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Unconsciously brought to you by:
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The F.Y.S.A.Q.
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What does F.Y.S.A.Q. stand for?
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"Funny You Should Ask Questions"
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Why not just F.A.Q.?
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I was going to call this my FAQ page, but nobody has actually asked me anything yet, so I considered calling it "Frequently UNasked Questions" instead. But then I decided I want to save my first big Freedom-Of-Speech battle for something other than an acronym.
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What does "Foop Disclosure" mean?
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It's a section of the OneSwellFoop site for various information related to the site itself. It will include all the legal disclaimers necessary to avoid any responsibility whatsoever, on a page called "The Disclaimery" (plus a list of all-purpose disclaimers collected from various sources), a definition list of my own personal jargon that I call "The 8 by 10 Glossary", and any personal background (which I have not yet gotten the nerve to post) in "My-ography".
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Why do you call the site "One Swell Foop"?
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This website and all that it will contain will be a very personal endeavor; the work (and play) of ONE man. I want the whole endeavor to be very positive (SWELL), without being the least bit serious (FOOP). And since the title is a mangling of the phrase "one fell swoop", it also connotes my intent to include the full spectrum of subjects I am interested in. Any other connotations you may pick up from the title are your own business.
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Why a weblog?
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I have been interested in putting together some kind of site for some time, because of the web's unique ability to house, and at the same time expose my creative endeavors and collections. The emerging weblog medium offered me an appropriate format for some of what I wanted to write, a logical site hub around which I can arrange my other stuff, a creative environment to motivate me to keep writing daily, a dynamic "scene" populated by interesting people doing interestinbg things, and where even I may have a chance of finding an audience.
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No, really, WHY a blog?
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Because there is nothing else in the current media so condusive to bad puns:
The New Kids on the Blog
Chip Off the Old Blog
Blog Rolling
Blog Heads
Nut Blog
Blog Party
Cheese Blog
Erin Go Blog
Mental Blog
Blog Cabin
Blog Ambition
Bleached Blog
Beware of the Blog (a great old sci-fi movie)
blog, blog, blog...
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What's with "Ask Jeeves" and the other search boxes?
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In a moment of weakness, I visited the register.net website and signed up for several affiliate programs, mostly those for search engines (and not necessarily the best search engines, but then they don't NEED affiliate programs). But I thought of a way to keep it interesting and increase the click-thru (at 2 to 3 cents a click) by researching and pre-entering "Silly Questions" or "Silly Searches" that take advantage of some of the weaknesses of the engines in order to provide entertaining results. The search engines get traffic, visitors to my site get an extra laugh, and I get paid. Everybody's happy, as long I don't act like I'm ridiculing the search engines, which is not my intent at all. Honest. Crossmmyheartandhopetodie. In fact, I plan to let into the fun a few sites that wouldn't pay me a penny.
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What's with the euphemisms, you chicken chicagohope?
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I like euphemisms. I believe they can be more entertaining and creative than the hot-button words they replace. I will always have explanations for the euphemisms (and usually linked) in my "8 by 10 Glossary", complete with the words they replace. I will occasionally use certain words with shock value, when shock is my intent. And I will always quote others as precisely as possible (although I reserve the right to ridicule lazy or uncreative use of so-called dirty words).
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What is your policy toward linking?
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Linking good.
Linking is the reason etre (or something like that) for Weblogs, and the anchor (excuse the HTML pun) to everything else in the Foopsite. But it would behoove (I always wanted to use that word) the reader to understand the method to my linking madness.
First, I want all my links to be clear and readable, which is why I do not suppress the underlining of links and I do NOT underline any text that is not a link. My pre-defined color for a link is blue, active links are red, and visited links are purple (I won't mind if you override them - what can I do?). The "main links" in any item are in bold print, the links that aren't will provide some secondary information or just a web side-trip. Occasionally, I will write about a site that I consider so crappy or creepy that I do not wish to give my tacet support to it with a link. In these cases, I will display the site's URL in non-link form; if you really want to go there, jusy copy the URL into your browser's address window (This will also be done with sites that don't want me to link to them).
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Why are you on Tripod?
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In its current form, One Swell Foop is an extremely low-budget operation, and there are two reasons for that:
1 - I'm cheap.
2 - I'm broke.
Until and unless my web-based hobby starts actually generating income, I'm going to use all the cheapest available (usually free) web resources I can find. So, I "auditioned" various free hosts for months before I actually started the blog, reserving the name "oneswellfoop" and putting up partial pages all over the web's back lot (Some of you may have accidentally seen one of them). I was impressed by WebJump's (www.webjump.com) self-promotional reaction to the infamous Yahoo/Geocities (www.geocities.yahoo.com) copyright grab incident, and they were the only place I'd found that included directing traffic from an official domain name to your free site as part of the no-charge package. But once I started actually using it, I had some serious misgivings. Their frame-based ads were far more intrusive than Tripod's pop-ups, and the way they were implimented made linking difficult and sometimes uncertain, and what's a blog without links? Their services ranged from unreliable (ftp) to fictional (site stats), and when I saw them put up an ad for a web casino, I knew I needed to put up some mirror sites. At the same time, the Pod People from Planet Lycos actually improved their service, with shorter URLs and an option to get less-intrusive embedded ads - if your site logs 100 hits a day for 30 days. Until and unless I reach that level, I'm using a little chunk of javascript I found suppressing the pop-ups on the Metascene weblog for more than three months, and doing so with a minimum of guilt. (I'm relieved that the other, well-established bloggers are not treating me like a second-class netizen.) But if life in the pod does become intolerable, I may end up on Chuck Taggert's Gumbo server, which sounds like a kitchen product in an infomercial, but certainly doesn't have pop-up ads..
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Why are you messing with the names of all the other bloggers?
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I realized that I am linking an awful lot to other weblogs, so, the name-mangling is intended to keep it from becoming monotonous, and just to have fun. It is definately not intended in distrespect to anybody (with two exceptions, and you know who YOU are).
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