Not to be an alarmist, but you may want to save anything here on Shyzer that you absolutely love (like there’s anybody out there who thinks anything I’ve written is beyond awesome…) because this site may be going dark soon.
Just sayin’
Oh, and Happy New Year! I’m pretty fucking excited about things to come – hopefully you are as well!
I’m not sure how many of you have noticed, but during the Olympics Shyzer underwent a pretty extensive makeover. Most of the aesthetic changes have simply been to “clean” up the site. The RSS feed is now much more prominent, the search bar actually stays in the sidebar(!), links now have a dotted underline to make them more noticeable, the footer has been cleaned up, and now the comments like approximately 1 gazillion times better. I’ve even incorporated gravatars! The only page that still needs work is the archives and I can live with that for now.
All of this is a long-winded way to say that I’m kinda happy with the way Shyzer looks. And kinda proud. I don’t usually pat myself on the back, but I really enjoy this theme now. I’m even contemplating releasing it to the world as a freebie and letting anybody use it.
I would like to add that I’m aware Shyzer looks like ass when using IE6. My response? Which one of you fools are still using IE6!?! I know there’s at least one of you as it has a 2% market share in my stats. So, uh…stop? Please? The entire Internet thanks you.
Oh, and the Firebug extension for Firefox is a damned Godsend. You can test out edits LIVE! I know nobody reading this runs their own website, so I’ll shut up now. I just wanted to get that in for the record so that when I look back, I’ll know when it was that I finally discovered Firebug.
In my ongoing effort to try and give credit to anything I may have borrowed, used, or downright taken here on Shyzer and elsewhere on all my sites, I finally slayed the giant beast that was finding the original design that I used as a template for the creation of this current Shyzer theme. It’s not quite like what I have now, as I think it’s better, albeit a little more cluttered than what I’ve currently got. It took me fucking forever to find it as well. I’ve got a link to it and the creator’s website down on my footer and it will remain there until I switch themes to something else, which should be soon, but still.
I’m sick of people stealing my work, be it writing or photos. But I don’t think I have the right to complain about it until I’m completely and utterly free of committing the same crime.
And to be honest, I think I’m pretty much there. About damn time. Commence the bitching about theft…now!
Via Chacha.com and Shaynon:
The next one i asked was, “What is shyzer.com?”
They said, “Shyzer is a blog written by a 25 year old in Virginia, who is widely regarded as being ‘awesome!’”
Damn straight.
You might have noticed that Shyzer is looking a bit wonky today and will continue to look this way throughout tomorrow. Why? Because April 9th is the third annual CSS Naked Day, where every participating site strips their theme and any CSS off. I was simply curious to see what Shyzer looked like without my countless hours of work I’ve put into it over the years.
Early verdict? Not all that bad, but certainly nothing fun to look at.
Things will be back up and running correctly by Thursday. Until then, just watch the videos in the posts below over and over.
Want to win $25? Then join in on the HIF March Madness Contest!
It’s a contest I’m holding over on Hey, It’s Free for a few people off the forums, but if anybody here on Shyzer (all three of you!) want to join in on the fun and try to win a little cash that I’m giving away, feel free to sign up and play. You have until tomorrow morning before the tip off of the first game to get your bracket in.
Don’t worry if you know nothing about college basketball either, because none of us have a freaking clue over there 
Yahoo group: http://tournament.fantasysports.yahoo.com/t1/group/157337/
School: South Carolina
Group Name: HITF B-Ball Tourney
If you don’t have a yahoo account already, it’s free and easy to make one. Though who doesn’t have a Yahoo account these days? Feel free to comment here or on the freebie forums if you want to follow along in all the friendly trash talking we’re sure to commence in.
The post I made exactly one month ago about starting this whole Shyzer Challenge counted towards me initial goal of 30 posts in 30 days. The update post I made halfway through the trial did not. So, as I sit on the fence trying to decide which way to fall, I have trouble deciding if this should count or not. There’s precedent for either way, but you know what? I think four real posts in one day is epic enough for me, five is almost legendary. Let’s not push our luck and go for six just yet, sound good? 
So here we are. 30 freaking posts in 30 days. Is this 275 straight starts at QB? Na, but I almost feel like I should keep it going for another 245 days in honor of him. Okay, don’t even tempt me.
Seriously though, the past month has been pretty damn cool. I’d say it flew by, but in all honesty it felt like it crept on for ages. Yet, I gotta admit, I had fun. Way more fun than I thought I would. Only once or twice did I view it as a chore and the daily attempts to come up something new to write about was just as, if not far more, fun than actually writing the posts.
I don’t usually check the stats of Shyzer, but just looking at the before and after, there’s a clear difference. Daily readership has more than doubled (albeit from miniscule to slightly less miniscule), which is a result of organic readers (people coming here directly from their bookmarks), search engine traffic, and links to some of the more topical posts I’ve recently written. People are commenting more, I’m finding excuses to read other sites that I used to really enjoy, and again, I’m viewing things through a much more creative lens lately.
I don’t know how long I can keep this up, but you better believe I’ll make it 31 posts in 31 days. And 32 in 32. Maybe even 33 in 33. How long can I go? Let’s find out.
When I first heard the old saying “good writers borrow, great writers steal,” I scoffed at it. Surely great writers don’t steal. If a piece of writing was good enough to be stolen, wouldn’t the original author be able to find success with it? Plus, anybody stealing other’s work and then capitalizing on it would definitely be caught!
Then I entered the real world…
It wasn’t until I got to college that I actually started putting the Internet to good use. Downloading new music, finding directions, chatting with friends…and reading unpublished work.
Growing up, I’d venture to guess that 90% of the average person’s reading material is forced upon them. Book reviews, summer reading lists, crappy textbooks. Eventually we begin to find our “enjoyable” reading niche, which unfortunately for most men is Sports Illustrated or some other pathetic magazine while women turn to crappy romance novels. Before we know it, we’ve unceremoniously morphed into adults who have long forgotten what it feels like to read something spectacular. It’s no wonder that every time you board an airplane, all you see are cookie cutter John Patterson novels in people’s hands.
In the past, only a select few seemed to be lucky enough to truly discover and appreciate a Watership Down or Catch-22 or Ball Four. But even with those, you were limited. It’s my experience that no matter how wonderful a book may be, chances are anything else by the same author is…well, sub standard. You’ll always be holding the author up to what ultimately may be their magnum opus, at least in your eyes. Something that took years of writing and polishing and editing is what you find yourself holding as the benchmark for adequacy. An author can’t just snap their fingers and produce another equally astounding piece of work. I don’t care what J.K. Rowling writes next, it won’t top Harry Potter. The same goes for Richard Adams or Pat Conroy or any of the other authors who’ve written something I’ve grown to love.
So with that, all I can say is thank God for the Internet. There’s something different between an author in the traditional sense and somebody who writes and publishes something each and every day. Sure, you have to sludge through a lot of crap, but every now and then you find a hidden author that for reasons unknown is able to produce gem after gem, day in and day out, with practically nobody reading it. It doesn’t take a genius to see how somebody then goes from reading an unknown blog to ripping it off.
Think of it another way. How many of your favorite bloggers have taken their old material and actually made a book from it? How many of their posts will actually ever be read by more than a few hundred people? With odds like that, and other pressures that a “”published” author faces such as deadlines and expectations, I’m honestly shocked we haven’t seen more cases of plagiarizing on the web. The only blogger who I can name off the top of my head that transformed his material into a book (and whom I once read on a daily basis) was Colby Buzzell. Most bloggers simply delete their material when they grow tired with the net, like Doc and Stan did. At that point, ripping somebody off isn’t just an appealing option, it’s practically screaming in your face.
I write this post to point out one fact: in the past, I’ve ripped people off. There, I admit it. I’ve since deleted anything I copied from somebody else and thank God none of it became popular (in the sense that it made the Best of Shyzer or even garnered a lot of comments). Before, whenever I read something I especially liked, I might copy it here on Shyzer and bury it somewhere in a post. Now, I just link to it as it should be.
I think what changed my ways was having my own content stolen for the first time a few years back. It pissed me off then and it still pisses me off now, as is evident with the Mark Kotsay’s wife post I made a few months back. But at the same time, it’s an occupational hazard and something to be expected, I guess. Hell, I’ve even had attacks against me that I’ve copied other people for posts I made on HIF and it wasn’t even intentional. Such was the result of accepting user submissions. So, basically I know how it feels to be on every end of the plagiarizing triangle and frankly, none of them provide an enjoyable experience.
So to any would-be plagiarizing author out there who thinks he or she can get away with copying just a few paragraphs from an unknown website and passing them off as their own work – don’t do it. It’s simply not worth it, trust me.
Today marks the 15th day since I said I’d post daily. Since then, I’ve made 12 posts, missed four days (because I’m not counting this one) and posted twice on one day. That means I’m three posts behind and need to make 18 posts before 12:01am March 7th in order for it to be an even 30 posts in 30 days.
Honestly, I figured I’d be farther behind at this point in time. Go me
EDIT: Hey, click the image below. Come on, do it! How awesome is that?
Everything below this line is simply a long winded message describing the fact that I’m loving how people are leaving comments on Shyzer again. I’d love to say I write for some altruistic reason, but deep down I’m just another attention whore. 
In an effort to add a little thank you to all the people who take the time out of their day to comment on Shyzer, I sat down tonight with the goal of adding a “Recent Comments” box to the sidebar. In it, I want to show the last 7 comments left here on Shyzer. Why? Well, for starters, a lot of people go back and make comments on posts a few days old and I wanted to make sure other people saw them. I also wanted to stick in an added bonus for anybody with a site of their own, as their name would contain a link to their site.
However, in the process of doing all this, I discovered that WordPress widgets aren’t retardedly stupid like I’d previous thought. Instead, they’re pretty damn awesome. As a result, the sidebar will look goofy for the rest of tonight as I properly style each default widget that WordPress comes with. Why would I care if the widget’s look decent, even if I don’t use them myself? Because I want to one day release this theme as a free WordPress theme for others to download
And yes, since I’ve spent a few hours teaching myself how these widgets work (and more importantly, how to freaking style them!), this totally counts as today’s post.
