After I finished my composition, "Coffee or Tea, Hot or Cold, But No Soda For Me", I decided that this particular article group would focus on blogs with articles about coffee.

The following articles are the ones I selected about some kind of coffee, some kind of coffee house, or just about anything related to coffee. They're not necessarily the best articles out there, but they're some of the ones I enjoyed reading. I enjoyed reading about coffee so much that the next batch will probably be about coffee again.

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I'm working on a project on my flagship blog. While working on the project, I've been coming across some good information, some enjoyable humor, and some references to things I've written about over there.

I'm going to share as much of it as I can and here we go.

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As I surf around the net, I come across blog articles of all kinds. Whether I comment on them or not, I'll bookmark them for future commenting, reference, or whatever. Well, I'm not keeping them to myself. I hope you enjoy what I have to offer this time around. Without further ado:

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I read an interesting article at the Los Angeles Times online, "Arizona slams door on illegal immigrants", and quickly realized the problem won't go away until Mexico's economy is better than that of the United States. Here's what a few other bloggers have written about the immigration problem. After the list, I'll offer you my solution to the problem.

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I think it's going to take me a while to go through all my feeds and pick out the things I want to write about. After that, I'll probably start searching for specific topics from blogs I may or may not be subscribed to. There's an endless supply of good stuff out there, enough to keep me busy forever.

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This is the first batch of what I hope will become thousands of outbound links, all under the guise of article reviews. I'm using the term "article reviews" because it helps to break away from the quick links mentality. I read each and every article and add my thoughts where I think they're appropriate.

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Blog Reviews

I'm preparing to start my first blog review at Blog & Article Reviews. The first one, from my current list, will be published tomorrow (my tomorrow and not necessarily yours).

The plan is to follow the examples at OpTempo (such as "Blog Review: Prince of Wall Street") and break each review into sections. I don't think I'll go as far as Bloggy Award with a review like "Lady Java", but I never know what I'm going to do exactly until I do it. I do know the reviews will be more in-depth than the blog reviews I have already done on this blog.

I haven't created the submission page yet, which will list the blogs I have pending, but that shouldn't take too long. If I happen to omit YOUR blog (and you've requested a review), please use the submission page when it becomes available.

When my review queue empties, I'll be publishing unsolicited reviews of blogs. Hopefully, that'll never happen.

Article Reviews

Article reviews will be done much in the same way as my blog drive-bys were done in the past, but hopefully in more detail.

The plan is to follow a format similar to that of Brown Thoughts (for example, "Brown Batch #36: Link Love Fiesta"), but not exactly like that.

I'll be reviewing articles from commenters (who have blogs) on all of my blogs, regardless of which blog they comment on. I'll also be reviewing articles of the blogs in my feedreader, on my blogroll, and other sources. The goal will be to keep it at 10 articles at a time. This may cause me to generate as many as one post per day, or as few as one post per week, depending on how many articles I read and like.

Goals

The goal of each blog review is to provide at least 2 backlinks per review. The goal of each article review is to provide at least 1 backlink per article for a total of 10 per post. I may exceed those parameters at any given time for any reason you can think of, so it isn't written in stone.

At about 2 am today, local time, I switched the name servers back to my web host after being changed by the registrar to a parking page. Since DNS takes up to 72 hours to propagate worldwide, it will be around 2 am on May 31st before I can be absolutely sure the changes are in place. Although there are still some things happening behind the scenes to disrupt things, I plan to continue with my blog drive-bys tomorrow.

DNS propagation is strange. In most places in the US, my name server changes took effect in less than two hours. In the Asian countries such as China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Taiwan, the changes took more than 8 hours. I'm sure there are places where the changes still haven't shown up. Several times today, while editing and trying to write (when our power wasn't cut off), my domain came up as nonexistent. I thought it was merely a local phenomena, but when I went to resync my feeds at FeedBurner, FeedBurner couldn't find my domain either.

I mentioned in my Blog Drive Bys for 2007-05-27 that I was starting to go through my neighborhood at BlogCatalog for blogs that I haven't really visited yet. I just realized about an hour ago that I have another good source: My post comments. The comment editor in the administrative center of WordPress will allow me to browse and find every URL used by readers who made a comment. I think my post comments will be my next source after I'm finished with BlogCatalog. I'll just start from the beginning, in May of last year, and work my way forward.

An incident occurred two nights ago, in the creek next to my house. Two teenaged couples were caught having sex, in the creek and in some strange positions. The area was dark, but it just happened to be right next to my neighbor's house. She came out because of all the noise and chased them off. One of my relatives remarked that he wished he had a video camera at the time (he saw a lot of it and this happened at like 3 am in the morning). My son, being the inquisitive type, asked me if that would be considered an invasion of privacy. We had a long discussion and it gave me some great ideas for a future article. That's all I'll write about it right now so you can look forward to it later, maybe as late as tomorrow.

Doing a "blog drive-by" is my new passion. After visiting some of the links from Nirmal's article, Blogging Mistakes-Complete List, I realize that this is considered a mistake by some bloggers. I disagree with their assessment in this instance. They point out bloggers who do a quick mention of another website and link to it and nothing more. This is not what I do. I not only link to a blog that I've visited, but I actually read the articles on their blog and even comment on some of them. It's a different ball game altogether.

An example of a blog where I read multiple articles is at www.mapelli.info. What led me to the blog? A link from Nirmal's article, The Blogging Mistake I Did For 25 Years. I didn't comment on Francesco's blog because the comment would have been "Ummm, the Internet didn't exist 25 years ago" or something like that, which was already well-covered in other comments.

When I first started doing my "drive-bys", I did it for one selfish reason: To get pings to other blogs which would obviously point back to mine. I kept doing it for reasons that are completely unselfish: To promote other bloggers and to point my readers to interesting blogs, articles and videos. Judging by the outbound clicks I'm seeing with Clicky, it seems to be working well. I try to do the drive-bys daily but some circumstances (such as DSL and power outages) have been throwing monkey wrenches into my well-oiled machine.

To put it all into one neat package, or perspective if you prefer, I have found that promoting a small fraction of the more than 70 million blogs on the Internet gives me more satisfaction than all the visits I will ever receive on my own blog. The fact that some of my newest regular readers are reading my blog specifically because of my drive-bys is a fantastic side effect that I didn't expect.

I want to thank jer at nyquil.ORG for unwittingly inspiring me.