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Posts tagged as “The Black Laser”

Happy (Belated) 2nd Birthday, The Black Laser!

Yesterday marked the two-year anniversary of The Black Laser. Isn’t that exciting?! Let’s all have some cake!

What does the bright and shining future hold for The Black Laser?! WHO FUCKING KNOWS?!? What, I can see into the future? Jesus Christ, guys. I may be the Space Pope, but I’m not psychic. Well, I AM psychic, but I’m not a friggin’ fortuneteller. You want one of those, you go to a fucking carnival.

In all seriousness, the site’s long overdue for a redesign. What I’ve got now is SOOOO 2008 that it just screams for the tender loving help it needs. I’ve got some ideas for it. We shall see.

Otherwise, there will be no great changes to the format or content of The Black Laser. Why would it change? So, keep reading, and I’ll keep posting all sorts of crazy crap.

I also want to say happy birthday to my darling niece Sienna as she shares a birthday with The Black Laser. I don’t get a lot of two year olds on this site, so one of you with a direct line will have to convey my birthday wishes.

The Black Laser enters MEAT SPACE.

Dearest Deegan,

Thank you for the incredible birthday gift. I know that I actually received this a while ago, but I felt like today was a good day to post it. There’s only one, and I’ve got it. Fuck yes.

The Front.

The Back.

To be perfectly honest, it took me a while to start wearing it out mostly because it feels like being in a band wearing its own t-shirt—a serious no-no in the metal community as we both know. But then I started to think of it as determined self-promotion and thought, “You know what? Fuck anyone who’d bust my balls for wearing this awesome shirt of my own equally awesome website.” And there you have it. Interestingly enough, a post yesterday on Invisible Oranges called “The rules of metal t-shirt wearing” confirmed some of the things I’ve already been feeling.

But you still won’t ever catch me wearing the band’s shirt to the show.

Anyway! Thanks for the shirt, dude. It slays.

Sincerely,

The Black Laser.

Redesign of The Black Laser

So, I’m growing bored with the utterly awesome design I have here on The Black Laser. It’s basically just a customized version of the freeware theme Pixel. I tweaked the colors and the fonts and whatever quickly, just to get the site up and running. If I had spent a million years fucking with the design, there would be no Black Laser for all of you to read. That would be horrible, wouldn’t it.

Well, now more than a year has passed since I made this place public and it seems to me like it’s time to really go super duper with this place.

There are a few elements I think are critical.

  • Lasers.
  • Bright pink.
  • Black.
  • Comments than differentiate me (the admin) and you (my loyal readers).
  • Good search engine optimization (which I know nothing about).
  • Unicorns.
  • Serif fonts.

I like my color scheme. I think that black and pink are basically the perfect colors for this place. But there are some problems, like the huge empty space at the top. Or the black bars on either side. It feels like my text is floating in space and I think it makes it a little hard to digest the sometimes quite large blocks of text I post. Yes, Tiffany, I know, TL:DR. But for everyone else, I’d like to make it easier to read on this site.

Some people have complained about how reading white (actually light grey) text on black hurts their eyes. Personally, I think it’s more tiring to look at black text on white on the computer, but different strokes, right? I could play around with that, but it probably won’t change.

Another thing, I’ve got a jumble of boxes on the side with very little delineation between them. I’m not even sure how useful that stuff on the side is to anyone. Do any of you even read it? I update that stuff fairly regularly or when appropriate. It could definitely be laid out more smartly.

Other than that, I don’t really know. I have some pictures in my head of what it should look like, but nothing definite. I should also probably finally do something with josephdillingham.com.

Anyway, thoughts? Suggestions? Fears? Concerns?

Happy 1st Birthday, The Black Laser!!

Today is The Black Laser’s first birthday. Yay! I made my very first post here on November 11, 2008, and you can see it here: The inaugural posting at The Black Laser.com/.net. A year in internet time is basically, what?, a decade in regular old meatspace time? That’s pretty awesome. Here’s a look at the current stats.

Screen shot 2009-11-11 at 3.43.59 PM

311 posts works out to 85% of a post every day. Not bad for being written by one solitary Space Pope from Beyond the Stars. I wonder how many of those are just music videos? I could probably figure it out, but I’m not going to. Too depressing, I think. 285 comments is not so great. It works out to comments on 91.6% posts if averaged, or 78% of a comment per day. Mind that this number also includes my comments in response to your comments. I encourage you to leave a comment for me if you liked what I wrote or have thoughts or whatever. I see all of them and it’s good to know people are reading. This number does not include the comments left by people on Facebook, which is too bad since I think the number would be significantly higher. I wish I knew of a way to migrate the comments from Facebook to these pages, but I don’t think it’s possible. Too bad. Our superstar poster is Don Diggler. Good work, Deegs!

And 5,640 spam comments?! Holy crap!

Screen shot 2009-11-11 at 3.47.21 PM

This handy little graph (which you can see full size if you click on it) shows the number of hits received by The Black Laser of the last 12 months. April of this year was a high point in the readership of The Black Laser, with 1,060 views.

Screen shot 2009-11-11 at 3.58.47 PM

In case the little line wasn’t telling enough for you, here’s a table of the data for hits on The Black Laser since 11/11/2008. I don’t know if this will be interesting to anyone but me, but it’s interesting to me and this is my fucking site, so deal.

According to Google, I get 32.52% of my traffic directly, 37.79% from referring sites, and 29.41% from search engines. That is remarkably even, I think. I don’t know, or care, what it signifies, but the numbers are fun!

I’ve had visitors from 84 different countries, including Slovenia, Thailand, Israel, and Poland. Most hits come, unsurprisingly, from the United States, followed by the United Kingdom and Canada. To all my international readers—thanks!

Screen shot 2009-11-11 at 4.15.25 PM

Internet Explorer 6, people? Seriously, GET WITH THE NOW. You’re not seeing The Black Laser as it’s intended if you’re using IE6. Upgrade to Firefox. It’s free and lightyears better. And you 1059 hits using IE5? May God have mercy on your iSouls.

But more important that all of this, November 11, 2008 was also the day my darling little niece, Sienna, was born. Happy birthday, Sienna Jo! We’re both 1 today! YAY!!!!!!!