Migrations 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…
It’s been three weeks since I tried to ward off gophers by using extra-hot chili powder. People want to know if it works.
The conclusion: There’s no sign of obvious damage from pocket gophers in the treated area. The plants are growing and blooming normally. That might sound like success, but there hasn’t been any gopher damage anywhere else in the garden, either. So it’s inconclusive at this point. But I’ll post as the season goes on. I really really want this to work.
Update #2: Life post-hacking (Original post: I was hacked)
After I realized that my blog was hacked I cleaned out what looked like the problem code. But two days later the WordPress Pharma Hack was back. I did more drastic cleanup after that, and it looks like that took care of the problem.
The tide turns...
Even after cleanup, because it takes days to weeks for Google to catch up and reindex everything on a site, searches for my blog showed many titles for my posts as promising ways to buy various drugs without prescription. Even as recently as Wednesday, last week, the number one blog keyword was “Prescription.” For a garden blog it’s pathetic to have that word ahead of the next four on the list: “garden,” “plants,” “blog” or “landscape.” But the tide turned on Thursday, and the good words continue to rise as the hacker words sink.
It’s been almost a year since I mentioned that my specimen Aloe barberae (aka A. bainesii) was in serious decline. Aloe mites had attacked the plant and I was blaming its fate on them. The plant continued to decline to the point that it had just a few growing tips that kept getting smaller and smaller. Something was very wrong and we cut the plant back to a stump one to two months later, leaving three small pups that were springing from the lowest two feet of the plant.
The dying trunk of the dying aloe, with the three pups looking increasingly worse. Time to pull the pups off to root them, it looks like...
Since then even those little pups have failed to thrive. Signs of mites have been few, so I’m beginning to think that some other cause is responsible for the problems. Hypothesis #1 at the moment: pocket gophers eating the roots. My main reason for thinking this is that there’s another A. barberae just a few feet away that looks robust, with none of the signs of illness the big plant was showing. I’ll keep my hope up for that plant.
A rooted cutting of the original big aloe
In the meantime, aloes being aloes, I figured that all the little branch tips I cut off might root easily. I treated all the chunks with miticide, stuck them in potting mix and kept them just-moist. All three took.
Quite frankly I’m not sure there’s room in the front for two giant aloes I had there in the first place–placing the two original plants so close was a mistake. So I gave two of the rooted plants to people in my office who were eager to grow this terrific plant. I still have one rooted plant, along with a half dozen more unrooted branch tips sitting on my greenhouse floor that are still green, almost a year later. I might end up with an impressive aloe in a pot if I can’t find a place for it. And if I root the remaining branch tips I could have a half-dozen more giveaways.
The original plant looks doomed, but pieces of the original clone live on. In the life and death world of gardens that’s almost a happy ending.
In case you’re wonderng what happened to the mutant Hooker’s evening primrose from a May 12 posting, it looks like the weight of the extra tissue on the crested growing tip was more than the stem could keep aloft. Within a week of the original photo, the stem flopped to the ground, where it has stayed, still alive, but not thriving…
Now (early July)...How the plant looked in early May...
My last progress report is on this mutant crested growth of a Euphorbia lambii. Since I posted on it in June of 2009, the plant seems to have incorporated the crest into its continued growth patterns, unlike on what was going on with the primrose above. Still, you can tell that the growth pattern isn’t quite what normal plants go through. Still interesting, two years later…
The crest as of July of this year...The crest in June, 2009A different view of the plant as it looks today. The spindly-looking-ness of the plant is my fault (forgetting to water it enough) and not something the crested growth is responsible for.
There are lots of blog design elements, but one of the most important is the main text that people read. Here are a couple attempts at coming up with an online typographic style that looks a little more oldschool, more pre-computer.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
So do they look on the right track?
This is a greatly condensed version of a much more technical post. Click “continue reading” below to see the full version. Continue reading blog typography→
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.
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.
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?
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:
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.
Thanks to Mary Ann at Urban Garden Journal, this blog has been tagged. Actually, it’s the second time I’ve been tagged. (Thanks, In the Garden!) But I was swamped at the time and didn’t get a chance to respond. Also, I was even newer to blogging than I am now, and wasn’t familiar with the game of blog tag. In my occasionally over-cynical mind I mistook it to be some sort of suspect blogger’s pyramid scheme. But in the meantime I’ve realized it’s actually a fun game and a terrific way to get to know more about your fellow bloggers.
The rules as passed down to me from the two taggers are simple, though the two sets of rules vary a bit. If I’ve tagged you, you can pick whichever version you like, or make up something along these lines:
Once you have been tagged, in your blog you must list six (or ten) weird things, random facts, or habits about yourself.
In that same post, tag five (or six) other bloggers, by linking to their blogs and writing a little about why you’re tagging that blog.
Once you’ve done the above, you should leave a note on the blog of the person who tagged you. (That would be me.)
The person that is tagged can’t tag back the person who just tagged them.
So…some randomness about me:
“Mulch” is one of my favorite words–not to garden with it, necessarily, just the sound of of the word.
My shoe size is 11.
When other children were wanting to be firemen or police officers I was thinking that I wanted to be a college professor. I didn’t grow out of it until I was three years into a graduate program in music.
Though I enjoy novels, I read mostly non-fiction books.
The Four Corners region of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah is probably my favorite place on earth.
I love good chocolate.
In my teen years I appeared as an extra in Paul Bartel’s film, Death Race 2000.
I appreciate order, but I seem to attract chaos at least as much.
I have a big yellow ocean kayak in the side yard that I haven’t taken out on the water in at least four years.
I don’t consider myself particularly interested in popular culture–I wouldn’t know a Britney Spears if one jumped up from the sidewalk and bit me on the butt–but I do enjoy Bravo TV’s Project Runway and Top Chef reality shows, as well as the Daily Show.
And now for the bloggers I’m tagging:
Garden History Girl: Excellent insights into gardens today, informed by gardens past, as well as notes on cultural influences that can influence garden-making.
The Midnight Garden: A blogger on Cape Cod enjoying his garden and its seasons–as well as his morning cups of coffee.
Garden Wise Guy: Always informative, usually funny, sometimes even a little snide–and coming from me that’s a compliment! You might not want your garden to appear on his blog…sometimes like a 10 worst-dressed list…
Landscape + Urbanism: A great roundup of things in the outdoor urbanism realm. Lots of fun ideas to steal and down-size for your own garden.
Pacha Mona: What’s it like to live and garden and cook with interesting ingredients in Costa Rica? This blog captures the textures and flavors of a place that’s on my “visit someday” list.
Garden Porn: With a name like that what’s not to like? A fun read and some great spaces to boot.
There are more–lots more–that I enjoy and would have loved to have tagged. But I need to keep some in store for the next time I’m tagged. And if I haven’t tagged you but you’d like to play, please do! I’ll add you to my list here.
Migrations 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.
