Sunday, November 9, 2008

1000 Hits!

Final Fantasy fighter fightingNo, this isn't some video game reference; I'm writing to celebrate our blog receiving over 1000 hits.

Alex and I had a bet: if we got 1000 hits before December 31, I could force him to watch Star Wars, which--get this--he has never seen before.

Not any of them.

You can expect a report from Alex on that some time in the next few weeks, hopefully. Our next Poll of the Week will be asking which version Alex should watch, so keep an eye out for that starting on Friday.

In the meantime, I wanted to thank everybody who's been a regular or even sporadic visitor to Exfanding Your Horizons. It would have taken forever for just Alex and myself to reach 1000 hits.

Now, I've got a smattering of announcements that apply directly to you, our loyal minons--er--masses.

Not that we're calling you fat.

Anywho...

First! If you're a Blogger user, I encourage you to become an official Follower of our blog. Blogger Help explains how.

Second! If you want your hobby/fandom-related blog to appear on our blogroll, e-mail Laffman85 [at] aol [dot] com with your blog's address and we'll most likely add it.

Third! This is an open invitation to anyone who wants to contribute a guest post. We'll consider any post related to any hobby or fandom, and we promise to leave what you've written totally intact unless there's something incredibly glaring. E-mail Laffman85 [at] aol [dot] com with "Guest Post" in the subject line if you'd like to submit something. We'll probably save it for a rainy day and post it when we're both tapped for ideas. Recall that guests have written about everything from Tranformers to orchids, so just about anything goes.

Fourth! The new banner is under construction and should hopefully be ready by or before next weekend. Until then, pretend like everybody's still talking about the election so that our current banner doesn't feel all left out.

Fifth! If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions about our blog's content and/or layout, please leave a constructive comment on this post.

Thank you, and we'll see you tomorrow!

4 comments:

Scott said...

I have a hobby blog, though it may not be geeky enough, heh.

http://kenshilife.blogspot.com


As for the layout, it would be nice if you considered making the content section a bit wider since people tend to write longer posts. A little less scrolling.

The link at the bottom could be a local anchor link rather than an actual page link; stick an anchor tag on the header, then make the link at the bottom a link to that anchor. When clicked, it will send them to the top instantly rather than reloading the page.

I love the icon.

You could look into doing multiple banners and cycling through them randomly; it's technique I used on one of my blogs with a Final Fantasy theme.

Flashman85 said...

All excellent suggestions! The biggest problem is that I know next to no HTML whatsoever, so I need to do research and careful experimentation every time I want to try something new, and I haven't often had time to just sit and fiddle with things here.

If you've got a link to a foolproof tutorial to do these things, that'd be super-handy and would hasten the changes.

Glad you like the icon! Also, I'll be happy to add your blog to our blogroll; all hobbies and fandoms are welcome here, and they don't necessarily need to be overtly geeky.

Scott said...

(a name="top")Exfanding Your Horizons(/a)

Your content.

More content.

Pictures.

Content.

(a href="#top")Return to the top!(/a)


Of course, replace the parentheses with greater-than/less-than brackets.

The random banner cycling is a little more difficult, unfortunately, and requires you to have a website account where you can host images and one additional file in the same directory. You can see the result in my old blog; I just reinstated the (super geeky) layout just for you.

http://majidayo.blogspot.com

Scott said...

P.S.: Reload the page to see the banners change. Also, if you watch the Black Wizard long enough, something neat should happen.

P.P.S.: If you require people to log in, word verification should be that important; spammers don't usually have accounts to log in with. I'd go one way or the other, myself.