Notice: I have been advised by various individuals to place this message of warning at the top of this blog post. If you do not care about the history, the evolution, or the future of my blog, I strongly discourage you from reading this post, as it will most likely be a waste of your time. Thank you, and enjoy this picture of a dictionary.Drum roll, please. Itâs the moment youâve all been waiting for! ⦠Okay, let me rephrase that â itâs the moment some of you have been waiting for. ⦠Actually, now that I think of it, there probably wasnât anyone waiting for this moment but me. But saying that this is a globally anticipated event makes me feel special. In a good way.
So, how was your day? Was it sunny? Did you eat a delicious, healthy, high-fiber breakfast? ⦠What did you say? Did you just ask me what this drum roll deserving moment is? I knew it! All of you were waiting for this moment after all! ⦠Okay, now I feel special. In a bad way.
Anyway, congratulations! You just read the first two paragraphs of Five Minutes in My Head, Version 3. The best part is, itâs not even called Five Minutes in My Head anymore. If you shift your eyes slightly upward (sort of like those shady individuals you find hiding under your family room couch), youâll see that my blog is now simply called “Parkerâs Blog.” The main reason for this is that far too many people asked me what FMiMH stood for, even though on all of the blog posts, I had both the abbreviation and the full name written out. For those of you that
still canât figure out what FMiMH stands for, I will tell you once and only once, so pay close attention. FMiMH stands for Five Minutes in My Head. Donât forget to use environmentally friendly economy light bulbs.
Ironically, Iâm drifting away from the FMiMH name, but drifting closer to the original concept of Five Minutes in My Head. If youâve never read the original Five Minutes in My Head (both the first and second versions) and are too lazy to go back and read them, the core concept was that the reader would spend five minutes in my head, or more literally, five minutes in my thoughts. The intention of my blog was to get my readers to spend approximately five minutes reading my thoughts on a particular topic every day, then respond and discuss using the commenting system. Not much later, I ran out of controversial topics to talk about and ended up writing so abstractly that nobody wanted to spend the thinking power to try to understand what I was writing about or the effort and energy to try to reply to me. My popularity and appeal were declining rapidly.
In order to stop my own demise, I had a brainstorming session with myself one day during my Modern World History class. Although I failed to realize at that time that the instructor was preparing us for an in-class essay exam scheduled for the following day, and ended up going into the exam the next day with no idea what to do, I still got some good ideas for my website. I thought about what would interest readers enough to make them keep coming back for more, wanting to read what I had to say. I came up with something simple: short, funny blog posts.
Starting from the release of Five Minutes in My Head, Version 2, I spent less time elaborating and more time thinking of short, funny summaries of things that happened during my day. At first, the plan was a success. However, as time went on, I tried harder and harder to entertain my readers with things inducing short bursts of laughter, and ended up making my blog posts shorter and shorter. People needed to put zero thought into reading what I had to say. What was once Five Minutes in My Head became Five Seconds in y Head, because five sections were really enough to finish reading some daysâ blog posts. I had taken my ideas to the extreme, and now they were acting negatively toward my blog.
One of the main focuses of the update to Five Minutes in My Head was to simplify the blog in ways other than content so all excess and irrelevant additions could be removed. As stated earlier, the title of y blog is now simply “Parkzerâs Blog.” Also, those of you that paid particular attention to the URL may have noticed that the date is now formatted as YYYY/MM/DD instead of YYYYMMDD. Believe it or not, people have asked me what the series of numbers at the end of the URL was because they were unable to identify the date in it. These two updates, along with a few others, minimized all distracters, reducing confusion and opening the door for an opportunity to create more in-depth content without losing peopleâs attentions to other random things.
Now that the format was set, it was time to find a good balance of Five Minutes in y Head, Version 1 and Five Minutes in My Head, Version 2. I couldnât simply go back to Version 1, because they I would start losing readers out of boredom. On the other hand, I couldnât stay with Version 2, because doing so would make it pointless to even have a blog â I could just Tweet on Twitter a few times a day, call it my blog, and end up sharing more information than I did with my blog. The solution? Keep both.
Unless I am running severely short on time, all blog posts will have a short, funny part at the beginning, and a slightly longer part after it. Those who simply want the quick laugh can read the first few lines, look at the photograph if there is one, and leave. Those who want more can keep reading and be enlightened.
So now that I wasted your time telling you the history of Five Minutes in My Head that you probably didnât want to know about, and gave you a preview of whatâs to come, go build a rocket and fly to the moon. Iâll see you tomorrow.
Before you proudly declare “Yes,” it’s actually not supposed to look familiar, especially because I never actually officially released it to the public. The only people that should know about it are 10-15 people that were included in the private testing. If you were not asked directly by me to visit the website and suggest improvements, then you probably heard about it from someone else that wasn’t supposed to tell you about it.It’s okay now though, don’t worry about it.I won’t eat your soul.For the people that weren’t included in the private testing of 365Parkzer and don’t know what it is (which should be most people), 365Parkzer was a daily photo blog that I was going to make. The point was to upload a moderately high-resolution photographs relating to something significant I did that day. I would do this once a day, 365 days a year (which is where the 365 in 365Parkzer came from).Unfortunately, that didn’t work out too well.I got all the back-end software written and ready, but I just couldn’t get a pictoral representation of something significant that happened on a daily basis (especially because something significant doesn’t happen every day of my life). In addition, I was also posting pictures on my blog, and the picture on 365Parkzer frequently ended up being the same picture as the one in my blog entry for that day. After a few weeks or so, I gave up on 365Parkzer entirely and stopped adding new pictures.A few weeks ago, I came across Picasa Web Albums, the photograph sharing and storage extension of Google. I actually knew of the website long before, but I never really found motivation to use it because I already had a Photobucket account. After drifting away from Photobucket because they updated the website to be much more confusing, I took a closer look at Picasa Web and found it suitable for my needs; the only thing I needed that it was missing was an in-browser bulk uploader. I switched to Picasa Web and uploaded all my photos to it using a desktop client.If you’ve been checking out my photographs lately, you’ll notice that the navigation button no longer links to the old photographs page on my website, but instead links to my Picasa Web account. All of the photographs that used to be on my website have been moved to my Picasa Web account.With that being done, I decided to drastically increase the number of photographs I upload on a regular basis. All throughout June, I have been uploading random pictures that I’ve been taking, essentially turning my Picasa Web Album into the new 365Parkzer. For those interested, the old pictures that used to be a part of the 365Parkzer website are now available on my Picasa Web Album, along with lots of additional recent photographs.As if that’s not enough, I will also be including a high-resolution picture on the days that I come across something worth sharing and include it in my normal blog post for that day under the “Photograph of the Day” category. For example, if I were intending to present to you today a picture of my dog sleeping on a gray recliner in front of my desk, it would look like this. Notice that you can click on the image to make it bigger. Photograph of the Day
That’s all for today, I’ll see you tomorrow to discuss questions. 
Back in March of 2010, I made a bet with one of my good buddies saying that I would blog every single day of the month, or else I would have to film myself doing 500 crunches while singing songs by Miley Cyrus and post it as a public video on my main