A Cry For Help

photo credit: phaln

Brand New URL!

(A Poem by Crabby McSlacker)

Crabby had a little blog
With "blogspot" in its name;
Not sleek at all;
Who could recall
An URL so long and lame?

It followed her around the web,
From when she was quite small,
But change the name? Or just complain?
'Cause page rank; it might fall!

But one day "blogspot" she threw out,
And now she needs your help.
Please change your links
(She knows; it stinks)
And help her keep her clout!

(The End).

Sorry, Crabby couldn't help herself.

But check it out! If you look above the blog at your browser window, you might notice there's a new address up there. You've been redirected from icky old http://crankyfitness.blogspot.com to the simpler, more elegant "www.crankyfitness.com". You can also find Crabby by typing in: "crankyfitness.com" (but it takes longer). So tell all your friends! (Yeah, right).

The upside: now, when people who are trying to be nice to Crabby in social settings ask her, "So where is your blog thing on the web?" Crabby will no longer have to screw up her face into an unflattering quizzical expression and report: "Um, you know? I don't actually remember. Just google Crabby McSlacker, you'll probably find it." (Crabby hopes this is the reason virtually none of her friends except the Super Super Nice ones tend to visit; however, she suspects it might be because she writes a bizarre health blog, in the third person, as a crab).

Anyway, back to the URL thing: Crabby never got around to memorizing the address of her own blog. She'd just type "cr" in her browser window and the rest would fill right in. Then she'd copy it from there if she needed to. After six months, this was getting stupid.

Now, even the tiny-brained Crab can remember www.crankyfitness.com.

The downside to the name change? Well, from what she understands, by deciding to change her URL she could basically end up starting over as a new blog. Technorati and Google and all the other imperial Rulers of the Internet will think: What's this tiny crankyfitness.com thing? No one's ever heard of it! No one has ever linked to it before! Nothin' to see here; move along, move along.

So here are some things you all can do to help the Crab feel less insignificant, if you care to.

Crabby hopes that those of you who have the Crab on your blogroll, or who are ever thinking of linking to Cranky Fitness for any reason, might start migrating to the www.crankyfitness.com address. And readers, while you can still arrive here the old way, could you maybe start switching your bookmarks to the new address? Coolio!

Also, could you please let Crabby know if the change has messed with your feeds or made the site hard to get to or whatever? She's still trying to figure out the technical stuff and suspects she still has Things To Do to make everything work correctly.

And to top it off, there is one final request, but only for the Truly Brave:

Crabby had a blast writing her stupid poem, and it reminds her that she likes reading silly poems even more than writing them.

Anyone got one, or want to write one? Crabby would love to put a few silly poems or haikus or limericks together for a future post, perhaps even next week. It doesn't have to be about anything in particular, but extra points if it's about health (in the broadest sense), or blogging, or if it rhymes, or if it's funny. There is nothing to "win" but gratitude and publicity for yourself or your blog or your favorite charity.

If everyone says "no way in hell," no worries. Crabby will just inflict another one of hers on you someday and you'll be saying to yourself, damnit, why didn't I send something in, she's really terrible at this!

You can leave them in the comments to this post, or, if you don't want to spoil the surprise, email them to Crabby. If none arrive, Crabby will just pretend she never asked and you all have to play along with her.

Oh, health news?

Right. This is a health blog. Here we go, comin' right up:

If you'd like
A bigger brood,
Stay off the couch,
And skip junk food.

(The study actually says: Diet And Lifestyle Changes May Help Prevent Infertility).

(See? You all can do WAY better than that!)

Random Rotating Blogroll: Now It's "Fun-Sized!"

You know how those microscopic candy bars are called "fun sized," even though there's nothing "fun" about getting one measly bite all wrapped up masquerading as a real candy bar? Or how cheap restaurants or hotels with few extras are called "Express" even though they're not particularly fast? Well, in that stellar American Marketing Tradition, Crabby is proud to present her new, "Fun-Sized" "Express" Random Rotating Blogroll!

Could we have a Blogroll Drumroll please...

Ta da!

It's over on the right side bar somewhere. It may be hard to find because there are only 10 blogs on it. But if you refresh, the selection changes. Doesn't it? Please?

At least that's what Crabby hopes. It took her for-freakin'-ever to put it together, despite the Perfectly Clear Instructions. (Apparently missing commas and stray apostrophe's can kill the whole list, and Crabby is terrible about spotting things like that.)

Crabby has been looking for something like this, because she herself finds that when she goes to blogs with huge Blogrolls, she rarely ever clicks on anything. With a small list, the idea of checking something out becomes far more intriguing. On the other hand, one hates to be overly fussy about adding new friends in order to keep a blogroll small and tempting. So where to find a solution?

It seems as though there are many more Widgets around for Wordpress than for Blogger, and most Blogroll widgets wanted Crabby to bring in Content from Other Blogs and involved RSS feeds. Crabby wanted something simpler. So she finally Consulted the Google and found JuliaKM, who has come up with a Fine Solution!

The only problem was that the coding worked just fine when Crabby copied it exactly, but then she had a blogroll full of Chess Blogs. It took so many tries to get her own blogs in there before it worked that Crabby was about to give up and start writing about Chess instead of Health! So please don't tell her its not working or you all are going to be reading soon about Chess, which won't be much fun at all because Crabby can't remember the first thing about how to play it.

Anyway, Crabby in the process of adding some new people to the blogroll and dropping some former blog friendlies that she hasn't seen around in a while. But it may be a while forever before she gets completely up to date.

In the meantime, if you've been visiting regularly and commenting frequently and don't see your blog ever, ever, come up, give Crabby a holler in the comments or email her. She is (a) lazy (b) careless and (c) not necessarily trying to be all-inclusive. Some general guidelines: health-related blogs, incredibly amusing blogs, and frequent commenters are more likely to be given priority. Also, if you want to be on Crabby's blogroll it's a good idea to put her on yours, too. But like most bloggers, she's somewhat arbitrary about this as well as being forgetful.

Hope everyone is having a good weekend!

Dog Gone It, The Crab Goes Visiting Again!

Remember how Crabby mentioned offhand that dog ownership might be healthy for you? Well over here at Diet Blog (sorry for the extra click) are some further thoughts she had on the subject. They are, of course, silly thoughts meant mostly in jest, and who knows if they will annoy people not accustomed to Crabby's weirdness. She hopes for the best.

The timing for the appearance of this post was good, actually, as last night Crabby was finishing up her post for this morning, and guess what? She carelessly dragged the base of her thumb across her touch pad, and in a split second managed to both highlight and delete 7/8ths of her post!

That should be no problem, right? Because in any other software program Crabby has ever used, if you accidentally delete a huge chunk of material, you don't save that version! You either "undo" your delete, or worst case, you go back and open up your old version where all that material hadn't been carelessly deleted yet.

But welcome to Blogger! Because if there's an "undo" function Crabby hasn't found it yet. (Readers, please tell her if there is and this will never happen again!) In addition, Blogger's lovely "AutoSave" function makes sure transient errors become permanent by deleting your old version within seconds. By the time she tried to open up her old post, it was gone.

So today she will rewrite the rest of the lost post, perhaps pop back in with something small later this afternoon (there are two great blogs she wants to recommend, and Friday's Roundup was looking a little crowded) and in the meantime, send you over to Diet Blog.

If you have any thoughts about Dog Ownership and Exercise, please share them either over at the Diet Blog post, or here, or both places, or neither! If you have any thoughts about Stupid Software, Accidental Deletion, Blogging Platforms, or computer frustrations generally, this would be the better place as the poor Diet Blog people have no idea Crabby is whining about that today.