Category: meta

unstuck

Hi. Anyone still here?

I did some blog maintenance today, because the platform was so old that all its security flaws had been exploited and stupid hackers were flooding my world with spam. I think that’s fixed now. I hope. I updated the platform to the most recent version my host provides, and I thought it was going to break everything because I was *so* far behind, but mostly it seems to have just boogered up some of the special characters. Sorry about that. And sorry for any other broken stuff you find.

I think I might be about to get back into the blogging thing. It kind of tapered off when I got, as Ani DiFranco once put it, “distracted.” But there’s now one fewer distraction in my life, and words are starting to circulate through my brain again. In a writing way, I mean. I didn’t stop speaking or anything.

Who knows, maybe there will even be a poem or two around the corner.

This little description coming up is going to make it sound like the last three years have been awful, or soul-crushing or something, but please don’t read it that way. Mostly, they’ve been good.

But now I feel a little bit like I’ve been smashed against a wall, or frozen in a clear plastic cube, or something, and I was watching the world go by — albeit from a limited perspective — and now I’m…coming unstuck.

Anyway. I just wanted to say hi. Hi.

my blog is smart

My blog is smart. Not the part I write, but the software itself.

Over to the left of this text there’s a section for upcoming events. You’ll note that there are very few non-Poetry Thursday events these days, since most of the regular Oba Oba and Chester Attic gigs have been canceled. But that’s not the point. The point is that it says Daylight Savings starts on April 1st. But! Right above it, it warns you that this is a joke, by also providing notice that it’s April Fool’s Day.

I was going to fix it, but I’d like to encourage such software-cleverness as this.

oversight

The previous post (about Bayou) was, according to WordPress, my 300th post. I meant to point this out, but completely forgot while actually writing the post. The blog’s been up since September 2003, so I guess that means I’ve been averaging 100 posts per year. Clearly the average was a lot higher in the beginning.

Anyway, that’s all for now. I need to get ready to leave for West Virginia. Maybe I’ll tell you about it when I return.

meeting the needs of my readers

Did you know that if you google “which direction does the sun set in iraq“, this site comes up as the third result?

I know this because someone searched for it, then followed the link. It showed up as a key search phrase in my stats.

Let’s go over this one more time. Someone googled the phrase, “which direction does the sun set in iraq“.

I apologize that my blog did not previously provide an answer to this very difficult question. After much research, though, I am pleased to be able to tell you what none of the top ten results for that search could.

The answer: the west.

Yes, in Iraq the sun sets in the west.

Maybe if we all understood that, we wouldn’t have to fight.

search terms

This post is a result of me having not much else to say, largely because I am so caught up in the start of the semester that my focus is not very outward right now.

This post is to tell you that for some reason my average unique visitors per day dropped from around 150 in November to around 80 in January. December was somewhere in between, but I thought that was because of the holidays. Unfortunately, I don’t have stats for months prior to November because I switched hosts.

I just now, sitting here, typing, figured it out. Early in the life of this blog, I posted a link to a site featuring old pictures of scantily clad women. I called the post “antique porn”. This meant that there was a page on my blog with the word “porn” in the URL. This meant that droves of people got to my site as a result of searches for porn. Sometime in November or December I made that post private, because I was curious about how much of my traffic was coming from that one page. It took Google a while to catch up, but I just noticed that my number of 404s has dropped dramatically, and “porn” has dropped off the search terms completely. So I guess that one post was pulling in nearly half of my unique visitors. I’m not sure, but I don’t think it had quite that big an impact on my overall traffic because I’d imagine that the folks who get to me looking for porn are not as likely to return as those whose interests are more relevant to my site.

Anyway, now that I know what the effect is, I think I’m going to make that page public again. In the meantime, here are some of the top search words that got people here so far this month:

  • pesce
  • poetry
  • harrisburg
  • poems
  • mediterranean
  • bistro
  • 2005
  • eyes
  • restaurant
  • poem
  • pictures
  • koi
  • houlihan
  • vietnamese
  • hershey
  • rietmulder
  • pa
  • mantis
  • lucky
  • shameless
  • wrong
  • sunset
  • blog
  • miyako
  • pink
  • julia
  • picture
  • fedora
  • jancey
  • shady
  • ross
  • pho
  • leaf
  • james
  • goldenpalace.com
  • pasteur
  • scam
  • new
  • disobedience
  • susurration
  • civil
  • food
  • collective
  • mp3
  • cotton
  • armor
  • preteens

unplugged

I haven’t had internet at home for the last week or so, and won’t again until Thursday. What this means for you is: I’m not spending much time blogging, it takes a while for me to approve comments, and I’m not getting to email as quickly as normal.

What this means for me is: I never know what the weather is like until I step outside, I have no idea what’s going on in current events, I’ve made a lot of progress toward organizing my mp3 library (and spent some time thinking about whether or not I can call it an mp3 library if most of the files are actually in the .m4a or .m4p formats), my father called me one day to make sure I was still around as it took me more than 24 hours to reply to an email, I’ve gotten much better at spider solitaire, and my recipe-creation skills have received a workout.

In some ways this has been proof for me that I can survive without internet access at home. But I really really really don’t like it.

I’m ba-ack!

Well. After an unplanned hiatus, I’m back. I’ve switched hosts (the last one ate the SQL database that housed my blog, and was less than responsive to my pleas for help) and spent way too many hours trying to recover the stuff that I hadn’t backed up or was eaten. I lost much of May, and probably some comments, but overall I’m pretty pleased with the extent to which I was able to recover. Many thanks to Google’s cached pages. The poetry and gallery sections are not yet working, but I hope to get to them relatively soon. We’ll see.

Anyway, while I’ve been gone…School has continued to go well, and I’m now really excited for the coming semesters. It sounds like I’ll be able to tailor my McDaniel experience to my interests (well, interest: creative writing), and my advisor has been amazingly supportive so far. I haven’t officially made the switch yet, but I think I’m going to drop the Political Science piece of my major (I was English/PoliSci with a Writing minor) to give me more time to do the extra creative writing stuff. Again, we’ll see.

Non-academically, I am still loving my apartment here in Westminster, and I’ve made some on-campus friends I’ve really been enjoying spending time with. It’s also wonderful to have my sister here.

I would like to say that I will go back to updating regularly, but November is National Novel Writing Month and I have been convinced to undertake this insane task. They recommend lots of boasting before November starts so that failure to write 50,000 words carries with it a large dose of embarassment. So here’s my boasting: I’m gonna write 50,000 words in November! Yikes.

For now, I’m going to go do the dishes.