Tag Archives: blog posts

autumn migration

Autumn Migration GraphicMigrations are in the air. East of here, along the Pacific Flyway, birds have been aerially changing their zipcodes. With impending winter and shortening days, my own mind shifts towards changing things up.

This blog has been on hiatus of late. Part of it’s been my distractions into other, shiny directions. But a significant part of it is my web hosting service that has sunk from being one of the brightest options seven years ago to becoming a quagmire that has left me unable to post or even maintain the back end of the pages for many months. [Insert frowning, exasperated emoticon here.]

[ Lost in the Landscape ] however now has a new home on new servers, and it’s got a new look. I enjoyed the chance to update the visuals a bit and move to a theme that’s more friendly towards mobile devices. But along the way a few things have gotten broken.

  • If you were a previous subscriber to email notifications of new posts, you will need to renew. Unfortunately the old system won’t let go of the hundred-plus names that were on the subscriber roles. The new system here is way more sophisticated, and allows you to unsubscribe as easily as it was to sign up. Just click on the “Subscribe” tab to get started.
  • If you received post notices via RSS feeds, you’ll need to re-subscribe using the link in the left panel.
  • Many of the older posts contain links that no longer link. That goes with the territory of anything of any age on the web, but the modified architecture here has caused some of the links to internal blog content to stop working. I will be going back and spot-fixing what I can, but feel free to let me know if you spot anything particularly egregious.
  • The old blogroll is gone, but I’ll be bringing it back, refreshed and more current.

I’ve also sprung for a blog domain name after–what?–almost seven years? No worries. Once I complete the transition of the entire site the old address should redirect automatically to this one. And the new one should be easier to remember. That will probably take a few weeks to complete. lostinthelandscape.com will bring you here immediately. (UPDATE November 21: The redirect to this domain is already working.)

I’ve mentioned it a few times recently, I’ve been meaning to get back to posting at least occasionally. Things are happening in the garden, and a whole new season is on the way, and garden tours, and cool art stuff…

 

visualize your blog content

A lot of blogs these days–including this one–have tag clouds in their sidebars. These highly visual displays of tags the blogger has supplied give you a good sense of the kinds of topics the blog covers. And they give you a sense of how often the topics get discussed.

These do a nice job of displaying the words the blogger thought would be important, but they sometimes miss the big picture that you could get by turning an entire post into a cloud, something using all the words in the post, not just the ones supplied by the blogger.

One of the interesting things I saw in the coverage of Barack Obama’s inauguration was an Associated Press visualization of his inaugural address using an online tool to analyze the frequency of the words he used. (Perhaps the AP’s analysis was based on one at Free Government Information.) Then the story went on to compare it with a visualized version of George Bush’s 2005 inaugural address.

I used the same tool, TagCrowd, to re-visualize the same Obama speech. TagCrowd picks the most frequently used words and assigns different sizes to them. As in a regular tag cloud, the bigger the visualized word, the more times it was used.

obamaspeech

But instead of comparing it to Bush’s address, I visualized Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, since people seem to compare Obama and Lincoln. You can see how language has shifted over one and a half centuries, as well as how differently the men use words.

lincolnspeech

Interesting, huh?

Then I thought, why not try visualizing some blog posts by turning all the words in blog posts into clouds? Would the results between posts be that different? And would they differ much from the tag cloud in my left sidebar?

The first posting I analyzed is a recent one, “greener gardening practices,” from January 7:

blogpostinggreener

How would that gardening post compare with one of my older hoity-toity art posts? This is the cloud derived from “gardens, phonebooths, poetics and old maids,” a post from January 21, 2008:

blogpostchiricahua

Pretty different clouds, I thought. (And sorry for the typos on “Cochise!”) The different subjects resulted in dramatically different vocabularies and different word emphases. Also, over the last year, I’ve been trying to simplify my writing for the web–not at all dumbing it down, but adapting to how people read text on a screen versus text in a book. That probably contributed to a difference between the two posts.

Try TagCrowd. Compare old posts with new posts, or posts about your garden with those about your friends or travels. Or pick just one text you like to see what the repeated words tell you.

I think you’ll discover some interesting things!