Mick's World

Looking for blogs is very easy thanks to blogospheres, directories and other community based projects. There are a lot of services out there to choose from, however most of them are US or internationally based.

So where do you go to find Australian based blogs? Well there are a few places. Since listing my site in a few well know places i’ve been receiving a good amount of inbound traffic from them.

The first one I’ve received a bit of traffic from is The Australian Index. This is a directory style site that contains heaps of links to a lot of different styles of blog.

Another great site is AustralianBlogs, a tag based system, which is very popular and a good way to find Australian blogs within a specific topic. Recently AustralianBlogs has released a sister site called AustralianPodcasts which is the same layout and idea as AustralianBlogs but for podcasts. Since it’s release a couple of weeks ago it’s become extremely popular and has grown at a rapid rate.

Lastly a new project which is currently in beta testing is Gnoos. After signing up for a beta test i was surprised by what they’ve already done. Their approach is different than most of the other Australian blogs indexes, instead of a link index style of site they’ve gone for more of a clean design feel with a different style of displaying the blogs and their content. Once the first version is released for public use I’m sure this site will take of and grow to become something quite large and well used. Even though the site is in beta, already i have received a bit of inbound traffic from this site.

Although i only went through a few sites, these are the ones that I’m receiving links from and that i use regularly to find new blogs. There are many more Australian based link indexes out there, whether or not they are as good as these and as widely used is another question.

Last November i went to Sydney with my girlfriend and we did a lot of walking around the place. On our last day there we walked from China town to Circular Quay, through Hyde park and the Botanical gardens.

This photo was taken looking north of Hyde park.

While walking through the gardens we came to fairly open section that had grass like a bowls green. Across the grass was a pyramid shaped structure with a small hedge in front. The hedge was shaped into "Sex + Death".

I haven’t looked at the picture too much until the other day when i was looking through some photos. After having a look at the photo i started thinking about why they would have those particular words as a hedge in front of the pyramid that seems to be some sort of greenhouse. Did the words relate to the greenhouse or what was within? Or are they just a statement with stronger meaning? What do you think?

About a month ago i noticed my site had disappeared from Google. Searching for the domain name turned up no results, or only sites that link to this site.

I read through Google’s guidelines and also did some searching as to why this had happened. Apparently this is not uncommon for sites to disappear from Google’s index. I checked over my site and couldn’t see any reason for the exclusion and sent a re-inclusion request.

A few weeks later, after not hearing anything from Google, my site appeared once again. I thought it must have originally disappeared during updating and was now back. However this only lasted a few days and it continues to confuse me as to why it has disappeared again.

Hopefully this is just one of those things that happens and not something that keeps coming back. As far as i understand the guidelines, this site does not breach them, at least no more so than other sites that stay listed.

There have been a lot of nice days lately, it’s a very nice time of year in Brisbane at the moment. The sun is shining, the weather is sweet. Since the beautiful evening i’ve taken a few more photos and put together this panorama.

I started a re-align of this site a few days ago hoping to include it in the CSS Reboot, however got busy and didn’t get to finish it in time.

I got the re-align finished earlier today so it’s up and running, i’ll probably put a theme changer up sometime so either the old and new designs can be used.

Hope you enjoy the new design!