Submit Your Site For Consideration

I have only been blogging since January 11 of this year. This is a very short time period. However, in just a few months, I have viewed literally thousands of blogs. I have seen great templates and bad templates. I have read great writers and poor writers. I have seen blogs with a purpose and blogs have no coherence whatsoever.

A lot of these things became clear to me in the last week or so as I constructed my April Fool's Day Prank Post. The prank was on Stephanie Davies and blog templates. So a thought occurred to me regarding really great blogs: Although a lot of us leave comments and some of the comments we leave are absolutely glowing regarding posts and they foster discussion and interaction, I wanted to leave a more indelible mark.

So I have created the MTMD Blog of Excellence Award.

The blogs I recognize must meet all of the following criteria:
1. An irrepressible and adventurous spirit.
2. Strong writing and variety of content.
3. Interesting, Functional, or Beautiful Web Design.
4. Clarity and Ease of Navigation.
5. A Focused Point of View.

Winning blogs will have the option of displaying the award on their blog in a location of the author's choosing.

The MTMD Blog of Excellence Award is really not an award that can be applied for, but anyone may suggest a blog for my consideration.

Without further adieu, the first five blogs chosen for the MTMD Blog of Excellence Award are:
1. Mystickal Incense and More Blog
2. Perspectives of a Nomad
3. Jessica
4. Jazz Coffee
5. Jetting Through Life

Congratulations! You are all most deserving.

Thanks for reading.

Blogging, Blog Awards, Blog Contests, Blog Excellence, Matthew S. Urdan, MTMD or Meltwater, Torrents, Meanderings, Delta

Sidewalk Art: Part II

Thank you everyone who replied to my first post with the picture of the Batman and Robin sidework art. Because so many of you really enjoyed seeing that, and some of you said you had never seen this art before, I'm posting two more pictures from Julian Beever's work.

The first pic is of the world, drawn on sidework as it would appear in the illusion, the second pic is the same pic as it would appear if you were viewing it from the side. In the second pic, you can really see the mastery of the work in making it appear as an illusion.

I hope you enjoy these pics. For those of you who would like to see more pics of Julian Beever's sidework art, drop me a comment with your email address, or email me directly, and I'll forward a whole slew of these pics to you.

PICTURE 1: The World as seen when looking at it from the perspective of the illusion.



PICTURE 2: The World as seen when looking at it from the side, showing how the drawing really appears in 2 dimensions.



Pretty cool, huh?

Thanks for reading.

Julian Beever, Sidewalk Art, Chalk Art, Art

Sidewalk Art

Julian Beever is an English artist who's famous for his chalk art on pavement in England, France, Germany, USA, Australia and Belgium. Beever gives his drawings amazing 3D illusion. We've all seen these pictures before because they have made the email rounds, but here is one that I'm really impressed with: Batman and Robin to save the day! Enjoy.

Thanks for reading.

Julian Beever, Sidewalk Art, Chalk Art, Art

MTMD Welcomes "A Pile of Dog Bones"

Yes! New York City's Watchdog is BACK! and A Pile of Dog Bones is publishing again with its creator in a brand new template design! You can check out the blog by clicking on the orange thumbnail over on the left at the top of the sidebar!

After having lost the rights to the blog in an unfortunate game of Texas Hold Em, NYC's Watchdog burst back onto the scene in the last few days, winning back his blog, just in time for my April Fool's Joke on Mystickal Incense Blog Author and MY Template Designer Stephanie Davies. Apparently, the April Fool's Joke post has become my most successful post in the blogosphere to date, and it tickled the funny bones of many and made NYC Watchdog a fan of MTMD as evidenced HERE.

Not only is NYC's watchdog praise glowing, but he then went out and rented space on my blog. So it is truly a great honor to host his blog here this week. Often tenants don't interact with the writers of the blogs they rent, they're mostly looking for promotion of their own blogs. But in this case, I know that NYC's Watchdog is a fan of my blog, and I made him laugh. More importantly, I suspect I've made a friend.

Go on! Click on the thumbnail. You know you want to check out his blog. Post a comment on his site and tell him Matt sent ya!

Thanks for reading.

Blog Templates: I'm Going Back to Blogger Dark Dots

I've decided. When I get home from work tonight, I'm going back to the original blogger template I had when I started the blog: The old dark dots.



I really liked the look of the template, and if truth be told, it's really not a lot different than the template I have now, except that my current template has some nice pictures on it. If you look at the sidebar, it's organized the same way. The text, the bullets, the headings, they're all the same, really.

I've decided to go back to Blogger's Dark Dots for several reasons:

1. I've had some complaints that my template takes too long to load because of the background image in dial up. I never considered this. It has been suggested to me that I'm not winning as many battles in Blog Explosion Battle of the Blogs because nobody gets to see my blog before the 20 seconds is up. Actually, I think that problem is more related to Blogger server slowness than anything else, but I think it's also a legitimate complaint for some.

2. While I really love the design of my new template, I think it takes away from the content of my posts. I originally started blogging because I thought I had some things to say. I think pretty pictures distract from that, and I would like to focus more on my content without the peer pressure that comes with trying to compete with other well-designed blogs.

3. Michelle from Jazz Coffee says that thirty years from now, the orginial blogger templates will be viewed as vintage and classic, so after the current fads of cartoon character blogs fade, everyone will want one of the originals. I think this makes sense. So why not just stay with an original all along?

4. Shelly from the Dramedy of Life thinks my blog is hard to read because of the white text on black. Personally, I don't see it. I think my font is quite easy to read, but I use IE7. In truth, Firefox thins out my font a little, so depending on Shelly's screen resolution and browser, it may indeed be very difficult to read. I hadn't considered this. With my current template, I don't have the option of changing the background color. If I did, it would really destroy the look of the blog, and I don't have the heart to go to Stephanie and ask for a redesign. It would take weeks to work out new color schemes and blend them with the photos--we would probably have to change photos and the header graphic and the background to make it all work right with a different color font.

5. Most importantly, the new graphical look isn't helping expand my readership base. I was getting just as many hits if not more with my original look supplied by Blogger. When I was in Alaska, when I started this blog, I was receiving about 550 hits a day. I switched my counter to ClustrMaps when I got back from Alaska, so those initial hits aren't reflected in my current tally; but I was getting emails from climbers at Everest Base Camp because of the info I had posted regarded Denali. It's funny...I was getting more hits from Nepal than I was from Columbus.

So all in all, tomorrow, I'll be switching back to Blogger's Dark Dots. I hope none of you will be disappointed by the decision, but I think in the long run, it's for the best.

Oh, and Stephanie...

April Fool.

Thanks for reading.

April Fool, Blogger Templates, practical jokes, Battle of the Blogs, Stephanie Davies, Humor