Quick suggestion. The following quote is funnier in its original context (hey, Swampy taught me something after all!):

As it appears on your site: "These animals are beautiful. The ones that know the most about them are the trappers. They are amazing creatures." 

With hilarious added context:

"These animals are beautiful. The ones that know the most about
them are the trappers. They are amazing creatures.

I'm not too keen on only seeing the dead ones either.

Mike tells me they get skinned then go to Europe. "

 

Also, you lost a great nugget of wisdom when you fixed up the quotes page:

http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/p/8159/155087.aspx#155087 

When searching I set the swamp search to play at 1/10 speed and I sit close and watch. Hitting enter pauses the video. It takes 10 minutes to view a 1 minute clip as it is. Hitting pause no pause is no way to search for aliens.

 

 By the way, the site keeps getting better and better.  Hope all that hard work eventually pays off (in the form of sweet, sweet ad revenues)!

MasterPlanSoftware:

 Another update: I think I fixed most of the layout on the site. Check it out and let me know if you see any major issues.

Major issue: It's totally broken on Opera :P Navbar is stuck way out on the left, the rest of the layout is centered.

One more suggestion.  If you are really serious about attracting major traffic from people who have never heard of SpectateSwamp, you may want to make the site more accessible to the Masses (ironic, I know).  Right now, I think the site is most attractive to those of us who are already familiar with Spectate's lunacy.

Most people will not want to navigate the whole site to find out why Spectate is the stupidest man on Earth, so I would suggest summarizing the main reasons on the front page:

• Thinks birds, insects, and leaves are aliens
• Thinks he wrote the world's greatest software program, but nobody wants to use it
• Believes himself to be a modern-day medicine man, even though First Nations want nothing to do with him
• Thinks the best way to work with video is to do "screen re-shoots" of his laptop
• Once painted his head yellow to run in the federal election
  
• Threatened several organizations with "curses" including '86 Expo and United Nations
• Boasts about being a self-styled Sasquatch, alien, and dinosaur skin hunter
• Obsessed with holey rocks
• Believes he made it rain in 1986
• Believes he will save the world in 2012
• Finds all attention flattering, including mockery and blatant insults

On the front page, instead of just the one picture, you might want to include a montage of Spectate's various incarnations (Bearded YellowHead circa '93, Masked Medicine Man, Insane White-Haired Old Guy Clutching Medicine Stones).

If Joe Sixpack stumbles on your site from a wayward google search or an email from a techie friend, he needs to be engaged in the site immediately, otherwise he'll leave and he won't recommend the site to his own friends.  Right now I think the navigation tree gives the visitor a hint of Swampy's craziness, but more can be done to grab his attention quickly.

One way to do this could be: 

•  The top of the front page could be a small montage of Swampy (as described above)
• Underneath the montage, a caption could read: The World According To Doug Pederson
• Below the caption, you could list the summarized versions of Swampy's crazy claims, maybe from his point of view (paraphrased or quoted).

If you can do all of that with a minimum of text, you might be able to attract even more more visitors.

Just my 2 cents.  Could be wrong (probably am), I've never run my own web site or undertaken any kind of marketing venture. 

 One more thing: you might also want to point out that Spectate is a relentless publicity hound.  He spams every Internet blog, wiki, and forum known to man with his crackpot ideas on Desktop Search and aliens in an attempt to get attention.  He admits that he enjoys "riling people up" (e.g. posting dead animals videos to a nature appreciation still photography forum.)  By highlighting this fact, you might lessen any possible sympathy the reader might have for Spectate.  (As in, "Gee, this guy sure is stupid, but I feel kinda guilty laughing at him.  Maybe I won't spread his site around.")  Once you see how Spectate ignores all pleas for sanity and attempts of assistance, sympathy for him quickly dissipates. 

SpectateSwamp:

And who on earth would want to look at those monstrosities. Too intimidating. Too much to learn.

 

Why would we have to "learn" them? Did you "learn" Windows when you started on SSDS? It couldn't exist/run WITHOUT Windows.

Same with Linux. No one (except kernel/driver developers) generally cares what happens in the background, all you do is learn the interfaces to it.

Do you know exactly how a car runs? No, you just step on the gas and turn the wheel. Those are interfaces that hide the guts of the car from you. You don't need to learn biochemistry to refine your own gas. You don't have to learn metallurgy to forge your own steel. You don't have to learn electronics to build your own control systems. Just step on a pedal and things happen.

Exact same thing in SSDS. You don't "do" video, all you do is tell Windows to start playing a video for you. You don't parse the video file, you don't extract video data, you don't decompress/decode the video data, you don't blit it to a frame buffer, you don't create windows for it to play in. You just tell Windows "go" and it does it for you. MCIsendstring is a simple interface to very complicated systems. But claiming you "do" video because of a single function call is a total lie. All you're doing is calling a taxi to take you somewhere, because you code can't even handle pushing a gas pedal or turning a wheel.

So you can quit saying you don't need anything other than SSDS. Let's see how far you could get if MCIsendstring suddenly vanished from existence and you had to implement a complete media player on your own. Could you write a video codec? An audio codec? You wouldn't even know where to start.

MarcB:

No, you just step on the gas and turn the wheel.

 

I sure hope he doesn't have a car.

 

CodeSimian:

Also, you lost a great nugget of wisdom when you fixed up the quotes page:

Just hold back, I let the content and layout take priority over dynamic quotes. I am going to work on it soon I promise.

CodeSimian:

Hope all that hard work eventually pays off (in the form of sweet, sweet ad revenues)!

 

I highly doubt it. I am not really looking to make money, but it would be nice to recover some of my expenses. We will see. So far: $1.36

CodeSimian:

If you are really serious about attracting major traffic from people who have never heard of SpectateSwamp, you may want to make the site more accessible to the Masses

 

I absolutely agree. I only stuck the current content on the front page because it was the best we have for the purpose. But we certainly could use a quick 'Draw them into the insanity' writeup with pictures.

Right now I am just grateful for TDWTF traffic we have. But soon it would be nice to expand a bit.

Any takers on this suggestion? Anyone that can help write it up?

Does anyone want to do a write up for the conspiracies page?

Swampspiracies?

MasterPlanSoftware:

Does anyone want to do a write up for the conspiracies page?

Swampspiracies?

 

Doug Patterson believes that there is one giant conspiracy amongst all programmers. He believes that all programs are actually unnecessary and are engeneered by programmers to make themselves useful and needed. He feels that by eliminating most programs, people will be freed from their shackles and will realize just how wonderful and liberating SpectateSwamp Desktop Search is. Ignoring all pleas for sanity from programmers claiming that what he envisioned in SSDS has already been done, is freely available, and works better than SSDS, he continues to believe that SSDS is the greatest program ever created and is being shunned by evil programmers fighing to keep their jobs.

 its a start :)

dlikhten:

 its a start :)

 

Indeed, thanks. Let's see if it snowballs like the other write ups have.

 Just found out that jakkle was the one who wrote the Teachings page.

 The conspiracies page should also probably mention other things besides the "geek conspiracy", maybe something like this too:

 

Doug Pederson believes that when any of his attempts to "liberate the masses" from video editing, spread the word of SSDS, or do anything else goes wrong, it's because of a conspiracy. At one point he ran in a local election, and when he lost he blamed it on "plants". When he entered SSDS in a web application mashup contest by NetSquared.org and it was disqualified (because it isn't a web application), he insisted it was because the sponsors pressured NetSquared to drop it, as SSDS would make their products obsolete. Many people tried to explain to him that this was like trying to enter a dog in a horse race. Doug Pederson responded by saying that he would have turned it into a web application if it won, but again, people compared this to entering a dog in a horse race and hoping it would turn into a horse. Finally, he admitted that this contest was the wrong place to try to advertise SSDS, but he still stuck to his opinion that it was "pure silly" to actually tell him that it had been disqualified and to "let down the Swampies." When his insane and self-contradictory ramblings on why video editing is evil, posted on video forums, are deleted, he says that most of the people believed him, but it was the "forum bullies" that drove him off.

 

 Also, maybe it's just me, but I think the tone of the SSDS article is slightly off - the full insanity doesn't come across.  It's more like "He uses many methods which aren't considered best practice" when it should be more like "This is a horrible mess which makes no sense to a sane person."  Not to sound insulting, I think what's there is a good start, but after reading it I don't quite get the impression of "Wow, this guy has no fucking idea what he's doing."

burntfuse:

 Just found out that jakkle was the one who wrote the Teachings page.

 

Excellent, I suspected that, but wasn't 100% sure. Thanks I will change it as soon as my RD session starts responding again.

burntfuse:

 The conspiracies page should also probably mention other things besides the "geek conspiracy", maybe something like this too:

I like your write up. Hopefully we can expand on that as well, I would like to see it divided into sections. Maybe something like:

• Forum Conspiracies
• Alien Conspiracies
• Magic Rock Conspiracies
• Desktop Search Conspiracies
• Dinosaur Skin Conspiracies

Etc...

Could do it in just one nice writeup on that page, and if need expand it into a whole section with different pages for each documenting his belief in the 'conspiracy'.

Let's face it, he has given us plenty of material on this!

I don't know if there's enough conspiracies material for separate sections, but I was thinking about taking what the other person had already done and maybe adding a bit and combining it with mine to make a more in-depth write-up.

burntfuse:

 Also, maybe it's just me, but I think the tone of the SSDS article is slightly off - the full insanity doesn't come across.  It's more like "He uses many methods which aren't considered best practice" when it should be more like "This is a horrible mess which makes no sense to a sane person."  Not to sound insulting, I think what's there is a good start, but after reading it I don't quite get the impression of "Wow, this guy has no fucking idea what he's doing."

 

I agree, I wouldn't mind more of an antagonistic tone, especially considering the nature of the site. However I think WWWolf did a good job of documenting the issues, and I don't think he likes to be insulting (like most of the rest of us). I have to compliment and respect him for that.

But if someone wants to add a synopsis of the nature of SSDS, and how completely fucking ridiculous it (and SS) is, I would not be opposed to jockeying in a new page or something for it.

burntfuse:

I don't know if there's enough conspiracies material for separate sections, but I was thinking about taking what the other person had already done and maybe adding a bit and combining it with mine to make a more in-depth write-up.

 

I am all for it. I think it really helps to make the case for mental illness in addition to the pure stupidity we have documented.

 We can have a list of conspiracies and a short description of how each is rediculous. Going from mild to insanity sort order.

MasterPlanSoftware:

But if someone wants to add a synopsis of the nature of SSDS, and how completely fucking ridiculous it (and SS) is, I would not be opposed to jockeying in a new page or something for it.

I'm busy elsewhere, but I cobbled together a couple scripts to determine the frequency of certain key words and functions in his code.  Keep in mind that I have already stripped all the comments, so these are all actually in the code:

GoTo: 614
GoSub: 172
Call: 3

Then: 1138

Left: 233
Right: 90
Mid: 101

Return: 36
End Sub: 10

Cls: 31
Print: 483

DoEvents: 141
mciSendString: 54

bstorer:

I'm busy elsewhere, but I cobbled together a couple scripts to determine the frequency of certain key words and functions in his code.  Keep in mind that I have already stripped all the comments, so these are all actually in the code:

 

Nice! Now we also need a statistic of how many commented lines of code there are just to show his inability to use source control :)

bstorer:

MasterPlanSoftware:

But if someone wants to add a synopsis of the nature of SSDS, and how completely fucking ridiculous it (and SS) is, I would not be opposed to jockeying in a new page or something for it.

I'm busy elsewhere, but I cobbled together a couple scripts to determine the frequency of certain key words and functions in his code.  Keep in mind that I have already stripped all the comments, so these are all actually in the code:

GoTo: 614
GoSub: 172
Call: 3

Then: 1138

Left: 233
Right: 90
Mid: 101

Return: 36
End Sub: 10

Cls: 31
Print: 483

DoEvents: 141
mciSendString: 54

 

Maybe I can make sections off the desktop search, and have one for just code analysis?

Something like this?

:

Teachings

    Desktop Search

         The Code

         The philosophy

         The results