2008 was a fairly uneventful year here at nocategories.net. The site doesn’t get as many visitors as it used to, and so I don’t post very often, and because I don’t post often, fewer visitors come… and so it goes. All hope is not lost, though. Here’s a roundup of 2008’s most popular entries on this site. Other people liked this stuff. Maybe you’ll like it too.

Make Your Own South Park Character

Always a crowd pleaser, the little web page where you can design a south park character that looks like you, or anyone is mentioned here, under the name “make your own south park character“, which makes it easy to find, since that’s what people want to do. That is what the internet is for, after all: making south park characters.

Rough Living: An Urban Survival Manual

I posted a quick link to a book about how to survive homelessness, written from personal experience. Since then, the post has become the second most popular thing on this website. It is an interesting book. Says the author: “in 2000 I moved into my car and set out to learn what it takes to survive the day to day world of the United States without a steady income, without a home, and without most of what a lot of people think is essential to their lives. This book isn’t about how to live in public restrooms or how to steal muffins. This is a book for people that find themselves outside of what is normal in the United States and the rest of the world. This book is about surviving with much less than you think you need.”

Spoken Word, Recorded Poetry, and Hip-Hop

Three years ago, I was just starting to take some notes for what would become the spoken word album that I have just now finished producing at Magnanimous Records studio. I guess it took a while. I started by trying to get an overview of the different types of spoken word, recorded poetry, and hip-hop. It seemed to me that there are three “categories” of spoken word. Since I don’t like categories too much, I hope that my spoken word doesn’t fit too neatly into any of them. Those notes seem to be interesting to many other people.

I mentioned in that post that I wanted to list some examples of each type. I did end up collecting lots of examples of spoken word. I should share that list, shouldn’t I?

Software for Writers

There’s a maxim out there, variously attributed, which says: “serious writers should keep their work in circulation until it either sells or the ink wears off”. But it can be difficult to keep track of all those submissions, cover letters, editors, rejection slips, etc. Luckily, there are several good software applications that can help a writer to keep tabs on it all. I wrote an overview of software for writers. It’s pretty popular. (Now, I should probably eat my own dog food, so to speak, and start sending out more submissions!)

The History of and Development of Hypertext, and Hypertext Literary Theory

I’m happy to see that the first chapter of my undergraduate thesis is filling out this list of popular content on the site. I put a lot of work into it. For this chapter, I wanted to know: what is hypertext literary theory and were does it come from? If you are interested in the subject, or if you’ve never even heard of it before, this will provide you with plenty of information.