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MikeDiDonato.com isn’t going to see much action this week, I’m sad to say that the problem light is still burning brightly. But what better time to recommend user registration! If you go here you can register for the website. At this time I’m going to accept 5 new content contributors. That means that if you register you might have a chance to add content to the website on your own free will!! Wow! what a privilege!

This is how it works. You can register and the website will automatically put you in as a subscriber. 5 lucky subscribers will be promoted to contributor. As a contributor, you can log in any time you’d like and publish little anecdotes or stories of rock into the Quickthoughts. Some of the current contributors include:

JonAbad!
ShaunMcQuaid!
Ryan Schenk!
Alicia!
and Theresa!

Once you’re selected, I’ll tell you how to make those posts happen. So if you’re interested, click that link above and lets spread the awesome.

Last night at Kung Fu I took a class from Master Tat-Mau Wong. Master Wong is the head of our academy and quite the martial artist. He is coaching the American Kung Fu Olympic team and was the chosen Kung Fu teacher (with students) to perform a demonstration at the recent opening of the movie Kung Fu Panda.

He’s totally intense. At one point during the seminar as he talked about inner power he said “If I needed to, I could shake this building with my chi.”

It was heavy.

The second half of this posts title is to commemorate my awesome Birthday which will be this Sunday (twenty seven!). I had an idea for a birthday adventure. I’m thinking about making a bunch of silk screened MSPaint logo picture MikeDiDonato T-shirts. They’d probably be pretty awesome. If you wanted a t-shirt I could make and ship one to you. I’d need about $5 (plus shipping) to cover costs but if you wanted to donate more than the five dollars all additional donations will go directly towards the purchase of a Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier Amplifier.

In this way you can get a sweet shirt and at the same time help contribute to the rock.

Leave a comment if you’d be interested in participating. If I got enough people, I’d probably make 4 or 5 different shirt styles to really boost the levels of awesome.

We’ve been rocking the Witty Text for a few years now. What’s Witty Text you ask? It’s the little changing phrase under the MikeDiDonato.com logo up at the top right of the page. Every time you reload the page, it gives you a different phrase.

We have such gems as:

Soy un hombre del queso.
Recommended by 4 out of 5 adult film actresses.
Salt is the volume knob of flavor.
{IF _mikedidonato IS “on”} awesome=lots {ELSE} awesome=0 {/IF}
and
We waste water here. A lot of it.

Right now I have 40 rotating phrases (10 mikedidonato.com points if you can name them all!)

Typically this little witty text phrase is really appreciated by first time visitors and completely ignored by regular visitors. Well, I think it’s time to revamp the list with some surefire winners. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to post them in the comments. I’ll add the favorites to the list and take out some of the lamer ones that have been stagnating in mediocrity (like Curing boredom since 1981. that’s pretty much the pinnacle of ‘eh’)

The only rule is that the clever phrase should be less than 75 characters long. Otherwise we could get into formatting issues.

The Comments are Open!

1. Birds.
Last night around 11pm the birds were going crazy.
What?!
Go to bed birds. Go to bed.

2. Coffee.
If someone could make a french vanilla coffee that tasted the way it smelled?
Instant millionaire.

3. Advertising.
This weekend some advertising will likely appear on MikeDiDonato.com.
It will be subtle and textual. It will help pay for the operation costs without sacrificing awesomeness.

4. Spring Cleaning.
It’s that time of the year. Hopefully by Sunday night the House of Rock will reach new levels of clean comfort.

Check out this awesome Schenk interview. MikeDiDonato.com even got a shout out!

Rock!

Seriously.

Switch to firefox.

Some of our readers are being forced by their company to use Internet Explorer. Help us stand up against corporate decrees of idiocy. Install Firefox at home and get us one user closer to abolishing Internet Explorer.

There are definitely still some hold outs. My family among them.

Family! Friends! There is a reason people heart Firefox. Try it for two weeks. If for no other reason, MikeDiDonato.com totally blows in Internet Explorer.

As mentioned last Friday, Team D has been slaving night and day over new header graphics for MikeDiDonato.com, and below are the fruits of our efforts. Thank you to those who responded with entries, the two we received are fantastic.

Simply click on the name of an image below, and using the power Internet Magic* the new header banner will appear** at the top of the page! Vote for your favorites below***!

Black and White
Broken Script
Canterbury
Dinosaurus
FAT!
Flames
Robot
Scratched
Script
Splatter

* Aforementioned Internet Magic is only guaranteed to work in Firefox and Safari, as Team D’s Internet Magician does not have access to Internet Explorer. But it’ll probably work****!
** Might take a second!
*** In the comments!
**** Update: Someone with a PC says it does. Yay!

A short while ago we had a chat about banners here at MikeDiDonato.com

Well, now I’m looking for some input. Ryan Schenk and I have put together a handful of different font options for the top of the page and on Monday we’re going to have a little voting to choose the newest and greatest for the website.

This weekend, if you’d like to make a banner to contribute. Just whip it up and e-mail it over to MikeDiDonato AT gmail D0T com.

Just make sure the banner is 950 pixels wide and 126 pixels tall. You can provide a fun new font, or a whole new banner. Anything you’d like. The more the merrier, and we won’t restrict it solely to MSPaint. Use whatever you’d like.

MikeDiDonato.com has a new banner.

Thanks to Jon Abad and Ryan for their assistance in making this website rock so severely.

Concerned Internet Reader:
“Mike D! Something’s wrong with your website!”

Mike D: “yeah… we’re working on it.”
CIR: “When will it be back and awesome again?”
Mike D: “probably not until the weekend.”
CIR: “oh no!”
Mike D: “it’s okay. I’ll reimburse you with brownies. Just e-mail me your address.”

In the post in the quickthoughts section today I beckoned the MikeDiDonato.com readers to switch to firefox. Ryan Schenk asked what the browser stats are for this website.

Great question Ryan!

Let’s take a look at the last 100 visitors.

Oooh, exciting! let’s add the varieties together for a better picture.

Firefox: 47%
IE: 46%
Safari: 7%

FIREFOX WINS! but… just barely. That means that 46% of my readers are looking at a broken Internet Explorer page. It’s not pretty! let’s get some screen shots so y’all can see the differences.

First, IE.

Notice the poor colors in the Quickthoughts and the Features section? NASTY! Even more disturbing is that if I post a picture… the post flies down to the bottom of the screen. WEAK!

Now, Firefox.

Oh what elegant colors! And all the posts are lining up just right. Let’s make 2008 a great year for MikeDiDonato.com

Let’s all get rid of Internet Explorer.

A weird thing happened at work yesterday. I needed to find a means to make some six inch plumbing flexible. I opened up Google images and did a quick search for:

plumbing flexible 6″

I was cycling through the images trying to find something that might work when suddenly, I saw a picture of my bathroom plumbing. Google was suggesting my own website as a source of solution. Now, people find this place all the time through random searches… but it’s really weird when you find your own website by accident. It’s a very strange feeling.

Jes Saint had commented that she’d be interested to see where all the readers come from. I made a lil’ MSPaint action that showed the linkages.

I tried to incorporate everyone who has left a comment (and some who haven’t) within the last month or two. If I missed you, I apologize.

Here it is!

Okay. We’re at the sunset of 2007. And soon, very soon, the 720 Posts onslaught will begin. Are you guys excited?

720 Posts came about from a conversation I had with Schenk. Old man Schenk was annoyed that my website didn’t constantly have new content. He challenged me to update the website every hour for a month. So that’s what 720 is all about.

Next Tuesday at 12:00am the first post will appear in the features section to the left. Each day will begin with a feature so that even if you start the day late you can catch up to what the heck is going on. the rest of the day will appear in either the main content area or the quickthoughts on the right.

I’ve automatically setup a bunch of posts and a bunch of people have helped me out (thanks people!). Some days are EPIC (January 16th) other days are totally lame (January 20th). And some days I have no idea what will happen because no planning has been done (January 23). I’m not even sure if I’ll be successful with this endeavor because I’m going to be writing additional content as the month progresses. If you have stuff you’d like me to post, e-mail it over to 720posts AT gmail D0T com. I’m sure I’ll get pretty desperate, so pretty much anything you send there will probably go up at some point or another.

After January’s insanity, posting will continue as normal come February.

I’ve taken a couple days off.

Posting will be back up in business next week. And then January? well… whew. It’s going to be intense.

Dear Internets,

I’m working on an aggressive challenge of putting up a single post every hour for the entire month of January 2008. That’s a total of 720 posts. I’ve set up an automatic posting schedule and have been contacting friends asking for contributions.

At the moment, I have 251 posts up and ready to go for January… but the January first deadline draws near. So for this one, I’m going to the entire MikeDiDonato.com community. If you’d like to submit some fun writing for the 720 posts challenge about something you love or find fascinating, (e-mail: 720Posts AT Gmail D0T com) then I will add it to the queue and it will probably be published to the world some time on January 9th.

Rock on,
The D.

My spam filter cleans out HUNDREDS of spam related comments a day. And even with the technologies JonAbad installed on the site, a few still get through now and again and need to be manually deleted.

What I find interesting is the progression of spam from pure advertisement to complimentary. We used to get spam that just threw the product in your face. Then spammers got a little more creative (not intelligent) and started complimenting my guest book. This is particularly humorous since I don’t have a guest book. The latest craze seems to be ping-backs (references to your blog that in-turn throws a comment onto your blog). they use the link as “vote” on search engines to get higher in the list.

Sometimes the ping backs are just ping backs. nothing special.

othertimes though it’s a link to your blog with more compliments thrown in. Things like, “Read this great article on mikedidonato.com”

Oh Spam. I don’t find your antics cute anymore. Seriously. cut it out.

Dear Readers,

I’m in Pittsburgh for Tuesday and Wednesday of this week.

Check out the new feature video on the left, don’t forget to submit some hot MSPaint costumes, and hopefully you’ll hear some exciting PA stories come Tuesday evening.

Yours forever and ever,
Mike D.

My hometown of Stoneham is trying to get some free lights for our recreational park.

Will you help out my hometown?

click here and then find Stoneham. Select, and vote.

Thanks!

Today MikeDiDonato.com turns three years old. It’s kind of strange thinking that three years of my life (11%!!) is documented here. Thanks to everybody who has read and participated. This website has been really fun. On average, I probably spend about 30-45 minutes a day on this thing. That’s a total of something like 500-600 hours of effort over the past three years.

That’s a lot of time but there are distinct benefits to having a website. Financially, this website got me a free furnace service package, a tea steeping thing, roller derby tickets, 20 dollars off my Kitchen Aid Mixer, the opportunity to buy Jocelyn’s car, kiteboarding lessons from Schenk, and endless amounts of free advice. It costs 10 bucks a month to run… which is a lot less than some people spend on coffee.

I’ve met a whole crowd of new exciting people through the site: UK Roland, Aaron, Jes Saint, Molly, Patrick, UUIG, Zoe, and J2.
I’ve had great e-mail correspondence with some folks in India and Australia, and even received a comment from a distant relative who sent me this sweet photo of my mom when she was two.

Major page accomplishments over the last three years:
#1 on Google searches for Mike D.
#4 on searches for Britney Gallivan - if you ARE Britney Gallivan… send us an e-mail at MikeDiDonato AT gmail DOT com You’re a mikedidonato.com hero!
We broke the 300 unique readers mark on Tuesday - yay!

Interesting page facts:
The most common way random people find this site is from image searches for “cupcake” (thank you Roland) and web searches for “spelt vs. spelled”.
Presently, I get more referrals from the CT Roller Girls than from any other single website. Second place goes to www.jonabad.com
My website is not banned in China.
Shaun McQuaid really does know everything and JonAbad really did invent the pommel horse.
There are currently 1,698 posts and 9,731 comments.
The post with the most comments is wish corruption.

If you have any favorite posts from the past, throw a link up in the comments.

Thanks everybody!
Happy Birthday MikeDiDonato.com!

I’ve been hit by quite a bit of comment spam lately. I’ve increased the severity of my spam filter. So if you’re having trouble leaving a comment, fire me an e-mail and let me know.

I am working on a massive internet project. If you’d like to participate, and haven’t already received an invitation, please fire me a quick e-mail at MikeDiDonato AT gmail D0T com. I’ll let you know what’s going down.

Reaching back into the depths of pre-history, before mikedidonato.com was founded, before HnH, there was an initial foray into the world of Internet polls. This took form as a series of AIM polls contained in Mike D.’s AIM profile, which would be presented to the world for a week, and then the results of the poll were rated by Mike D., a “winner” was awarded, and the results put up on a very primitive web site, maintained by, well, me.

I’ve recently rediscovered the code for this web site, and the poll questions and various answers. As a nostalgic trip down memory lane, I’ll be posting the AIM Poll and results sporadically for current viewers to take a look at. It’s a good opportunity for some historical research on the roots of the media machine that is mikedidonato.com. Enjoy!

#1 for Mike D.

#442 for Mike

I can do this.