A while ago I misplaced a few hundred emails for people that had signed up for the newsletter and I blamed it on the system I was using to send them out. For the past few weeks (or months? has it been that long?) I’ve been sending them all out manually, but I eventually got around to writing my own script that makes it a whole lot easier for me to send stuff to the subscribers. So now the weekly emails, will actually be arriving once a week (probably not actually, I can’t write a program to make me less lazy).

If you haven’t signed up for the newsletter yet, you can do so here.

A while ago I ran a poll about implementing forums into the network of Crap sites (?) and I concluded that regardless of whether people want one, I’ll make one eventually. Well, today I make the first announcement that is very close to becoming a reality. I still got some setting up to do but hopefully I won’t pull a Microsoft and not have it out until 2014 (though if you’ve been following the development of Windows 7, then you’ll notice that they’re getting a lot better).

Knowing how all of you freaks out there just love telling random strangers how much you like something, I replaced the ‘Share on Facebook’ button with a ‘Share with…’ link. You can simply hover over it and have the most popular sharing platforms easily displayed for you to click and post on the respective sites. Want more? Click the more link and you should definitely have the link to whatever you use there.

How totally cool is that?

Related…?

About a year ago I was told by visitors that they could not submit any of the pages on Chicken Crap to Digg.  I contacted Digg about that claim and was told that one of the submissions had been buried so many times that the system marked the site banned from being submitted again. I found this a little weird that a single poor posting by a third party would merit the disqualification of an entire site, especially a site that had been Dugg up many times before and had made it to the front page multiple times. I also found it disconcerting that content that had been uploaded here and formatted by me to specific sizes had found its way onto the front page of the social news site under a different domain, on a different site. I’m not claiming that all of the content on the site is original (we do have tons of originally uploaded images submitted by users and myself) and that it cannot be published on a different site, but what I was upset at the fact that Digg didn’t think it necessary to allow CC the opportunity to even be sumitted to be Dugg up.

Well anyway, today I got an email from Digg support that the site had been unbanned! So all that’s been left behind and if there are any Digg users out there that want to submit a page, go ahead and do it (and let me know if it truly does work)!

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Clearly the emphasis in terms of content on Chicken Crap lies with the pictures. They are readibly available and easy to work with. Since the beginning of this site 2 years ago when I added a videos section, the section has remained relatively low on my list of priorities. I was always late with updating parts of pages and implementing cool features like I did with the images.

Back then in 2006, the dominance of flash based video players had just began to take hold so out of pure lack of technical skill I stuck with Windows Media files and embedded the player into the page. Soon I realized that the videos weren’t getting that much attention because people didn’t like the WM player and preferred flash players like the one on YouTube. So instead of making the move to flash videos on Chicken Crap, I was lazy and just began embedding YouTube or other source clips into the page, and that’s the way it’s remained.

But this week I embark on a mission. As part of Project Washcloth, I begin paying more attention to the video pages, updating them more regularly, and implementing a proprietary Chicken Crap video player. Expect to see these features soon… or this year sometime.

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