Looking at the calendar, it has been well over a year since I last posted on the blog. This is due to a variety of reasons with a lack of interest being the primary reason...

When I first started From the Sidelines, it was intended mostly as a journal of sorts rather than trying to start a paper one yet again. Those prior attempts never lasted long due to there rarely being anything positive to report leaving constant bad health for entries. At some point, abandoning doing the same on the blog had to happen as nobody (me) wants to read a litany of woe.

Over the years, the death of Live Writer and Open Live Writer straight up killed the formatting I liked to use for posts containing images leading to a reduction of my interest in photography as an unwanted side effect. Simultaneously, the Internet became a short inflammatory text message or video oriented format as the race to the lowest common denominator of human behavior took over. The failure of search engines in recent years turned the new frontier days of the World Wide Web into a corporately homogeneous dull pastiche of assorted inanities with no place for anything remotely thoughtful or creative.

In short, it all ceased to be even remotely fun.

At one point, I thought the site would at least be preserved for posterity, after all everything is permanent on the Internet as it used to be said. Time and reality have proved otherwise with vast tracts of data, personal sites, and even large web sites vanished into the ether. While the Internet Archive project is a valiant attempt to preserve things, it is under threat of being sued out of existence. 

The fragility of digital data has become very apparent of late and the things we take for granted today will be gone without a trace, unlike tangible objects such as books, documents, paintings, and buildings. We, the denizens of the modern West, have built a house of cards at the end of our civilization that most people will be shocked by when it collapses.

So I find myself questioning why I bothered with creating From the Sidelines in the first place. 20/20 hindsight is at play, of course -- but I can't remember the feeling I had starting it up and adding to it in the early years. That was a time I still had hope for some kind of life in mortality and those kind of delusions are now long gone.

The blog is a relic of the past at this point, I think.

A Lack of Motivation

It has been just over five months since I last posted here. Between struggles with health and not a whole lot to say, there hasn't been a lot of motivation to put together content for the blog. However, there has been an additional demotivating factor affecting my attitude.

The death of Open Live Writer's ability to work with images. Since the built in Blogger editor has always been twitchy, not to mention inconvenient to work with by comparison, it has made posting difficult.

One of the things that has made aging a melancholy process for me is the ruination of so many things I enjoyed or used faithfully over many years. From movie franchises to books to stores to tremendously helpful software, the downward spiral has been unavoidable. Here and there a replacement has been found that works, yet all too many have fallen prey to creative destruction -- minus the creative part.

So rethinking the blog is in order. Movie and anime reviews will not continue, though the old ones will stay. I had enjoyed the process of composing them but formatting has become an onerous task. A return to the more journal like aspect of the blog is probably in order with the added complication of my disliking writing about the unhappy things in my life.  Living through them is enough pain in the first place. The human desire to dwell endlessly on unhappiness is not something I approve of -- especially where I'm concerned.

Since my other blog, Mamie's Life is permanently discontinued I have to wonder if this is an end to an era on the Net for me. Output steadily decreased over the years has dropped the blog in priority to somewhere in the negative numbers on my To-Do list. Earlier in the year I posted about a lot of other factors souring me on blogging including the decline of civilized behavior in general.

All in all, I can't find any motivation to continue From the Sidelines.

To Blog, or Not to Blog, that Is the Question

For some time now I’ve been dealing with my evolving view of the Web and in particular its benefit to mankind. What began as a wonderful way to freely put out and find information, it looked like one of humanity’s greatest inventions, perhaps even something that would bring the world together.

Alas, it has turned out to do the opposite more often than not.

Not Dead Yet

The title of the post is what I yell out to turkey vultures hopefully circling overhead whenever I notice them stalking me. Likewise, the blog is still going though I seem to have missed posting for an entire month again.

Believe it or not, the multiyear delayed Godzilla review has advanced slightly, in that I’ve got most of the screen captures ready for editing. Now if the notes taken on the Blu-ray release turn up real progress might be made.

Lots of little things and unusually low amounts of energy even for me have kept me from doing anything interesting since May. My sister’s family visited over the Independence Day weekend, so the back half of the week had me bed ridden most of the time.

Dad has done well with eating more solids along with liquid food that normally is pumped in. Apparently the Nestle kind is palatable enough to consume by mouth, or so he says. Dealing with a big change in food consumption has been challenging, since we’ve both forgotten how to cook over the last three years of his paralyzed stomach. With it working again, my solitary diet of rice and eggs/chicken can no longer be the norm.

As for me, the rest of July looks… challenging. August doesn’t look much better and I find myself dreading all the energy expenditures involved. More than likely I will have to disappoint someone or more than one if my energy levels don’t improve.

In the meantime, there may be some short posts coming up featuring some oddball acquisitions made over the past few months.

No Excuses

While I’ve been struggling with my health and what few activities I’ve had, having an entire month go by without posting is ridiculous. That will be rectified in the near future, as I’m going to be making some changes in my life to reduce demands on my time and energy.

At the moment, I’m too tired to write anything at the moment, however there will be more posting on a variety of topics coming after I get over a bug I picked up this weekend.

From the Sidelines 2015 Review

Once again I wasn’t able to give the blog the attention it needs resulting is a steep drop off in traffic. In the collegiate world, it is said one needs to “publish or perish” and so it is also with blogs.

According to Google Analytics, there were 20,175 pageviews from 14,132 visitors from January 1st through December 29th. Statcounter disagrees and says the numbers were 15,048 and 10,033 respectively. Give AdBlocker and NoScript usage, I’ll guess that Google is more accurate and still missed some visits. People from all over the globe visited from more countries than I care to list with the U.S. only making up 47.43% of the traffic.

It amazes me that From the Sidelines has so many international visitors.

Looking at the ongoing web browser wars, Chrome was the dominant browser by far for 45.49% of the share. That was no surprise, however the second most used browser was. Safari was used for 22.61% of visits to the blog easily passing Firefox at 14.58%. This was rather stunning though I knew Firefox is in decline.

Some exotic browsers showed up at less than 1%, most of which I hadn’t heard of before: Iron, UC Browser, YaBrowser, Coc Coc, Maxthon, S40 Ovi Browser, MRCHROME, DoCoMo, JUC, Lunascape, NetFront, and YE. A few of those are state supplied browsers from countries where Internet access is highly monitored, so apparently I haven’t run afoul of their censors.

Aside from the home page, the following posts were the most visited in 2015:

1. Children Who Chase Lost Voices Review
2. The Invisible Boy Review
3. India’s Bantam Weight Fighter: The LCA Tejas Displays 
4. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind Review
5. The Big Sleep 1946 and 1945 Review
6. Pacific Rim Review
7. Spirited Away Review
8. Battle of Britain Review
9. Dracula (1931) Review
10. Whisper of the Heart Review

The continuing traffic to the LCA Tejas post has turned it into an evergreen thanks to the horrifically (and controversial) prolonged development of the aircraft. Showing how much I know, the post was expected to fade into obscurity when I wrote it. It is pleasing that Children Who Chase Lost Voices ended up at number one for it is a movie deserving of more attention than it has gotten.

2016 will see more posting, or so is the hope since no promises can be made. It will be interesting to see if that stops the decline.

Into the Last Quarter

2015 has gotten away from me, I realized when seeing October arrive so quickly. Last year was difficult due to my father’s travails, but still, things got done. Not so this year and I find myself trying to play catch up while falling further behind.

My health hasn’t been catastrophically bad, however it has been bad by even my lowered expectations. Nothing I planned for the year has been accomplished or will be before 2016 rolls around. Simply there is no energy to go around with too many things needing doing.

Between that becoming glaringly obvious and the rather somber tone of General Conference this weekend, I’ve found myself less than motivated. Plowing on is the only plan with no real hope of progress in this desolate world filled with superficiality dominating the culture.

Ah well.

Randomness

Testing the android app for Blogger to see if it still works. Annoyed that it lost an entire post already.

Google Cuts Off Live Writer from Blogger

 UPDATE: As of June 2, everything is working again. That was an amazingly fast fix given how low priority Blogger has been to Google and Live Writer to Microsoft. Didn't see an update to Live Writer, so I suspect that this is Google's initial fix.

Original Post:

As of May 26, Google changed the login method for external software to access Blogger, cutting it off from all offline editors other than Blogger's default browser editor. Since many of us use Microsoft's Windows Live Writer 2012 to create our posts, this has been a disaster. If you are like me and use a lot of inline images, this is especially problematic since the default editor is terrible at handling images.

Google blames Microsoft:

7:51 AM

Nick - Google Guide said:

Hi everyone,

We appreciate you coming here and letting us know about this issue. It looks like this error is a result of an authentication problem between Google and Live Writer. A long time ago, we announced we were deprecating our old authentication system and we encouraged developers to move to the new one (OAuth 2.0). It seems that Live Writer is still using our old system, which is causing the issue. We are currently looking into it, but we suggest that users also reach out to Microsoft to report the issue.

Thanks,

Blogger Suport Team

p.s. please disregard the previous official announcement.

Edited

However, all other blog editors are affected, such as Raven, Blogjet, and BlogFire. Until one or more of them change over access methods, posting to Blogger will be a great deal more difficult given the Microsoft ceased development of Live Writer in 2012.

In my case, it may prevent the movie review I finally finished writing today from ever being posted, since I can't get the images to work properly with the default editor. Short of learning to hand code HTML image sizing, it isn't happening for me.

So I have to wait for some kind of fix from somebody. If that doesn't happen, it will be time to explore Wordpress to see if it can replace Blogger for me.  Otherwise, I may stop blogging altogether.

This is more than annoying.

AdSense is Nonsense

As part of trying to understand how the Web works, I have experimented with enabling ads on the site to see how they affect its presence in search engines or if they do at all. Making things easy for Google I opted to use their AdSense program and in the latest experiment tried one ad on the right hand sidebar. That way everything involved, Blogger, Google Search, and AdSense, would all be Google products.

So after a year of no profit with the latest attempt (due to the fact it will take around a decade to hit the cash out threshold), they send me a nastygram informing I’m in violation of AdSense:

Hello,

This is a warning message to alert you that there is action required to bring your AdSense account into compliance with our AdSense program policies. We’ve provided additional details below, along with the actions to be taken on your part.

Affected website: from-the-sidelines.blogspot.com

Example page where violation occurred: http://from-the-sidelines.blogspot.com/2011/11/few-war-movies-are-as-rousing-and.html?m=1

Action required: Please make changes immediately to your site to follow AdSense program policies.

Current account status: Active

My immediate reaction was wondering what in the world they were talking about. After visiting the page and seeing it renders as a mobile version with multiple ads, I rolled my eyes since I had no control over where the ads are placed with Bloggers default mobile version. In fact, I was astounded to see two ads, one each placed at the top and bottom of the post instead of only one as set.

Why is this annoying?

Violation explanation

​
AD MISLABELING: Publishers may not implement Google ads in a manner that disguises the ads in any way. For instance, publishers may not place ads under misleading headers or titles as this may confuse users into thinking the ads are actually site links related to that header. To avoid this issue, we ask that publishers use only "sponsored links" or "advertisements" to label ads. More information about this policy can be found in our help center at https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1346295?utm_source=crs&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=notification#Placing_ads_under_a_misleading_heading=en&answer=1346295#Placing_ads_under_a_misleading_heading

There was no header labeling of the ads they inserted on their own into the automatically generated conversion of the page to a mobile friendly format. It is sheer idiocy to trust Google’s services working properly with one another which reminds me of the bad old days of IBM where divisions would war with each other. It is one thing to have one hand not know what the other is doing, but neighboring fingers?

I’ve removed AdSense from the site and doubt I’ll experiment with it again. After removing the ad block on the side no ads render on the mobile version too. I pity anyone who tries to make money off of webpage ads these days if penalties are handed out so capriciously.

Somehow I don’t think the whopping $5 and odd cents theoretically earned by the site will be missed.

2014 in Retrospect, 2015 Looms

New Years Eve is upon me much faster than expected since life has been complicated of late. Of course, it has been for the entire year so I should have expected 2014 to end that way. To sum up the year it was a relentless grind.

Starting off with my father’s cancer battle, 2014 proved to be a bad year demonstrating 2013 was no fluke. Life got harder, so the blog didn’t get the attention planned for it, along with many other things.

Normally, I write a post with statistics for the blog, however this year I’m discontinuing the practice. Why? It is clear that growth is dead. Other than the front page and one post on spam, the top twenty pages viewed all were originally published in prior years.

Suffice it to say that visits decline by a quarter thanks to Google’s constant screwing around with their algorithms and my producing fewer posts. Having matured, the Web is now a pay to play business rather than the bold new frontier of the past.

Good thing the blog wasn’t created to garner wealth or fame!

Experimenting with Ads

Though I have too little traffic to ever make money off of ads run on the blog, I’m doing a test run to see if they negatively impact my organic traffic from Google. There will only be one on the sidebar since I’m looking to see if all the animal named algorithms G likes to unleash penalize the site.

Purely mad scientist stuff inspired by the fact that as time goes by there is less and less traffic from organic searches. In other words, I’ve got nothing to lose and curiosity about what destroyed my blog’s rise in late 2012 really was has taken over. Like before, I’ll be using Google’s own AdSense service, though I might toy with other services later on if nothing happens.

Following Through

Despite a paucity of energy, it is time to get reviews written again if only to see if I can still string words together in a coherent fashion. A review is already in the pipeline to get things rolling again. Okay, I only have the DVD out and am looking at it intently, but one has to start somewhere.

In a post in October of a previous year (I will not state which one), a list was put forth of movies that would be reviewed or have their reviews rewritten. Out of 26, only six remain to fulfill the promise made there. That should keep me busy, plus I did pick up the ritzy Criterion Blu-ray release of Godzilla/Gojira which means a rewrite of those reviews at some point.

I had considered finishing out the orphaned anime series reviews started before. However, this is one case where following through is unlikely as much as I despise not finishing a project. Instead, I may write an overall series review as a conclusion for each with other series getting that treatment in the future.

Hopefully, there will be time and energy for all this. It’s hard to believe that July is more than halfway over. Time really flies when you aren’t having fun.

Delays in Reviews

At least I got the Godzilla flicks promised earlier posted, though the bonus one was a bridge too far to complete. That’s my sole consolation because there is nothing in the pipeline due to how things have gone with my father’s health the last few weeks. His having taken up residence in the living room, I can’t evaluate any movies with 5.1 sound until he starts feeling better and can stay awake for two hours of film.

Note: A sure way to put him to sleep is to put on a movie. Only exception is if it is loud, which is a characteristic of most surround movies these days.

At the moment, I’m thinking of going to the older classics in my film library for material to review. Monaural sound is something I can do on the PC with headphones, ditto for stereo. There are a few older reviews that need rewriting and better screen captures, so maybe that will be a way to get some writing done.

Fiddling About the Edges

When one has a chronic illness, especially something that saps all energy like CFS, they need to find small things to do to keep from going stir crazy. For me, that's usually playing video games. What to do when even that is hard?

Well, I'm tweaking old review posts in an effort to clean up the formatting and tell search engines not to follow internal links. A small experiment at having an automated list making widget back on the blog produced the results I expected, that being a drop in search engine presence. Google may claim that the nofollow attribute is only needed in some cases, but it looks to me that they punish internal linking far more than they say.

I'd toyed with changing the links for some time so this was simply a tedious endeavor requiring time and no creativity. Something that requires no brain cells firing? Perfect for how I feel at the moment!

Well, that and dish washing which is weeks worth now. But that takes more energy. Like Pa Kettle, I'll get around to it one of these days.

Notes for the next review are nearly complete, so I'm on schedule there despite all the interruptions, crises, and exhaustion. Still need to do more work on the Sunday school lesson coming up in several days.

Life goes on.

Something Approaching Normalcy

With my father home from the hospital as of yesterday, my hope is that events will approximate what we normally go through, albeit with many concessions to his health problems. Due to the financial drain of the past week, we won’t be doing much unrelated to medical treatments. Scrounging up money for more wood pellets is something I’m attempting, but it will be ten days before more money comes my way.

Financial problems are far from uncommon when cancer strikes and I’ve always been very aware of the fund raisers done for people in the neighboring small towns. Often it is for people struck during the prime of their lives with families to provide for. So it could be far worse. I just hope that more people are aware of this being par for the course than not when they deal with cancer victims.

Sadly, awareness is not a trait associated with modern Westerners, though I often find myself suspecting it is simply human nature to be oblivious to what’s happening to others. Well, aside from salacious items that make fodder for gossip.

Since activity will be down, that means a chance to get this blog back to normal. One movie review needs to be finished, another has complete notes taken, and a third is partially noted. A small amount of referral spam has been recorded with an intent to investigate as well. Updates on my father’s battle with cancer will continue, hopefully with less drama.

The outer world is definitely seeing an increase in international drama with the return of the Cold War, airplane crashes, jet fighter shoot downs, and continuing economic woes. Therefore, I may end up posting on what’s going on if something really big happens…

…but I’d rather ignore the world for a week. Less stress equals better health, so a plan to bombard Dad with mass distraction is in the works. Time for nostalgia like the Emma Peel years of The Avengers plus family favorite movies of the past.

Technical Difficulties

Since last Saturday, I've been having problems with the DSL service provided by my ISP with frequent outages. Tech support is supposed to be investigating it, but nothing concrete has been found so far. So I'm way behind on posting and other Internet related doings.

Adding to the grief, I was so ill yesterday I accidentally clicked on the close button for the movie review that's been so troublesome. Exhausted, I thought I was clicking on the cancel button but it turned out to be the close out without saving button. More than half the review was lost, so another setback.

For the hat trick, the window in the basement blew out again. That's been the only easy thing to fix!

UPDATED 1/16

Somebody ran into our new mailbox and knocked it down the hill into the trees. I'm thinking of climbing up or down to get it, in the mean time we have to pick up the mail in town -- 12 miles away. 

At least the first pass on the movie review is finished and I may get the thing up tonight.

Looking Back: 2013 and the Blog

After the catastrophic collapse of traffic to end 2012, it looked like a bleak year coming up for From the Sidelines. Being a small blog and because I don’t work on promoting it, pageviews are highly dependent on organic search traffic from Google, Bing, and Yahoo – mostly Google. Every tweak, alteration, and seasonal mucking about of that mighty search engines algorithms seems to affect it. UPDATED with final figures.

Above is a graph of the traffic for 2013 according to Google Analytics. December has taken a downturn that reminds me a little of last December. A lot of reports of weirdness from search engine watchers makes me suspect that changes are being rolled out yet again.

In the end, December leveled out to my surprise. It seems the blog rebounds after every change Google makes now. As the trend shows since the middle of the year, traffic isn’t growing and is unlikely to.

The most visited posts for 2013:

Analysis? Selling Links for Money Spam

Either I’m beginning to become a connoisseur of referral spam or I’m just bored with the usual offerings. Today brought something slightly different to my Blogger stats that piqued my interest: http: // prlog . ru / analysis / from-the-sidelines . blogspot . com . Having my blog address in the spam brings such a warm, fuzzy feeling. Wait.. no, that’s indigestion. Anyway, it was a blink and you’ll miss it hit and run.

Ever curious, I fired up my copy of Ubuntu on a virtual machine and used TOR to anonymously check out the site the link came from. Don’t try this at home unless you know something about security or reformatting your hard drive. Never click on suspicious links like this, leave it to crazy people like me.

The Month That Ate My Homework

Or any other ridiculous excuse that you can imagine for not getting more done on the blog in November.

A wintery mix of weather, intestinal bug, and doing more in the real world than usual has led to my getting very little accomplished online lately. When it takes forever and a day to recover from expending energy, productivity suffers greatly. A couple of weekends ago I went on a trip up to the St. Paul area where I ended up assisting a close friend in teaching a merit badge course on computers to Boy Scouts.

Since then, I’ve been one of the walking dead and some extended trips out helping my father on some repair calls made me hungry for brains. Wait, that came out wrong. I lost my brains somewhere along the way, that’s what I meant. If you find them alongside the road, please send them to me and I might remember to repay the postage.

It depends on what shape the gray matter is in, you see.