Oh woe! Oh woe! Last time I checked, I was dead last on the College Scholarship Blogging Competition! Now, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I may be a cynic but I’m an optimistic cynic, and therefore think that surely if I apply my full mighty nerd powers, I can figure out what’s wrong and fix it.
First, what is going wrong? I thought for a while, and came up with a few possibilities:
- God Hates Me
- God Loves Me And Wants Me To Win, But Doesn’t Exist And Therefore This Does Me No Good
- The divine is not involved, but there is a conspiracy against me involving the CIA, the NSA, the BATF, The Teamsters, the Freemasons, and the World Aquaculture Society.
- Blatant Age Discrimination by a bunch of dang whippersnappers (Git offa my lawn!)
- Dang Yankees
- Perhaps my young and under-promoted blog is simply still too obscure and not well enough established to have the large number of connections that older and better-promoted blogs have, and this is just a natural result of more popular blogs being able to get their “vote for me” message out to more people, who in normal human fashion will vote for the blog with which they are most familiar.
- It’s too much work to vote for me
(Hey, I was brainstorming, so even crazy ideas like this were considered…)
Then, finally, the problem became obvious to me:
It’s so obvious now! Hordes of adoring fans are coming out of the metaphorical woodwork and going to vote for me, but are becoming exhausted and collapsing before they manage to find my name, buried near the bottom of the list of 20 different blogs!
You may not realize this, but I’m back in college because I’m trying to start my life over. I may be microbial biotechnology nerd now, but in my former life, I was a professional “computer nerd for 15 years. My amazing nerd powers are therefore being applied to solve this problem (see also the update at the end of this post):
There – one click on the image (aw, look, Cornelia wants you to vote for me!), click the confirm button that pops up, and you’ve voted for me. Problem solved. When clicked and confirmed, a new window should open and you should see the current standings. If you are presented instead with an unselected voting form, it didn’t work – let me know. Now go! Go, my fellow conspirators! Click us to victory!
But seriously – I may yet come up with a way to gain enough fame quickly enough to have a shot at the prize, but right now I’m in last friggin’ place…which means I’m free! I don’t have to worry at all about “oh, gosh, if I do that will I lose the crucial vote that loses me first place?!?!?” and I can pretty much do whatever I want, within the bounds of ethics and legality, and it’ll make no difference. Therefore, I want to point something out:
Down at the bottom of this post, you’ll see that this material is made available under a Creative Commons license. Basically, as long as you’re not a commercial venture and you give me credit, you’re allowed to take and use anything you like from here, including taking and remixing the one-click-vote thing there. And, yes, this explicitly applies to my competition (Money or no money, I really can’t imagine how a scholarship competition counts as “commercial”.)
I’ll even go one step further: if any of you other finalists happen to see this and would like to use this on your own blog, let me know and I’ll send you a version tweaked to vote for you blog instead of mine. I’ll even try to help you get it inserted into your blog if you’d like. All I ask is that you mention and link to my blog somewhere in one of your posts. Obviously I’d prefer something complimentary, but if you feel the urge to write “I hear that Sean at The Big Room rapes puppies, eats babies, and has an unnatural attraction for maple trees”, what the heck, as long as there’s a link…
What do you think? Good idea? Bad idea?
UPDATE: Dangit, I swear it looked like it was working yesterday, but the ‘one-click’ (plus confirmation) thing is unexplainably just not getting the vote in, though everything else was working correctly. For the moment, I’ve reverted to having the link bring up the official vote form in a separate window…
The offer to make it available to others still stands, however, if anyone’s interested. I’ll re-revise this post if I figure out how to get it working.
I think…you need to get on Jabber. I have an idea, and I’d like to know what you think.
Oh, and I’ve been sending people your way as much as I can. Go you! If nothing else, maybe you can do it again next year and have a larger reader base to do it with, right?