Whether or not I decide to keep a plugin is largely going to come down to one question, 'does the plugin make life easier?' If the answer is no, then there's a fair chance it won't be hanging around that much longer.

Off I go to switch off some plugins, if the lights go out, don't panic.

On the week I sat down and browsed through the Swollen Pickles archive. Some of what I found was good, some terrible, some a crass cash grab and some a reflection of where I was at personally at that point in time. This blog originally started off as a personal development experience. I wanted to see if I could start something from scratch and stick to it. In that respect, it's been a success. When I started I had no idea what was involved in starting up website from scratch, let along digging into any sort of code.

Not long after I set this up I decided that I'd try to make it self sustaining. I wanted to see if I could set up a blog to pay its own way in the world, and not rely upon me propping it up financially. This led to the inevitable monetization of the site. It didn't take me all that long to learn that income was directly related to traffic volume. More traffic, meant more money. This led me to analytics. Why were people coming here? What were they looking for? Tailoring content to search results had its advantages, more traffic. Giving people more of what they wanted was a fairly solid formula. The disadvantage being that it took me a little further away off the track that I had originally set out on. I set up other sites but in doing so found that I was spread too thin.

In looking through the archive I can almost pin point the moment in which this became more of a chore and less fun. In attempting to give people what they wanted, or what I thought they wanted, I wasn't getting what I needed out of the process. I'm sure I'm not the only person in the world that isn't a huge fan of chores. When something becomes a chore, I naturally steer away from it, toward something more fun and entertaining.

I guess what I'm trying to say, in a rather long winded fashion, is that I think it's time to get back to basics. Embrace minimalism. Strip the site back. Rebuild it. Make it something that I would visit myself, rather than something to cater to others. Back to basics.

I set up a 'feature' section to highlight some of the lengthier and, perhaps, more worthwhile posts. I also included a 'top 5 most popular posts' section that drags the top five posts as flagged by the Popularity Contest plugin. Perhaps it says a lot about this sites readership, but currently the top 5 posts are all camel toe related. Should I laugh or cry?

One of the bugs I'm trying to fix, but am currently a little clueless about, is incorporating the 'threaded comments' feature that is now a standard part of WordPress. From what I can tell, the threaded comments function is working, it's the styling (CSS) that is letting it down.

As part of this theme I also wanted to play around with Twitter, not because I find Twitter all that useful, but just so I could understand how to integrate it within a website. It seems like all the cool kids are incorporating Twitter into their blogs so I thought I'd have a crack at it myself and see if I could get something going that didn't rely on a plugin. As you can see, if you scroll to the footer, I got it working. My only issue with it now is that when there are long URLs in the 'tweet' is forces the tweet to break it's bounding 'speech bubble'. Not sure how to overcome this. The easy (cop out) solution would be not to post long URLs in tweets, but I'm sure there's another way...

So if you spot any bugs, have any ideas on how to fix anything that appears broken, or even just styling suggestions on how to make this whole beast look a little more aesthetically pleasing, I'd be happy to see people post them here.

It's been almost two months since I last posted anything here. It's not that I haven't thought about it. I have. I've even started writing. I'll get one or two sentences down, and lose interest, before hitting the 'delete' button. If I can't muster up enough enthusiasm to get a paragraph down, why should I expect anyone to read it?

Based on the comments people have been leaving lately, it would seem that the only people reading this are either web site owners, looking to leave a token comment along with a link to their website, or people who can't get passed the fact that not everyone thinks 300 is the greatest film ever made.

I've had a revised 'theme' sitting in the can 95% ready for implementation for the past few months, however I haven't been able to muster the motivation to knock over that last 5%. To me that's not a great sign, and one that leads me to the inevitable question, 'why am I doing this?'

I started this site up over five years ago for one simple reason, to see if I could do it. It wasn't about the number of visitors, it wasn't about the content and it wasn't even about making some extra coin. It was simply to see if I could set up a functioning website and maintain it. I guess I ticked that box. After a while, people started to actually visit. From there I figured that if people visited, then I could probably put some ads up to fund the whole experiment. Then it became about making money to pay the hosting bills.

Where is this all heading? I don't know. Where will this site be in twelve months? I don't know. Maybe I need a month on a tropical island to refocus and figure out what it is I'm trying to achieve, both with this site, and elsewhere. Maybe I'll focus in on a niche, or maybe I'll just post stuff that amuses me. I don't know. I do know that five years is a long time to maintain the status quo.

Emo rant over.

Which brings me to the Easter Bunny. WTF? A rabbit, laying eggs, made of chocolate. Is it the same rabbit each year or a different one? How does he get from house to house so quickly? Still, not as creepy as the idea of an old bearded man sneaking into my house at night leaving me 'gifts'.

Something happened in the late 90's/early 00's though. Basketball in Australia lost it's way.

Why? I'm not really sure, there were probably a number of factors that contributed. Channel Ten stopped covering NBL games in 1997, and around the same time the competition was shifted to its current summer season style format (running from October - April). Apparently the shift was to avoid direct competition from the variety of football codes played throughout the Australian winter.

Once prime time TV coverage disappeared, so to did the corporate support. When Mitsubishi Motors dropped out in the early 00's, the NBL really started to turn pear shaped, with a number of previously well supported teams folding including the Canberra Cannons and more recently the Brisbane Bullets and Sydney Kings.

For a guy that only has access to analogue free-to-air TV I could be forgiven for thinking that basketball has ceased to exist. In terms of basketball I'm still stuck in the 90's, with Andrew Gaze, Lanard Copeland, Shane Heal, Robert Rose, Scott Fisher, Andrew Vlahov and Derek Rucker. If it wasn't for NBA2K8 on the Xbox 360, I'd have no idea who was playing for who in the NBA. If it weren't for video games, I might still think that Shawn Kemp, Reggie Miller, Larry Johnson, Penny Hardaway, David Robinson, Chris Mullins and Latrell Sprewell were all still running around.

Where's this little nostalgia trip heading? Well the NBA are fresh off their All-Star weekend, and All-Star weekend means slam dunk competition. Here are some highlights, including the winning dunk from New York Knicks guard Nate Robinson. According to fountain of knowledge Wikipedia, Robinson is 5 foot 9 inches and has a vertical leap of 43.5 inches (110cm), which probably explains how he is able to literally dunk over the top of Dwight Howard who's listed as 6 feet 11 inches.

Robinson's dunk brings back memories of Vince Carter in the 2000 Sydney Olympics game against France, in which the Frence media later described Carter as delivering "le dunk de la mort" (or "the Dunk of Death" for the non-French speakers).

Tanktop Singlet Jersey Shirt Adult S Vintage Retro NBA NCAA Orange basketball

0 Bid

US $5.00

6d 17h 7m

2008 was an interesting year. I managed to keep this site up and running without breaking it. I started up a couple of other sites, with varying levels of success, and I managed to make a little extra coin. In terms of traffic, 2008 was the best year ever.

Here are some of the key statistics for SwollenPickles.com in 2008:

• there were 281,814 unique visitors
• April 19 was the highest traffic day, with 6,678 unique visitors in the 24 hour period
• 52.78% of traffic came from referring sites, 40.59% from search engines, with the remainder from 'other'
• The most visited page was 'Lindsay Lohan with massive camel toe', with 62,095 unique visits for the year
• A majority of visitors came from the United States, followed by the UK, Canada, Australia and Germany
• The least visited pages included Shock Docs Channel 9, A quick lesson in marketing and promotions, Project Deep Impact, the sadly under rated, Naomi Robson - her finest moments on YouTube, and the borderline inappropriate The latest product from Apple - the all new iPad
• SwollenPickles.com made a grand total of $270.59US from Adsense

With only a couple of days of December left, it's time that I sat down and think about what goals I want to set (and achieve!) for 2009!

* All the statistics span 1 January 2008 to 18 December 2008, so it's not technically the entire 2008, but it's close enough.

The reason I'm posing these tough questions is that recently I encountered a strange little piece of toilet etiquette. Whilst I was operating at the "fountain", two "cubicles" were occupied, with gentlemen apparently busy dropping some friends off at the pool. Everything was as it should be, until a phone in one of the cubicles started to ring. The gent that was occupying said cubicle, aka. cubicle guy number one, obviously felt comfortable enough in there to take the call, and proceeded to enter into conversation, not important conversation mind you, the general conversation usually reserved for when people have time to kill.

When it became apparent the conversation was not going to end any time soon, a gruff voice snarled from the other occupied cubicle, "for f***s sake, give it a f***ing rest would you". The phone chatter had obviously distracted cubicle guy number two from the task at hand. Cubicle guy number one promptly ended the call. I chuckled to myself and got the hell out of there.

It got me to thinking. Would I answer my phone while on the can? Or would I carry on a conversation with someone if I knew that they were seated in the house of ease? It's Friday. The day for the tough issues, so here's the poll. This could potentially tell me quite a bit about people that visit here.

This took me quite a while, and having finished it, I have huge respect for people that pump out Flash cartoons, like David Firth.

My animation has a suitably art house and deep title, Evolution of an Exploding Man. It's no Kung Fu Panda, but I'm happy with the fact that I finally finished my first animation! It runs for less than 2 minutes, so popcorn will not be necessary.

Hope you didn't fall asleep!

1. Comic guru, and guy with good movie taste, Lee, Quit Your Day Job. Check out his Top five signs that your DVD collecting is getting out of hand post. I'm pretty sure I exhibit all five signs.

2. Aussie Blogging Icon, Meg, Dipping into the Blogpond. Meg puts in a huge amount of work maintaining a list of the top 100 Australian blogs, which I'm currently lucky enough to be sitting in at 35.

3. Graphic and Logo Designer, David Airey, DavidAirey.com. His is a great blog, even if you only have a passing interest in design. He's been doing a logo of the month post for a while now, and are worth exploring.

4. Cyber legend, Me, DigitalBurn.org. My neglected music blog still manages to send people over here. Go read some of the artist interviews if you're into that sort of thing.

5. Fellow Aussie Blogger, Andrew Boyd, On Blogging Australia. He keeps on keeping on, so check out his post Injader: An Australian Open Source Blog Platform for all the techo geeks out there.

Honorable mention. Wormbrain, for continuing to entertain me, and send me a few peepz at the same time.

Shameless self promotion... if you're into guitar stuff check out Guitar FX Depot. I've posted a whole heap of guitar rigs, for the guitar geeks out there.

• John 5’s guitar rig
• Matt Bachand (Shadows Fall) guitar rig
• Pete Loeffler (Chevelle) guitar rig
• Stephen Carpenter (Deftones) guitar rig
• Mike McCready (Pearl Jam) guitar rig
• Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead) guitar rig

Ahhh... self love...