Blogging Bloggers and the Blogs they love.

Projects, websites

I’ve been thinking about this blog more and more this week. I’m helping my friend Sean redesign his layout and move to a new server. It will eventually be on SeanWelker.com/blog but for testing im hosting it on welker.swalrus.org Modifying the theme is a little more tricky than I would like, but I’m coming along with it. It’s going to be a simple design but very tightly designed. It makes me want to redesign this theme… and I probably will in the near future.

It also makes me rethink having two blogs. mark5four0.swalrus.org was supposed to be some kind of middle ground where I could dump anything that I was working on and not be afraid to show it. I was trying to keep some distance between my professional side, my personal side, and my artistic side. What I’ve realized is that no matter what I’m only one person. If I put Mark Schumaker in the meta tags of all the pages, I’m really not separating anything. So I might as well just put all my blogging and art in one place and have a portfolio site in another. So I’m shutting down that blog and bringing all the content over here.

I’m still keeping MarkSchumaker.com… because everyone should own their name.

Re-Organizing the Swalrus Network

Projects, websites

I made a blog for Wade the other day (that i’m pretty sure he’ll never use) and I needed a website for Laurel’s movie so I made another one for her. This got me thinking about the reasons I have so many domains…

Cue flashback.

It all originally started way back in 2002 with MarkSchumaker.com which after about 2 years I forgot to reapply for and it was snatched by a domain squatter. (Fuck you Kenyatech) So I needed a new domain, another Schumaker (Kevin Schumacher, no relation) already owned Schubox.com so because I couldn’t come up with anything better I thought theSchubox.com seemed reasonable. In hindsight I probably shouldn’t have registered a name so similar to someone who kind of does the exact same thing as I do… probably confusing… So after about a year the domain squatter realized that he should have taken my offer of $35 for the domain and gave it up. So I promptly bought it back, because any respectable nerd should own his own name. A few months later I wanted to switch hosts to one that offered more services. Dreamhost.com was having a $9.99 sale for one year of hosting and a free domain. Not wanting to waste the chance to own another piece of the web, I decided to register Swalrus.org. So now I have 3 domains… I decide that MarkSchumaker.com will be my professional site, TheSchubox.com will be my art portfolio, and Swalrus.org will be anything else. Which all made sense for about 3 months until I realized that I was putting the same keywords in all three sites and therefore they would all come up if you searched for my name on google.

So it’s not a prefect system.

Now that I’m looking at it swalrus.org is kind of useless, I could have all these domains under theschubox, but I guess it’ll be nice to have a seperate domain if the network idea ever takes off. Basically I’m paying $10 extra per year to be able to tell people that I own Swalrus.org! On the plus side it is such a weird word that I’m now the top result on Google for it. This all worked for hulu, google, boingboing, most other web2.0 sites so I guess I’m in good company.

So now, because of all this… I’ve found the old original version of the Swalrus Conservation site and put it back under the top level domain. I think it makes more sense to have to top domain point to all the sub domains… and it’s still funny. Now it will act as a distribution point for the Swalrus Network.

Which as of now officially contains…

Thoughts.swalrus.org – This blog
Mark5four0.swalrus.org – My art dump
WadeChi.swalrus.org – Wade Chi Photography
USAFuels.swalrus.org – Laurel’s Documentary
TheTable.swalrus.org – Site for the Beerpong Table
CRS.swalrus.org – The Charlitron

If I ever get more people to join up I’ll probably remove the last two because they kind of suck.

Traffic for TheSchubox.com up 300%

Projects, websites

Hello! to people who took my card from Artomatic and then came through the link to here.
Hello! to people who were searching for “Batman Spaceship”

But hello the most to people who are looking for the “Worlds Tallest Cat”. Because that post is the most popular I’ve ever done. I am going to cater to the masses and post some pictures of Frankie, hopefully with some sort of scientific measurements.

Also my other website Swalrus.org is now the number one result when searching for “swalrus” on google… I have now fulfilled one of my life goals.

BPS.SWALRUS.ORG

Life, Projects, Randomness, websites

Before I moved out of the house in Vienna the roomates were having a discussion on how many games of Beer Pong have been played at the house. In the interest of statistical accuracy I gave the guys a notebook to keep track of all the games and so was born… The Pong Log.

I moved in with Laurel and came back every once in a while to hang out but I really wasn’t there all that much. I remember being surprized when Jesse said that Greg was dominating all the games, he was always good but not in a 31 game win streak sort of way.  So now that they are moving out of the house I decided to put together a little website dedicated to the Log. But in typical Mark fashion I was a little bit grand in the plans and constructed the worlds most complicated, in-depth, and potentially accurate Beer Pong Stats Database EVER.  It’s not totally compete, but all the records are up to date and I’ll be adding more stats/records.

Before you get on our case for drinking this much beer. I just want to let you know that they didn’t actually play by the official rules and force the losers… or even the winners,  to drink all the cups that were left on the table. I think they actually used water some of the time.

I present…

BPS.SWALRUS.ORG

Later!