Is this what you are looking for?

I was looking through my site tracker the other day, curious to see how people found this blog. Asides from the obvious, aka. links from other blogs, I also noticed that quite a bit of my visitors were referred here by search engine results. Of course, being the curious (I hate this part of me sometimes) person that I am, I checked to see what people searched for, and here is what I found:

• Super Girl

  According to Google, my site is the 3rd result if you search for “Super Girl”. But is this really what you were looking for, or did you just click this link out of curiosity? Either way, out of all my search engine referrals, almost half got here because they searched for this term.

• Blair Waldorf ‘s lingerie

  Apparently I’m not the only one infatuated with Blair’s choice of lingerie on Gossip Girl, because this is my second most popular search term. I don’t blame these people;  I used to be one of them, searching blindly for where I could buy something close to what B wore without breaking my wallet, until I found my way to Macy’s lingerie department, and that’s where you should go too if you’re stil searching

• fat smilies

  This one made me laugh, because I never knew there were actually things such as “fat” (or even obese) smilies. I thought I made up the term when I ranted about how people who were literally challenged liked giving their emoticons extra chins, hence making them appear fat. Well apparently these emoticons have a name now: fat smilies. Talk about stating the obvious lol

• digital perms

  Technically I never blogged about my digital perm, but I did share some great products for curly/wavy hair that I use. But in a nutshell, a digital perm basically gives you the curling iron curls, vs the I-just-got-struck-by-lightening poof of the traditional perm. It’s supposed to be less damaging, but that’s a bunch of BS because my hair pretty much died after my perm. I’m still in the painful process of nursing it back to life Oh well, at least the waves I got from my perm are pretty enough to make up for the damage.

• talking dirty

  I know I mislead some of my readers with my post about talking shit about others, but apparently it mislead a couple Googlers, who were actually trying to learn how to talk dirty to others. o_o I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t think I’ll ever write a tutorial on how to do that. Go download some pr0n¹ or better yet, read Cosmopolitan².

And that’s pretty much it. Talking dirty is about the most obscene search term I got on my list, and it’s not even that obscene at all. :/ I was kind of hoping for something so absurd and out of this world so I could use a laugh and maybe write an entry about it. However, I did have someone search for “Jenny Wu Wingstranger” and find this blog. Stalker much? o_O

Have you noticed any interesting search terms for your blog? If so, what are they?

Invasion of tweens and teens

The other day when I was bloghopping, I came upon this site, which features the top 100 youngest bloggers of the world. I’m not talking about 14-year olds who have a small personal site on Blogger, but informative niche blogs with hundreds of subscribers. When I think of informative niche blogs, I think of sites like Smashing Magazine and Six Revision, with articles written by professionals with years of experience, who are actually legal to drink and vote. So you can imagine my surprise when I found out that there were so many niche blogs out there¹ written by kids who have yet to hit puberty.

Before anyone jumps down my throat, I’m not saying that tweens and teens are incompetent as bloggers or web designers, no. I know a couple 18-and-under people whose blog I frequently read and whose designs inspire me, and I’m sure the authors of the above blogs aren’t total twats either.  Heck when I was 14, my designs were mediocre at most and my blog entries were so bad that I can’t even stand re-reading them, so kudos to them for their achievements. But to me, the idea of following the blogging advice of a 12-year old boy²  is almost as ridiculous as taking relationship advice from my 13-year old male cousin. All I can think is, do they really know what they’re talking about? Maybe they do, but surely I can get more credible advice from someone who is older and more experienced, no?

It’s just like those tween/teen-run hosting sites that offer “unlimited” space and bandwidth all for $1/year³. Yeah it’s cheap and yeah you get everything those $5/month hosts offer, but is it reliable? I know I’d rather spend that extra $59/year to have a product that I know won’t screw me over without warning⁴. With informative blogs though, everything is free, so between the blog written by a 14-year old kid and one by a 30-year old web designer, wouldn’t you rather read and follow the advice of the latter? I’m not discriminating on age, but rather, on experience, and unfortunately, that’s something that can only be accumulated with time. To the tweens and teens running those blogs, give yourself a pat on the back, but you’ve still got a long way to go.

What do you all think of the emerging trend (or what I call invasion) of the tweens and teens outside of circle of personal blogs (aka. hosting sites, niche blogs, etc)?

Transparent background and opaque text

On a totally off-topic-to-the-title note:

1. My new theme is done and up (I like to state the obvious), and many thanks to Lani who let me use her adorable Pokemon artwork in my designs!
2. UMD kicked Duke’s ass in basketball tonight, 79-72! Sorry Duke fans, but Terps > Blue Devils. ALWAYS.
3. It’s almost Friday!

These things made my otherwise miserably long and omg-I-want-to-kill-myself week somewhat more tolerable. Again, let me know if you find bugs or errors of any sort with this theme. I wouldn’t be surprised if you did, since it was design + coded on a semi-functional brain that was in desperate need of sleep. Anyways, back on topic.

I haven’t done any tutorials/tips in a while, and as I was designing this new theme, I learned something I want to share with you all. With the arrival of CSS3, there are now so many things you can do with your designs without having to rely on images. One of these things is the opacity function. You can apply this property to pretty much any CSS selector: image, div, h2, etc. by using:
div { opacity: 0.5; }
This would give you a div with an opacity of 50%.
(But wait, there is more! Read on…)