Not to creep y’all out or anything
Apr 23, 2009 Blogging
I’m not hard-core about watching my stats but I do click to ‘em now and then just to see my numbers. I can only see ISP addresses and I can’t really connect those with people and I don’t really try. But I can also see referrers so I have a general idea where people come from (although this is imperfect — like AOL users get run through a machine that’s in Virginia no matter where they’re from).
So anyway, I can see that some people are very interested in my Joaquin entries and they’re all coming from the same general area in which he lives and I’d think, “Oh sure, that’s Joaquin” if it was just one but then there two or three coming from the larger general area and they’re all using the same type of searches. (I can also see what people search for on my blog with this plugin but I can’t connect that to individual visitors so don’t worry about searching — I’ll never know who searched for “blog politics;” I’ll just know you found 22 entries.) These visitors are only interested in the Joaquin entries and are hitting the same ones over and over. I labeled the ISPs in my statcounter so I could click a button and just check ‘em out.
Now it’s possible that none are Joaquin but that they know him. It may be that someone from that area knows him and happened on the entry and got a total kick out of recognizing him and told some friends or something. That’s absolutely possible because the city he’s living in isn’t all that huge and here in Columbus, which is a really a small town in a lot of ways, that could happen pretty easily so it’s likely it could happen even more easily there. (One person found the blog by typing “joaquin” and “dawn” into a google blog search and they live in his town but I don’t think that one is him ‘cuz I know he has the blog address, which is why I thought it could just be people who know him.)
I just don’t really know what to think of it, which is why I labeled the ISPs. I only do that when something weird seems to be going on so I can track it. I’m gonna tag this entry “Joaquin” too so those ISPs will know I see ‘em and I can say, “Howdy — feel free to introduce yourselves!”
Then again if it remains a mystery forever I’ll probably forget about it in a few days anyway (after they realize that there are only 9 entries — well, 10 now — with the Joaquin label and move on). Or they could always add a google alert to get immediate notification if I write about him again only I think I’m probably not going to want to do that for awhile. I am officially a little wary of it.
(Maybe I should take down the pics, though. I’d be weirded out if I came on a blog and found pictures of myself from a million years ago stuck on someone’s blog. Yeah, I’m going to go remove them. I’m thinking it wasn’t so kosher to put them up there.)
Tags: Blogging, joaquin, statcounter
Operation Less Internet Day 3
Mar 18, 2009 Blogging
Mostly I’ve been undoing the productivity things I put in place for freelancing and setting up new productivity tools for my job, which gives me more space for MYSELF here on my laptop. Like I removed my google reader notifier. I removed my gmail notifier. I set up my Entourage email to login to work’s outlook exchange server and I only use Twhirl for twitter now, which is where the work accounts are and no longer open up Tweetdeck, which is where my personal account is. Finally I installed a desktop feedreader to keep my work feeds separate.
Now my work is neatly compartmentalized. When I’m doing work, it’s all open. When I’m done, it’s all closed. I don’t fret about answering non-work email in a timely manner (so be forewarned) and I’m using Facebook as my virtual watercooler so I still have one place to waste a little time when I’m feeling antsy.
I already feel calmer.
Someone sent me a blog link earlier and it’s a blog I unsubscribed from because it made me freaking crazy and sure enough, craziness ensued. I was making waffles for the kids and cursing this blogger and making up blog posts (that I’d never write) and imagining the scathing comments (that I’d never leave) and realizing yet again what a good idea this internet trim down really is for me. What do I care if someone is an entitled idiot as long as I don’t know about it, right?
But it was good my friend sent it if only I could see what one single stupid post can do to my mood and my morning, as a reminder of what a lot of energy and brain space I’ve wasted being mad at the people who live in my computer.
I’ve given myself a blog subscription limit and anytime I add something, I’ll have to drop something, which will keep me mindful. I’m still terrified I might miss something awesome (or even amusingly annoying) but I can trust my friends to keep me in the loop. (Even my friend who emailed me today — this blogger is someone I liked to bitch about WITH her so in the interest of our mutual bitching, that was cool. I mean, better to fume WITH someone than fume alone.)
Tags: Facebook, productivity, STUPID, twitter, work
My wordpress 2.7 install went wonky
Dec 12, 2008 Blogging
(sigh) I think it’s just having such an enormous blog and also having played with plugins and themes so often through the years. I might be wrong about that. I’ve been blogging for 9 years come next month and I have (not counting this one) 3,298 posts, 15,220 approved comments, 4 pages, 24 categories and 967 tags. I’m using 11 widgets and since installing Akismet, I’ve blocked 41,652 spam comments.
Before this I was on Moveable Type. Before that I was hand-coding my entries in basic html.
In short, I have a huge, unwieldy blog and upgrades rarely go smoothly.
I meant to post a good post today but instead I’m going to spend my non-working, non-parenting time today trying to fix this. Rats.
Tags: blog, Blogging, plugins, wordpress, wordpress 2.7, wordpress upgrade
