Category Archives: HOAG Site

A Different Look For Heck Of A Guy

Posted on November 15, 2010 by DrHGuy | 8 Comments

DrHGuy - Medical School Yearbook Photo

Revising And Revitalizing The Focus

DrHGuy, pictured here during a more – well, let’s call it a more intense period of his life, is devoting today to contemplation of a shift in perspective for the Heck Of A Guy site.

Let Us Entertain You

In the meantime, viewers desirous of entertainment are invited to reflect upon which of the following institutional mug shots portrays the more – let’s stick with “intense” individual.

Credit Due Department: Inspiration was garnered from these lines from “The Future” by Leonard Cohen:

and all the lousy little poets
coming round
tryin’ to sound like Charlie Manson

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Posted in HOAG Site, Self-Referential

Tagged Dr Heck, Heck Of A Guy Blog

DrHGuy Site Replaces GoodCleanWholesomeFun

Posted on November 12, 2010 by DrHGuy | Comments Off

So Long GoodCleanWholesome.Fun.com

Good Clean Wholesome Fun opened two years ago with this identification:

Good Clean Wholesome Fun is the quick-witted, energetic, happy go lucky younger sibling of the jocose but prolix, sometimes abstruse Heck of a Guy blog.

And, that is a reasonably accurate, if not especially enlightening, description. Good Clean Wholesome Fun (GCWF) has hosted punchier, more concise posts, often no more than a quote or a captioned photo than those typically found at Heck Of A Guy. As is true of Heck Of A Guy, most but not all GCWF posts these days have had something to do with Leonard Cohen. While some GCWF entries have been condensations of or excerpts from Heck Of A Guy posts, most of its content has never appeared at Heck Of A Guy.

Persistent problems with Tumblr, the software that operates GCWF, now mandate a change in publishing platforms:

1. The Tumblr Search engine has not worked properly for weeks. Not being able to find content stored on a site is unacceptable.

2. Google doesn’t like Tumblr’s philosophy. Fundamental to Tumblr perspective is the encouragement of reblogging by making that process quick and easy. Fundamental to Google’s algorithms for judging a site’s ranking are backlinks and unique content. As explained in this excerpt from the SEO Facts blog, those fundamentals clash:

Sites like Tumblr have revolutionized the blogging experience by making building your site and maintaining it almost effortless. Tumblelogs have two key features that help users create an enormous backlog of posts in a very short time – “notes” and “reblog”. Through the latter button, users can simple click and reblog content found on another user’s site. This is one of the things that has made Tumblr such a hit among the masses, it is also one of the reasons that it is not in Google’s good graces.

Search engines like Google use two key factors when creating rankings for searched sites: content and backlinks. Since Tumblr makes it so easy to copy content found on other blogs, it takes a lot more effort of on the part of a Tumblelogger to achieve a high ranking in results … because reblogging can easily become a duplicate content nightmare.

Hello DrHGuy.Posterous.com

As of today, I will no longer be adding content or linking to Good Clean Wholesome Fun. For the time being, I will keep the existing site online and intact.

I have transferred copies of the Good Clean Wholesome Fun posts to a new site, DrHGuy. which operates on a platform developed by Posterous.com. While this shift should resolve the problem with the search function and with Google’s ranking process, the transfer does inevitably create its own pitfalls. Because Tumblr posts lack titles, for example, the two years of posts imported to DrHGuy also lack titles. Currently, I’ve manually added titles (and tags) to the most recent one-third of the posts.

The image atop this post (click to enlarge) is a screen capture from today’s entry at DrHGuy.

A box in the near right sidebar of Heck Of A Guy will list the most recent 5 postings to DrHGuy.

Note the “Tags” listing on the right. Clicking on, for example, “Signs Of LC” will call up all 33 posts from this ongoing photo series. And, as far as I can determine, the search process (see search box just above the tags) works as it should.

Subscribing to DrHGuy is accomplished by clicking on the Subscribe to this posterous » link at the bottom of the right sidebar.

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Posted in HOAG Site, Self-Referential

DrHGuy Is Out

Posted on October 28, 2010 by DrHGuy | 4 Comments

Beginning Friday, October 29, 2010, DrHGuy will not only be, as usual, out of sorts, out of luck, out of time, out of patience, out of his head, out of beta, out of bounds, out of the box, out of control, out of character, out of debt, out of the park, out of order, out of doors, out of his shell, out of gas, out of print, out of the way, out of the closet, out of balance, out of context, out of reach, out of sight, out of site, out of those wet clothes, out of the blue, out of love, out of town, out of state, out of the country, out of this world, out of his skull, out of your league, out of whack, out of sync, out of compliance, out of style, out of the rain, out of the picture, out of stock, out of hand, out of vogue, out of the ordinary, out of the frying pan, out of his mind, and out of it, but will also be both out of here and out of touch until at least Saturday, October 30, 2010, and perhaps as late as November 2, 2010.¹

Note: Because comments on any Heck Of A Guy post must be approved before they show up on the web page, DrHGuy has arranged for a colleague to handle this chore during his absence, but delays are certainly possible if not likely. DrHGuy and the rest of the Heck Of A Guy staff apologize for any difficulty this may cause.

_____________________

Momentous decisions cannot always be effected on a convenient schedule. [↩]

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Posted in HOAG Site

Heck Of A Guy Looking Good In Persian

Posted on October 1, 2010 by DrHGuy | 1 Comment

Things That Go Bump In The Web Stats

Sporadically, Heck Of A Guy is the recipient of a much-appreciated bump in viewers for a specific post. Ongoing readers may recall the recent post that focused on Leonard Cohen’s 73rd Birthday Is 2010 Hit.

Long-time ongoing readers may remember, from three years ago, Maternal Tchotchke Inventory Hits The Charts, which celebrated October 18, 2007 – the day an extra 2,000 folks dropped by 1heckofaguy.com.

Spike In Blog Views Caused By StumbleUpon Finding Mom's Collectibles

They stopped by to take a look at the Gallery Of My Mother’s Inventory of kitchen implements, farm tools, saws, mallets, meat grinders, ceramics, doodads, gadgets, widgets, and much, much more that fill the cabinets, shelves, tables, counters, and, most prominently, the walls of my mother’s home in the Ozarks.

One section of one wall of Mom's collections

Leonard Cohen, Bumpmeister

Leonard Cohen is, of course, the source of most such influxes of viewers. According to my analysis of historic trends, if Leonard Cohen would faint on stage on his birthday after introducing a new song during his final concert just after meeting with me backstage, the entire internet would collapse as every viewer would converge on the Heck Of A Guy post describing the event.

Other Dependable Hitmakers

Certain posts tend to transiently but repeatedly serve as viewer magnets. Every few months, for example, another group discovers the story of Professor Giles Brindley and the very personal presentation of his research on chemical induction of penile erections at the 1983 Las Vegas meeting of the American Urological Association, triggering a few hundred hits and many, many horrid puns.

The Latest Heck Of A Guy Rainmaker

Yesterday, this site greeted an extra 300 guests to the well written, interesting, and, all in all, perfectly nice but rarely noticed Onion News Reports On Google Opt-Out Village, an August 2009 homage to the verisimilitude wrought by The Onion in their parody of CNN news coverage, itself a means to devastatingly satirize Google’s “Opt-Out Village,” which is ostensibly Google’s heavy-handed alternative for those individuals who are reluctant to allow Google “access to their most private thoughts and feelings.”

Searching for the source of these 300 fine folks, I landed at Balatarin, which, as everyone knows, “is the most popular web 2.0 website in Persian.”

Well, that explains it. Of course, 300 viewers from “the most popular web 2.0 website in Persian” would converge on September 30, 2010 on a year old article praising the comic chops of The Onion.

After further investigation, the precise link accounting for those 300 visitors was found:

Transformed by Google Translate, this becomes

Logo resembles a news website with the logo of the Islamic Republic Onion

Yep, Heck Of A Guy earned those viewers by cleverly choosing to a graphic (see below), part of which happened to resemble the symbol found, among other places, on the flag of the Islamic Republic.

Today’s Lesson: Even successes in blogging, not unlike successes in raising children, keep one humble.

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Posted in HOAG Site

Tagged Blogs

So Long, Crystal Lake – Hello Bernard

Posted on September 2, 2010 by DrHGuy | 1 Comment

Moving On

Over the next several days, I will be enmeshed in the process of moving my home base somewhat southward. During that period, I may well lack sufficient time to promulgate Heck Of A Guy’s daily quota of hosannas and huzzahs in regard to Mr Cohen and his cohort, let alone blogatize whatever other stochastic thoughts that seem to make their way into posts.

Consequently, primary responsibility for the blog that is Heck will fall to Bernard Leak, who has recently been helping out sub rosa on the less glamorous aspects of blog housekeeping. Identifying data re Bernard is available at A New Lurker Emerges from the Shadows

I do plan to be fiddle with the blog when a free moment arises, mostly to annoy Bernard, but he indeed is the man until I settle into my new digs.

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Posted in HOAG Site

Goodbye Glaucoma Guys & Gals Of AIGS Website

Posted on June 12, 2010 by DrHGuy | Comments Off

The Lost Vision Of The Glaucoma Societies’ Website

On March 4, 2006, Heck Of A Guy published its fourth post, Open Your Hymnals To … The Association of International Glaucoma Societies Website. A sequel, Play It Again, Sam: Another Look At The Glaucoma Hymn Site, followed in June 2006.

The opening paragraph of that fourth post sets the tone:

The Glaucoma Hymn may well be the most prominent but is assuredly not the sole curiosity to be found at The Association of International Glaucoma Societies (AIGS) web site. It may not even be the most disturbing.

While the collage atop this post [click on image to enlarge] comprises images found on the AIGS website, it falls short of evoking the site itself. The sections with the tops of heads, for example, are not bobbing up into view and down out of view as they were in the original, and the eye doesn’t blink when it’s clicked. And, there is no jukebox – with images of surgical implements as controls.

Yep, the AIGS website had all this as well as a musical panegyric to glaucoma performed in full operatic mode and – you guessed it – more.

The alert, astute reader will have noted the use of the past tense in the previous sentence and inferred, accurately, alas, that this site, surely the most entertaining internet representation of a medical guild of all time, has succumbed to the implicit cultural demands and has transformed itself into the standard (i.e., dull) mode that is apparently requisite for medical societies.

The photos on display at the contemporary version of globalaigs.org are, in contrast to the pictures of costumed performers found on the 2006 site and seen in the above collage, photos of – well, photos of medical meetings. If the images I found in 2006 are still on the site, I was unable to discover them. Even the name associated with the pertinent url has changed from “The Association of International Glaucoma Societies” to “World Glaucoma Association.”

And, as one might expect, the site no longer automatically plays, as it once did, “The Glaucoma Hymn.”

Yet, all is not lost. To relive the glory that was glaucoma,¹ including the experience of listening to the only known hymn to a disease, one need only visit the descriptions of that phenomenon that reside at

Open Your Hymnals To … The AIGS Website

and

Play It Again, Sam: Another Look At The Glaucoma Hymn Site

_____________________

OK, it’s technically “the glory that was the 2006 version of The Association of International Glaucoma Societies (AIGS) web site,” but that doesn’t scan nearly as well [↩]

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Posted in Fascinations, HOAG Site