They aren’t much, but I thought I’d point them out.

First off, at the end of each post next to the categories and tags, you’ll see two little icons. The first is for Digg and the second is for Reddit. These are sites for sharing links. Someone reads something they like, they submit it to sites like Digg and Reddit and tell their friends about it. Their friends, if they like the link, click the “diggit” button to say the liked it, and it gets a point. Reddit has a similar ranking mechanism. The more points it gets, the more visible it is on the sites…

So, if you see an article you like, click the button. Submit it or give it your approval if its already submitted.

Secondly, I’ve added links to the feeds down on the bottom of the sidebar. There are feeds for the site in general, all the comments so you can stay on top of discussion, a ‘podcast’ feed of all the videos on the site, and the link to the same feed in iTunes, if you prefer your podcasts over there.

Next up, an iPhone skin has been implemented for iPhone users. If you don’t like the iPhone presentation and prefer the normal presentation, just scroll to the bottom of the page and click on “normal view.” If you want to get back to the iPhone view, look for the link at the bottom of the sidebar.

Lastly, the new WordPress supports Gravitars. Go to their site, sign up your email address (the same one you use in the comments form) and pick a picture. This little icon will then show up next to your comment here and any other site which is enabled to use them. If you don’t feel like it, that’s fine — you’ll get a little randomly generated icon instead.

It’s been a long time but I finally upgraded WordPress. So if you see anything funny going on, let me know, since I might have missed a file or something.

Protocon 3.0 will be occurring in Chestertown, MD at Webb Manor from August 16-18. Here’s the itinerary. Protocon 3.0

Friday, August 16th

6 to 9 PM — Arrivals
9 to 10 PM — Handout Hard Rations and Rules
9 to 12 PM — Movie: The Swarm
12 to ? — Late Night Discussion

Saturday, August 17th

8 to 9 AM — Eat Rations
9 to 10 AM — Write script
10 to 1 PM — Build “The Secret Thing”
1 to 2 PM — Eat Rations
2 to 4 PM — Shoot “The Secret Thing” Film
4 to 5 PM — Thom’s Dinner Time Speech
5 to 6 PM — Eat Rations
6 to 10 PM — Brian’s game
10 to 12 AM — Video Games & Party
12 to ? AM — Party

Sunday, August 18th

8 to 9 AM — Eat Rations
9 to 10 AM — Hard Ration Trophy
12 to 1 PM — Thom’s Farewell Speech and Goodbyes

I’ve added a new section to the site called Funny Pages. The section is for random comics. Currently these comics (like The Futurists) have been going to the Mindlab.

With the month of September just around the corner we are rapidly approaching 3 solid years of Protozoic. We’ve held 2 Protocons (soon to be 3), posted a glut of content, made a better follow-up to The Wicker Man than Nicholas Cage and even started to collaborate with other websites like The Disability Guru. Protozoic stands as the most successful site Tim and I have ever run, namely because our friends actually read it and contribute to it. We hope it stays that way.

With the rather momentous anniversary approaching, it seemed like a good time to reevaluate and redesign the site. This redesign will attempt to streamline things a bit, and cut some extraneous stuff, but retain the charming (or off-putting) randomness of the old site. The idea isn’t really to sell out just yet, cause no one is “buying it”, but we are going to attempt to do a couple things pretty well so we might actually get ourselves an audience. Changes will continue to occur over the next couple of weeks and if you have any suggestions, be sure to mail us or leave a comment. We’d love to hear them.

I don’t want to overshadow The Green Machine so I snuck it in before it, but our iTunes podcast feed is now working. To celebrate, we made it onto the front page of the iTunes store’s Podcast section. We’re in the New Releases.

I will be adding links to our new Videos feed and to the iTunes Podcast (if you want to subscribe to our videos via iTunes) on the sidebar later, but for now, here they are.

Subscribe via iTunes

Subscribe via RSS

Well, we finally upgraded Protozoic to Wordpress 2.1 from version 1.5. For most readers, no real differences accompany the upgrade, though we are working on integrating our videos into a podcast stream as well as using 2.1’s features to better serve up our media. Also of note is the doing away of the stupid little image one must retype to post a comment. 2.1 comes with a nice spam plugin which checks for each comment in a central database of spam, so most of the work is done for us.

Notable improvements on the administrative side include a new interface, an autosave feature, and some other random crap.

Loki: In the meantime, don’t forget your chapstick.

Just thought I’d give you guys an update on our most popular searches. I always get a kick out of these. For the month of August, the most popular search term was “monkey bread” with 88 hits. The second most popular was “bot fly” with 9 hits. There must be some kind of internet fad going on with monkey bread right now; why else would it be generating 10 times the hits of other search terms.

Regardless, the full top 10 in order are:

• monkey bread
• bot fly
• heathcliff
• mandingo
• zucchini bread
• rice bugs
• big bag big bag lyrics
• homemade ant farm
• really free mp3s
• presto pizzazz

Two quick comments on this. First, of the top 10 search terms, 4 concern food (”monkey bread”, “zucchini bread”, “rice bugs”, and “presto pizzazz”¹).

Second, only 2 of the top 10 represent “projects” of ours: “homemade ant farm” and “big bag big bag lyrics.” This of course assumes that the big bag search is referring to our song.

The combination of these two facts leads me to believe that we should retire from our creative efforts and make protozoic.com an online food magazine.

¹ The Presto Pizzazz pizza oven is actually a popular search term and it shows up in various forms. It’s ranking would probably be higher if one counted all the variations.

I finally got around to doing 2 things I’ve been meaning to do:

• (Potentially) Related Posts now show up on the right menu bar when you are reading a specific post. It only searches by post title, so it is not very accurate.
• Flickr integration. I got a Flickr account and will be posting pictures to it. These pictures show up on the right menu bar as well. It displays the last 2 pictures I’ve taken. If you click “Recent Photos,” you will get a gallery of all the photos.

In other news, our videos are up on Google Video. If you search for “protozoic” you will see our stuff.

Last thing. We’ve been linked by a new site. I don’t know who it is, but he links to dragon’s wife, so there must be some connection. Check him out. Speaking of that, I guess we should put up a list of related blogs in the menu bar. What do you guys think?

This just in: Proto-Con 2005 - Monstrous Success!

If you weren’t fortunate enough to attend this year’s Proto-Con, then you’d better bust out your calendar and start planning to attend the next one! To tide you over till then, here’s a quick run-down of the major events, incidents and adventures.

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