Typosphere Keyword-o-Rama

(Idea shamelessly stolen from the munchkin wrangler) Besides obsessively reloading the stats on my own blog, I thought all you fine folks might want a little view behind the Typospherical curtain. Here are the keywords folks used to locate this fine site this past week: typosphere Hi! Yes, you found us! Unless you were looking for the Web Home of Science Fiction Writer Ron Collins or the Ruby language blogging software. Then you might be a bit lost and very confused. typewriters for sale Not here, sadly. If you have deep pockets, you can look at Mr. Typewriter or My Typewriter. If you're in the New York City area, maybe Brady & Kowalski can hook you up. If you're fortunate enough to live near a repair shop, I'm sure they have some machines you can come in and try: Tom at Cambridge Typewriter spreads typer-joy, as do the fine folks at Blue Moon Camera and Machine. Or Mesa Typewriter Exchange. A good search engine will be your friend here. Don't discount local, though. Flea markets, church bazaars, yard sales, thrift and charity shops. Typewriters are uncommon until you start finding them. Oh yeah, and that big auction site, but be wary of careful packing. Typewriters are fragile critters. custom typewriter Maybe you're thinking of Richard Polt's "silver surfer" technique? Or just spend some time clicking around the blog links over on the right: lots of us have painted or decorated our own machines. I'm currently taking a hard look at a grubby old Skyriter after seeing this racing-inspired customizing. welcome to the typosphere Hi, yes. We've met. 10-characters-per-inch pica 87 font You probably want to go look at Ted's scans of the NOMDA blue books, which have typeface styles. Sounds like you got in reallly close and read that little number on the typeslug. You've got better eyes than I do. bicycle typerider nyt You must mean Maya Stein. Isn't this a great thing? We already know that typewriters like to be photographed out-of-doors, but who knew they liked interstate bike rides, too? christopher lockett seattle Chris is the director of the typewriter documentary "The Typewriter in the 21st Century." He's a nice guy, too, and I'm not just saying that because he ran a microphone up my shirt. Amazingly soft hands, Chris has. dean jones kasbah mod And speaking of customized typewriters. I get itchy to buy paint and noxious chemicals when I take a look at these machines. hammacher schlemmer manual typewriter "is probably crap." There, I finished that for you. http://www.typosphere.info/ Little old us once again. Thanks for visiting!

Your Favorite Repair Shop?

Hi again, Typosphere. I know that Richard Polt has a repair-shop list (which I can't find at the moment, Richard?) I'm thinking about adding them with a special icon to our map page. If you have a favorite shop, please post their name and address in a comment and I'll include them in the map.

"Typewriter Day" page is up

Hi all, I just finished gathering up what links and videos and photos I could find for the Typewriter Day 2011 celebration (commemoration? type-in?) Rather than make it a post, I went ahead and gave it top billing as a page: here it is.

I'm sure I've missed one or more of your videos or photos, which was purely unintentional. Please leave a comment if I missed you -- it's never too late to be added in. I tended to go for videos first, and then blog entries if I couldn't find or figure out how to pull the video out. If your computer can handle it, try playing all the videos at once to imagine what we'd sound like in one room. :-)

Thanks for participating, everyone: it was fun for me, knowing that thanks to Christopher Sholes, somewhere around the world on Thursday, there was a person sitting down at a typewriter to record footage of their hands to share on the Internet. It's an amazing world we live in.

Your Monthly Update

• For the stats junkies: 2,969 pages viewed in the month of May, with most of the traffic coming to the roll-call post and originating from the U.S., though Japan is making a strong showing thanks to Matt Cidoni's radio interview. Typewriters on the radio, it's the new big thing.
• Also in traffic numbers: a strange one-day surge of traffic from Russia. My paranoid sysadmin senses tell me that this was some kind of potential spam attack or scrape, as no actual pages or posts were heavily hit (and I saw the same surge on clickthing.) Everyone make sure to compute safe.
  
• There was a type-in in Los Angeles on May 22: anyone have pics? Video? I found this article about it, but it's pretty light. Any LA typecasters out there?
• Perhaps she's too humble or sleepless to post here, but Cheryl at Strikethru is making noises about another edition of Silent Type... with a twist. Have you see the first two editions? They are excellent, despite my own contributions. You should check them out.
• Typewriter Day is just three weeks away. If you can, please consider filming yourself or others doing a little typing that day (hands-only is fine if you're modest.)
• Several new bloggers are showing up in the blogroll and on the map page. Please feel free to post any that you find, even as a comment to posts like this one. Membership in the Typosphere can be involuntary and unexpected...

Updated: Richard linked to the video from the LA event, but I missed it.

Your (Late) Monthly Stats Update

It's kind of cool that Blogger offers automatic traffic stats, although since this site is mostly just a launch pad to our own personal ones, there's not a lot of Great Truths hidden in the numbers. But for those of you who enjoy such things, here's a little rundown on the Typosphere's second full month of life, a few days late:

• 5,791 pages turned total since the start of the site
• 3,027 pages turned in the last "month" (2011 Apr 7 – 2011 May 6)
• We roughly average about 100 views a day, some days flirting with 200 views. It's pretty steady all day, so my obsessive reloading isn't skewing the results.
• Firefox accounts for 49% of browser traffic (see obsessive reloading, above.) Chrome, IE, and Safari are neck-in-neck around the 15% mark.
  
• All time most popular page: the initial roll call post (155 views), followed by the Los Angeles type-in announcement (56 views) and then the origin of the term "typecasting" (46 views.) I've surely just messed up those numbers by linking to them.
  
• Top traffic sources: typosphere.net, www.typosphere.net, and strikethru.net
• Traffic comes from the same countries as our map, plus Canada ranks highly. Any Canadian bloggers hiding out there that want to be added? Just post a reply.
• "typosphere" as a search term leads people here the most, in various forms, though "matt cidoni" and "la vie graphite" are vying for fifth place. It's a battle royale for this dubious honor.
• This site is still ad-free, and supported purely by your collective awesomeness. Keep those fingers on the keys!
  

News Links

I've kept an RSS feed of Google news stories featuring the word "typewriter" for a while now, and maybe every tenth story or so is relevant (most often the typewriter is used as a cultural touchstone of "times long gone by.") Today I had the wise idea to try a search for "Typosphere" and lo! The stories are plentiful. So much so that I've added a new "In The News" section to the page, over there on the left, just below the members. The recent NY Times article is there, plus a few others. As I write this, the top three links feature fellow typospherians:

• Typewriter devotees gather online, in a Philly pub - The Desert Sun - 04/14/2011
• ASU alum uses typewriters in high school classroom - The State Press - 04/14/2011
• True Type - The Weekly Standard (blog) - 04/17/2011

Blogger seems to limit this gadget to the five most recent stories, but I'll see if I can tweak that: the layout has the space, certainly.

Updates

Some brief news:

• The list of typospherians (typospheroids? typosphericals?) is updated on the map page, including locations and URLs of blogs, and we're now using the Google map set up by Rob Bowker. Thanks Rob!
• I also added a mostly-silly description of the typosphere. You may or may not want to be affiliated with it.
  
• I've tinkered with the site layout a little, and added a blog roll to the right-hand edge of the page. The Blogger code could not find an RSS feed for some of your sites. If yours doesn't show up, please let me know what URL I should be requesting and I'll update the blogroll.
• Ryan at Magic Margin had a clever idea for spreading the typosphere word... it's worth checking out.
  

On The Map

I've just compiled the results from the comments in the first post and spend a little time getting the approximate locations on the map. Three things:

1. I tried to be faithful to your original post: if I've posted too much (or too little) you can drop me a note.
2. I do know where some of you are, generally (Rino) but not specifically enough to plunk an icon on the map. Corrections welcome!
3. I plan to be adding everyone as "authors" to the site, meaning you can post articles of interest (like upcoming type-ins, or whatever.) Stay tuned for an announcement about that, and potentially an email from Blogger, if I can find an email address for you. UPDATE: invites sent to those I have email addresses for. I have not started digging around on your blogs to find them yet.
   

Now go forth and enmapinate!

Typosphere Roll Call

Do you type? Do you blog? Do you dabble in that weird offspring known as typecasting? Then you, too, are part of the Typosphere. There are a number of personal blogs and sites out there dedicated to typewriters and their uses in the twenty-first century, and we'd like to hear from you.

If you're typecasting or otherwise using typewriters in some capacity, please comment on this post with:

1. The URL of your blog/site and an optional brief write-up: just a sentence or two
2. Your name, or preferred nom de plume if you're shy
   
3. Your approximate location in the world (to be published here on a map)

Thanks all!