forget that these things can be read in the future, it doesn't all have to be immediate). Believe it or not, I actually considered shutting down again last week, or at the very least just walking away (it was a fleeting hour in the dark of a very bad night). It's hard work keeping up 5+ blogs and writing for other people on top of it, plus other stuff I'm doing, but you know what? I think that is the key to getting through hard stuff, staying busy. That I have people supporting me with traffic is icing on the cake, and it does help a person feel better. But if I weren't a puny person, I'd be doing all this anyway just because I love blogging, and the numbers wouldn't mean a thing to me. I have 8 years of blogs tucked away in private.
I want to make a couple comments on stuff I've seen recently on twitter regarding numbers.
One woman decided to shut down her paid for blog because readers (apparently to her mind) didn't appreciate that they didn't have to put up with ads, and she wasn't getting the feedback and traffic she was expecting to get in return for what she was paying out. You know what? Blog for YOU. Pay to remove the ads for YOU. I'm talking to all you bloggers. If you don't get traffic and that's what you want to see, dang, pay for the traffic to get it started, start networking. There is no magic. Sometimes you have to work to be seen in the crowd. You might be a boring person, but there are way more boring people than me on twitter and blogs that have more followers than me because they dedicate the time to networking, and I don't think boring has as much to do with it as simply just taking people on your journey with you. Share your world because you want to. It's ridiculous to fuss at your readers for not being better cheerleaders. They have lives and stuff, too.
Then I read a story about a guy who had been on twitter for four years, made over 10,000 tweets, and had less than 20 followers the whole time. He finally decided to shut his twitter account down, had tried everything, like retweeting funny or interesting stuff, couldn't ever seem to get more followers. I think the guy's mistake may have been that he wasn't original. YOU are the only person on the planet that can say the stuff from the point of view that is your head. What do YOU think about things? What makes you laugh and cry? What do you think is cool? And again, share because you want to. If it's only about numbers while you repaste other people's stuff, you lose the game. You have to care about your readers caring about you, not just pull their strings to get reactions. If you don't enjoy entertaining people off the top of your head with your stuff and you think it's too much work, maybe tweeting and blogging isn't your thing. Kind of like people on American Idol who can't carry a tune, sometimes you just have to realize that no matter how much you love something, not everyone else has to appreciate that you love it. Doesn't mean you can't walk around singing at the top of your lungs or tweeting your eyeballs out, just don't take nonresponse as a signal to quit.
Another guy I follow on twitter gets those little weekly or monthly activity reports that show up in his feed for everyone to see. This last week he had 22 retweets, 6 new followers, and 15 mentions. What most of his followers may not realize is that he cross tweets over at least 3 accounts that he owns while pretending to be other people. Then he live tweets a tv show that he rewatches that has been over for a couple of years, but his tweets are random action alerts, rarely snarky, rarely emotionally involved. You know what? People must love it because he has a LOT of followers compared to me. Why? Because he also contributes real content to movie review sites, interacts well with people all over the world, and gets excited about other people's stuff. He's interesting in probably a very different way than he thinks he's interesting. His personna amuses me, I like him, nerd to the max. If something doesn't go right, he just creates another account and keeps working away. You have to admire and respect that kind of dedication.
And still another guy I follow on twitter does almost nothing but build legos. Every day he shares a pic of a new lego thing he constructs with his young son, and dang if he's not talking to people all over the world about legos. I'm not a legos person, but because of the ocassional interesting picture or little story about his kid, I've begun noticing all kinds of really cool lego stuff from conventions and lego obsessed builders. There are some really talented people out there.
Stay busy. Keep blogging or tweeting or whatever it is you do. Do it because you want to. Numbers are nice, and it's a fun game trying to bump them up, but never let numbers tell you what you are doing is dumb or unwanted. It may be that you just aren't being seen by the right audience, or that you haven't figured out how to network yet. Don't limit yourself to one media and reject the rest. This world is too big for that. Also, use your numbers wisely. Stat reports like this one are a great way for me to gauge how well I'm still managing during a sick spell. It's not about traffic as much as it is about my weaker productivity.
Watch your trending, compare it to same time year before, assess yourself and your content, do experiments to see where you can tweak your traffic. NEVER use traffic stats as a one-time only assessment tool to shut down your stuff. Time and traffic are fluid, numbers go up and down, and it might have a lot more to do with weather and the time of year than you think. I've noticed for years that my worst traffic is usually between spring break and Memorial Day.
Ok, back to real life. My commissioned Lexx art t-shirt is supposed to get finished up pretty soon. It's a huge job, two artists are working on it, it's pricey, and I can't wait to be a show off in it.
Also got a nice gift for my coming soon grandbabies from a really sweet actress-entrepreneur in England after I got silly and told her she'd be rewarded for talking to me on twitter with a promo on my silly survey blog. Click this pic if you want to see where they came from.
I'm hoping that my energy level is picking back up for real and that I'll be getting busier on my blogs again soon. If it hadn't been for twitter I think I would have just croaked off in a corner, so thanx to everyone on twitter who tolerated my weird facebook crossposting at one in the morning kind of stuff. Honestly, droid has changed the way I handle life, certainly makes it easier to get through tough nights now. I never want to bother people with middle of the night phone calls, and blogging about stuff only makes it more depressing, but get me rocking twitter on a droid and the night just flies by. There are so many awesome funny and creative people out there, and it's nice to find I'm not alone in the wee hours. And sometimes I get lucky and a someone famous retweets me or follows me back. It's a fun twitter game.
Ok, guys, I'm off to make some cookies. I haven't had a cookie in a long time.
The website owner of SF Series and Moviesbased in the Netherlands (SFSeries&Movies (SFSeriesMovies) on Twitter) alerted me to the website owner ofSyFyDesigns.combased in Chicago (myke (ekym) on Twitter) hosting a poll for a group Lexx watch twitter party. If you are not yet 'hip to the groove', these are live chat parties during a prechosen tv show or movie that everyone watches at the same time and are all the rage. Even if you don't have a twitter account, you can watch the chat party live by following a preset hashtag feed, i.e. if it's called #LexxWatch or something. (It'll be tricky to make it an easy to follow hashtag, there are thousands of users on twitter using and tweeting "Lexx" continually, so we'll need to fine tune our hashtag feed.)
Ignore that date on the poll, it's been moved up. :edit: 1-10-13 This watch party is being rescheduled to the next weekend around the 19th or something, pending playoff schedules.
At this moment we're tentatively looking at the 12th the 19th of January, not sure about the time yet. If I know anything else before then I'll add an edit and linx to where you can watch Lexx with us if you don't own the dvds.
:edit: Ok, that was fast, there's a countdown clock now on the Lexx poll thread, and the hashtag is #LexxWatch2013 if you want to join in or watch live.
:edit: 1-9-13 Here are a few links to help you get ready for a Lexx Watch. I'm also seeing used Lexx being recycled once in awhile through our local gamers paradise. I own the original Salter Street edits, and I'm finding out that marketing between regions 1 and 2 have a few different scene edits, and the new rereleases have some music and scene edits. Lexx is its own cult thing, and very much alive despite the scattered marketing and lack of official website. Syfy.com in the U.S. used to keep a page and message board for Lexx since it was a 'Sci-Fi Original' for Friday Prime, but that's all gone now, alas. It's up to the fans to keep Lexxing till someone can get their hands on it, and I know of at least 3 different sets of media people who have tried and are still working on acquisition so they can get projects rolling. We can dream.
I have to laugh. Some of my sites have exploded (more like bottle rocket, not nuclear) this week and sitemeter has been mostly down for days because they're moving their servers. Go figure.
I've been a blog watcher since before I ever got on xanga, which was 2004. I followed Michael J. Straczynski around on message boards, fought gang wars with Sliders and Xena fans that we though would explode the internet, ran groups and chats, and absolutely flipped out that no one was bringing up how The Lone Gunmen practically showed us how to take out the World Trade Center mere months before it really happened, and then the show just disappeared. I know a guy who hosted a Star Trek marathon wearing Spock ears on our local tv station back in the 80's. We were underground awesome before it was cool to geek out. Before other people ever started blogging, we were like human webcrawlers. Before blogging became a numbers game, we were forming conventions and group emails were flying all over the country.
When the internet got bigger this last decade, I was thrilled. My idea of internet was how cool it will be to have everything ever known to man catalogued and organized for easy access. Instead of laboriously digging through ancient books in old libraries, now we're zipping straight into a Trek-like future where everything ever known is commonly warehoused everywhere you go, and you simply ask a computer for information about *anything*, and ~voila~. For example, how about the movie A Sound of Thunder which came out in 2005. I saw that and was all *omgwheredidIreadthatbook*, because back in the 70's I read the short story. Well, sooner or later Wikipedia is going to have everything, because here it is, Ray Bradbury got it published in 1952. And that's what internet should be, an extension of my brain that helps me keep track of and remember things, as well as interact in a very timely manner all over the planet.
But the sport I love most is blog watching. When I first started blogging I had no idea what was going on, but it didn't take long to figure out, because once everything in media turned into blogging, that became the new interactive gaming for the intellectual. Or psueudointellectual. Or anyone preying on anyone else who can halfway phonetically spell well enough to encourage interchange, because boy have those ads taken over. Blogging is such a huge industry that money magically makes itself every time people flock around media sites. Commenting is the new hamster wheel, generating more and more interaction, and the worth of a blog becomes the sine of the tangent squared of the comments over the pi to the second crap of the traffic which that blog drives to the ads, and anyone can get in on the action now, just like buying and selling stocks over your computer at home.
Once a blog hits a certain threshold, the hits keep coming in with minimal maintenance because other blog sites are busy grabbing and reproducing the posts and linking back to that blog. This has gotten so complex that sometimes I hunt high and low for an original source and can never find it. Once something, however out of context, hits media blogging, it's a throw of the dice if you'll ever find a link back to the REAL original site, because all that is legally required now is to link back to where you're quoting from, and that absolves you of any claim to how real or true what you just reposted may be. I think the only logical thing the comment squabbling goes on about nowadays is whether something might be truly misquoted, but the mangling all that goes through during comments only proves that the more you misquote, the more money you can make. Likewise, opinions have always been weightier than truth, but nothing breathes more life into opinionating than blogging, and blogging is a money machine, so the more opinions spew out, the more money can be generated because more commenting drives more traffic through the ads. The more the world squabbles, the richer someone is becoming...
Lately there is a broohaha going on over Nathan Fillion's response to a request for a photo of him with a piece of twine. Staunch fans who know what the heck is going on are lining up and taking sides, and it's actually kinda funny that right now The Bloggess has actually got more clout to make an impact if she's getting 500 comments over that and he's not...
See, THAT is what the game is all about. How many people can you get to talk about you? If you can get ONE person full of hellbent fans to respond to you like that, you virtually win the game, or you can up the ante and go into high stakes poker with your own hellbent followers. This is what blog watching is all about. That and watching Michio Kaku's twitter get hacked LIVE because I'm up at 3 a.m. watching Olympic feeds on Twitter, and all the trending responses about the hack from Michio's followers were better than watching Comedy Central.
Live response is where I'm at. I'm enjoying the summer so far, watching my twitter feeds during live Merlin filming at Pierrefonds in France, thanks to the fans who were able to hang out there, and live during the San Diego Comic Con, thanks to all the fans and podcasts and actors tweeting their hearts out. Both of those went on for weeks, and I was nearly exhausted by the time it was all over from trying to keep up with the thousands of pictures and videos and blogs being linked.
Now I'm back to watching the entire world fuss back and forth about football coming up, and I'm watching my internal trackers, which aren't that great because I don't get IPs and very good locations like I do with sitemeter, so I'll wave a general hello back just in case some of those footprints happen to be people I know from former glory days. And the rest of you, don't want to leave anyone out.
I believe in our earth being the Magrathean super computer designed by Deep Thought in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and we're all a tiny part of it. The answer to life, the universe, and everything is nearly in our grasp now.
Tonight has been ~waaaay~ too exciting. Scott and I both woke up around 2 with our eyes oozing, kudos to whatever can still pollinate all night after days and days of utterly wilting heat and drought, and thank goodness there are Olympics on several channels, because tv pretty much sucks at 3 a.m. So I got back on twitter to catch the funny stuff everyone is saying about watching Olympics (general consensus says Ralph Lauren made us look anti-American), but I got completely distracted watching Michio Kaku's twitter getting hacked ~LIVE~... *That* was some funny stuff. Following twitter reactions to that was better than watching Comedy Central, people in general are so witty and hilarious, it was awesome.
And if that weren't exciting enough, Scott suddenly decided, after a year and a half into a total peanut ban in my life, that he was going to break out an old jar of peanut butter he had stashed away for to make peanut butter toast with some cereal, and I'm like *D*U*D*E*, wtcrap?!?!?!?! It's not exciting enough already, you want to risk me having an anaphylactic reaction at 4 in the morning??? omgheissodumb. I can't even let my skin touch the edge of a sleeve that has lightly brushed a suet block for a bird feeder without itching like mad and breaking out in sores and swelling, and he would have kissed me good night later without a second thought...
So this whole night has been one long adrenaline surge, and I've never been the sort who could go back to sleep and get up at noon. And all this is with benadryl. Looks like my plan for tomorrow is to be as lazyasIwannabe.
I will NEVER ask for or accept donations to keep this site going. Ever.
Laptop screencaps used in not for profit blog episode and character reviews and film study at grandfortuna.xanga.com and lexxperience.blogspot.com Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use."
My screencaps are hosted at LexxPix. You are welcome to use my bandwidth to share these pix to other sites.
Join registered hashtags #Lexxperience, #Lexx, and mashtag #MerLexxian for real time twitter feed, photos, and videos.
Public hashtag #pblexxpix goes to a shared album in my photobucket. Anything on twitter, instagram, and photobucket labeled with this hashtag will automatically appear in this album as well. You are welcome to use my bandwidth to share these pix to other sites.
Lexx fans have permission to translate and copy my material to other fan sites and hotlink images from this blog.
My first tracker was installed in 2004 and broke several times before moving to a new server, which lost a few months of stats, and then Xanga moved to new servers and I lost more stats for more months before the page came back up, so I've lost a total of about two years' worth of stats. The second was installed 2-22-14 and is considered very conservative by business owners who use analytics, which itself is very conservative, estimates being that roughly one third to one half of hits by real live people aren't even counted, most likely due to javascript discrepancies. Actual hits on several posts here are in the thousands now, and the Lexx Index in the ten thousands. I've got pingbacks turned off, so spam isn't counted at all within the Xanga internal tracker, and most direct post hits can be correlated to my real time linking activity on twitter and other social media. When I did Google Analytics beta testing I got to see how search engine performance compares to tracking. I believe live feed linking sources to various social medias are key to a future where search engines are more about performance than cataloging, which has been confirmed to me by coders who create bot algorithms as I was beta testing paper.li. I've fought hard through redundant age-old stacks to make my way to the google front lines again, so my Lexx work shows up faster on Chrome searches now. This has been a really interesting ride. At any rate, my point is, I can still go back 6 years on my original tracker and I can still see that in 2013 just before the last big blog server move, I was getting traffic like this (and since then, the tracker may have been abandoned, we can't tell). Click the thumbnail to see full size.
My original tracker also still lets me see the latest 500 visitors on a map. I once counted over 80 countries among the total visits. You guys are not alone. Click the map to see it better.
Besides Lexx, the most common search phrases that bring new visitors here are variations on 'huge spaceship'. The most seen post from a phrase search is How Big is the Lexx? My biggest Lexx referrer is Lexx Domain. Most of page views per person count comes from the Lexx tag on Tumblr. Visitors who stay the longest come through URLOpener and are pinged through the Google translator server in Mountain View, CA.
This is from http://www.syfydesigns.com/showthread.php?332-Watch-an-Episode-of-LEXX-what-one&p=816&viewfull=1#post816
In all the years we've lived here, we've never had a parasite problem with our chickens. Not sure what the crap, but they got a big bad mite infestation in their nests this winter and were eaten alive while the mites chewed their feathers to the nubs around the oil glands above their tails and the vent area where their skin is moister. It looked like we took an electric razor to them and buzzed their bottoms bald. This happened so quickly that it was mind blowing and very surprising. So we got the chicken house and pen all cleaned out and dusted real good, and their poor feathers are trying to grow back. Feathers don't grow continuously like hair does, so we may have to wait till they molt to see if the damage is repairable. Some of them are getting some fluff back, but the pin feathers were just destroyed. 
Actually, Xanga says I've already got over 2000 hits just this week so far, so my site meter numbers must be extremely conservative.
If I combined all my blogs hits it would be pretty impressive.
