Something that bums me out about blogging (and makes it easy to blow off) is the lack of real conversations.  On Usenet, you can pick a group like rec.games.bridge and find a bunch of conversations (threads) going on.  Any decent newsreader will show each thread in a tree form, so you can see who’s responding to whom, and follow the conversation logically.  You can jump in and respond at any point, and when you come back later, your own posts and any responses to them will be threaded right along with the rest.  If you’re using a good newsreader, you can even have it display direct responses to you at the top, and then other responses in threads you’ve posted in below that, and so on, so you can see the stuff you’re interested in first.  Web forums have some of these features, though I haven’t seen one yet that has all of them. Read more »

I finally moved my blog a few days ago, and I checked it seven different ways to make sure everything was working and links from the old site would redirect to the new one—but I forgot to check the old home page, which stayed broken.  Hope it didn’t drive away too many new visitors!

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I’ve probably said this before, but blogging is a strange business. Running any web site is, really. When I was in the pizza delivery business, sales traffic was pretty straightforward. We’d open at 3pm, and it’d be slow until the supper rush started about 5, and then it’d be slow and steady through prime-time, then die until a flurry when the bars all closed. On weekends, there’d be more sales throughout the evening and from the hotels. On Sunday evenings when the college cafeterias were closed, the store on the campus side of town would get hammered. If we put out coupons for something in particular, we’d sell more of that. And so on. It was all pretty predictable. Read more »

Harvested the third small batch of radishes today.  With all the moisture they’re getting, they seem noticeably bigger every day, so I’m not just picking little ones to thin them anymore.  Here’s a fuzzy picture of them halfway through washing them.

Radishes

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photo from flickr.com

I’m not really hungover; all I drank at the bar last night was water.  But I’m tired, achy, and sort of foggy and slow, so most of the same symptoms are there except for the headache.

I’m going to be glad when this pool league session is over.  I enjoy playing and being there, especially when I win like I did last night.  But it makes Sunday too long a day, starting with 8am Mass and ending around 11pm after pool league, usually with a family visit or a party of some sort in between.  For an introvert like me, even if all those things are enjoyable, they certainly don’t make for a day of rest.  I feel like I need to start taking Mondays off to recover from Sunday.  That doesn’t seem right.

Oh well, seven more weeks and this session will be over.  I’ll take the summer off for sure, and then switch to a weeknight if I play in the fall.  When I used to play on Tuesday nights, that was much better.

When it was raining yesterday, I wished we’d gotten some garden seeds planted.  But it got so cold last night we might be glad we waited.  If it’s too cold for germination to start and the seeds are completely soaked for a few days, they may rot.  After this storm front moves through, we should be able to plant our early stuff just in time for the next sunny spell.

My FreeBSD-induced traffic surge seems to have dwindled now.  It’s amazing how you can write 100+ articles about all sorts of different things, and you never know which one is going to happen to catch the attention of a much busier site and get you a link that quintuples your traffic overnight.  I guess that’s why most blogging experts focus more on how to create or attract links from big sites than they do on writing the actual content.  The content doesn’t have to be especially good or original, if the right person decides to share it.

Recently we tried a new recipe I found on Jimmy Moore’s low-carb site, low-carb baked macaroni and cheese using shirataki noodles.  It was pretty good, but I made the mistake of replacing the bread crumbs with crushed pork rinds and the rinds turned out to be fairly stale, so that flavor kind of overwhelmed the mild flavor of the mac-and-cheese.  Next time we’ll get some low-carb bread for the crumbs; with those it’s still supposed to have only 5 grams of carb per serving.  Fresh pork rinds would probably work okay too, but it really doesn’t need to be lower in carbs than 5/serving.  When we get it the way we like it, I’ll do a full article on it with pictures and talk some more about those noodles.

I woke up at 2:00am, too groggy to do any serious work for long, so I might as well get a blog post in.  My latest Latin Lesson is up, #11 on adverbs and the perfect tense.  After about 6-10 more lessons I think I’ll have covered enough to start translating parts of the Latin Mass, which should be fun.

Sometimes this blogging stuff just makes me shake my head.  My last post on FreeBSD was dry and off-topic, even for me.  I even felt kind of bad about posting it, figuring it wasn’t something my regular readers would care about, but it was what was on my mind at the time.  Thanks to a couple links from FreeBSD sites, my traffic has jumped the last three days, to where yesterday’s traffic was almost double my previous record.  As of 4am today I’ve already had more traffic than I had all day Monday.  Of course, those people probably aren’t going to stick around to read my usual posts on religion and gardening, so do they really count?  Not really, but it’s still kind of cool to see.

Anyway, time to get back to bed and try to get some more sleep!

Wow, I don’t blog for three days, and my traffic climbs each day!  I’m not sure it’s a good sign if your blog is at its most popular when you’re not writing.

Anyway, the big project that’s been keeping me from daily blogging is almost complete; I can see the light at the end of the tunnel now.  It should go live Monday and need a few fixes that are bound to come up right at first, and then I’ll be able to breath again by the end of the week.  First thing I’m going to do is sleep two days straight.  Then I’ll be able get back to things I’ve been neglecting, like this blog.

I forgot to write about the St. Rose chili dinner last Sunday.  It went really well from what I heard; we nearly ran out of food this time.  It’s too bad all the late Masses in town seem to get out about the same time; we get a big crowd right about 12:15 and then it dies down pretty quickly.  Maybe a discount for early birds?  Hmm, have to suggest that.  I didn’t win the raffle again.  I’ve got some other church stuff floating around in my head to write about some time, but I’ll save that for another time.

I haven’t been paying much attention to Twitter lately either.  I was about ready to just drop it (again), when I ran across this post which says what so many people say about Twitter:

At first I ignored Twitter as just another vanilla social media app. Then I looked into it and just didn’t get it. Finally I signed up and started playing around, but was less than impressed (I followed all the wrong people and felt like I was opting-in to be SPAMmed). But then 2 weeks ago I had an eye-opening experience and came face-to-face with the full value of Twitter, and then just last week I met with Jack Dorsey and became a fullblown Twitter convert.

It seems like that’s always how it works:  Net-savvy person looks at Twitter, thinks it looks kind of silly.  He tries it out, decides he was right the first time: it’s silly.  Then something clicks and suddenly he’s got a thousand followers and thinks it’s the best thing since someone put bacon on a cheeseburger.

So, I’m sticking with it for now, although I haven’t had the time to play with it much.  I did look at a couple of those tools that help you to find people with the same interests or who are in your area, and followed some new people.  Some of them followed me back, and some new ones did too, so I’ve got about 40-50 each way now.  Thing is, it seems like every time you follow a few people, it sends an alert out to all the Internet Marketing people: the ones whose sole activity on Twitter seems to be getting to 10,000 followers and telling everyone else how.  There’s a real pyramid scheme feel to it, in a way.  I suppose those guys will move along when I don’t follow them back right away, and I’ll be left with the ones who might actually be interested in what I say.

It seems like all these internet marketing methods come back to one thing: The List.  No matter what technology and methods you’re using to do it, the goal is to develop a List of people who trust your opinion.  It’s like any real-life sales in that sense, which is probably why I don’t really care for it: next to being a clown, I can’t imagine many things I’d less like to be than a salesman.  But a good salesman’s List is worth gold after a while.  Online, it seems to be the same way.  If you’re a blogger, your List is the people who subscribe to your blog.  If you’re a Twitterer, it’s your followers.  If you collect email addresses in exchange for a free report or something, that’s the List.  On social networking sites, it might be your friends.  There’s really nothing new here except the tools.

But however your List is created, its value doesn’t just come from its length, but also from how much those people trust you.  If I follow 100 people every day on Twitter, it appears that at least half of them will follow me back automatically, so after a month I’ll have 1500 followers.  But will any of these people who have no idea who I am care what I have to say?  If I post a link and say, “Buy this cool product,” no more of them are likely to do so than if I’d sent it to 1500 random people.  I still have to spend time writing content, linking to cool stuff, and developing a personality, before any of them are going to take my opinions seriously.  So even though it might be a tool for growing a long List in a hurry, it still takes plenty of grunt work before the quality is there.

Something to work on in the future, I guess.  In the meantime, there are sites to work on and garden seeds to order.

One thing my web server tracks is what search terms people used when they found my site through a search engine.  These are kind of interesting to look through.  Sometimes they can provide writing ideas, like if searchers are interested in a topic I named but hadn’t written specifically about.  (”Hey, other people want to know all about lard too?  I thought I was the only one!”)  Sometimes they’re just funny.  Here are a few search terms that have brought people to this blog recently.

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Some blog housekeeping…

I accidentally broke some of my older St. Rose images when I was reorganizing my site the other day. Oops. Sorry to anyone who tried to look at those recently. They’re fixed now.

Anyone want to learn Latin? I started relearning it this summer with my textbook from high school. The first 20-25 chapters went down easy, about one each night. By chapter 45, I was dragging pretty hard and starting to feel like I wasn’t really retaining it very well, so I decided I ought to back up and go through several chapters again.

I’ve also thought about offering to teach it, since teaching something is a great way to learn it better, and learning a language is a lot easier if you can recite words and phrases with other people. I don’t know if there would be any interest in that locally, so first I’m going to write Latin lessons here on my blog for anyone who’s interested. Then if I end up doing the tutoring thing, I’ll have those ready to use.

Looking at my stats on Google Analytics, I noticed it said my most popular search term has been “safari mahjong strategy.” Not just a little more popular, but supposedly sending me seven times more traffic than any other search term. That didn’t really match up with the other numbers I’m seeing, so I looked closer and discovered that all those hits were me! Apparently, at some point I searched for that at Google and clicked on my site from there, and ever since then it’s been crediting that search every time I view one of my own posts. Traffic stats are tricky.

Speaking of traffic, mine has declined gradually ever since about Thanksgiving, but it rose again this week, so that was nice to see. I know my main problem here is that I’m too much of a jack of all trades and master of none. I’ve got about 90 posts, but no more than ten on any one topic that a person might care about. Oh well, it’ll get there eventually. The new St. Rose site is already getting almost as much traffic as I get here, after only a couple weeks in existence. It’s just not fair.

I’m posting this through the Postie plugin for Wordpress, which lets me send posts by e-mail. I hope it works well, because that’s much more convenient. The editor in Wordpress is pretty good, but I’m much faster with XEmacs, since I’ve been using it for e-mail for at least ten years. I can write posts up ahead of time in plain text files if I want, cut and paste easily from other files, and I don’t have to worry about losing them to browser crashes or anything like that.

That’s enough for tonight; time to go outside and play with my dog in the snow.

This will probably only be of interest to other bloggers, but I’ve found some cool plugins and thought I’d let people know about them.

CodeColorer

If you want to paste program code into a post, it can be a real pain. Lines may run together, and you usually loose the indentation. The plugin fixes that, and adds syntax coloring like many text editors now have. It sets the code off nicely, and optionally can add line numbers, like this:

FD Word Stats

I just found this one a couple days ago, but I like it. While you’re editing a post, it shows the number of words and sentences, and some calculations about the readability of the post, like this:

Words: 103 Sentences: 7 Fog: 9.8 Kincaid: 6.4 Flesch: 75

Those last three numbers are attempts to show how readable the post is, based on the average number of syllables per word, the number of words per sentence, and so on. Fog and Kincaid try to estimate the number of years of education a person would need to understand the post. Obviously, these are pretty vague and don’t agree at all in this case, so it’s probably not very useful, but it’s kind of cool. I mostly wanted it so I could see how many words I’d written so I wouldn’t get carried away so much.

Quotes Collection

This plugin runs the “Random Quote” box I’ve got in the right sidebar now. I wanted to start putting quotes I’ve collected into my blog somehow; and sure enough, there was a handy plugin for it. It’ll also let me plug them into posts, by keyword, author, or other methods, so I may start using it that way too.

Spam Karma 2

This one is saving me some time, now that I’m getting more hits from spammers. It does a much more thorough job than the default Askimet spam checker that comes with Wordpress. (Askimet checking is included in SK2.) It trashes the really obvious spam so I don’t have to sort through it all, and it’s smart about letting through the real comments. Toss in the SK2 Moderate Plugin and it’ll send the good ones through moderation, so you can double-check them.

Star Rating for Reviews

This plugin makes the nice little 1-5 star ratings on my reviews. I just put rating:3.5 between square brackets, and it turns that into 3.5 stars. It can use other ratings ranges like 1-10 or 1-100, and it can use up to 20 stars. It can use other graphics in place of the stars, and it’d be easy enough to make some.

WP-EMail

This one sits behind the little e-mail envelope at the bottom of each of my posts, and lets people e-mail the post to a friend. No one has used it yet, but when they do, it’ll make that easy for them and keep statistics for me on how much each post gets e-mailed.

StatPress

Statpress is a pretty nice Wordpress-specific traffic analyzer. In other words, it keeps track of all the visits to the blog and gives me lots of information about them. It can’t tell me who visited (nothing can), but it tells me how many came each day, what pages they went to, where they came from, and things like that. It tells me what search terms people used when they found my site on the search engines, and what posts get visited the most, so I can tell what stuff that I’ve written is the most popular. (Based on that, if I were smart, I’d write a hundred articles about the Latin Mass and forget everything else.)

I also use Google Analytics, which isn’t a plugin but is Google’s free traffic analyzer. Its main difference from Statpress is that GA is done in Javascript, so it only tracks real browsers (or the 99% of them that have Javascript enabled). Actual readers, in other words. Statpress tracks everything—search engines, spam bots, hack attempts—so it inflates the numbers quite a bit. By comparing the two, I can tell whether a burst of activity is real people who might care what I’m writing or just random traffic from machines.