I’ve been neglecting the blog for too long, so I decided to give it a facial (minus the cucumbers—I don’t think they’d have a positive effect on my laptop’s keyboard). I just updated the features a little bit, trying to make it look and feel pretty… I don’t think any of the changes I made will cause the world to erupt in a ball of flames, but if it does, at least I didn’t waste any money buying cucumbers.
Is “bloggeryness” a word?
If it’s not, then I’m making it one.
Yesterday, I went to the main page and started scrolling down, looking at aaaaaaaall the months that I’ve written blog entries. I got to the bottom of the list and realized that the first month I wrote anything online was February, 2003. It’s now May of 2013.
The reason it’s not “my blog’s 10th anniversary” is that I’ve had to do some site-hopping. My first page was shawnbakken.com, but one day, the web service jacked up their fees, my registration lapsed and some other person or group jumped in and snatched it from me. I had to relocate. I opted to use Blogspot for a while and called it “(almost) shawnbakken.com,” but it just didn’t feel right. It never felt like it was “mine.”
I was eventually encouraged to use a new web service and found out that shawnbakken.net was available. Well, that seemed like a damn fine option. I filled out the necessary forms, paid a much lower price and got this site up and running in April of 2007. However, there was still one big problem: I’d neglected to save a lot of stuff from the old site onto my hard drive.
By copying and pasting entries from someone’s web feed and the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, I only lost a few things from mid-2005, back when Beauty and the Geek was on the air and I was at my most prolific. Dammit… I also lost hundreds of comments from people, but those weren’t nearly as important (no offense to anyone who left comments back then).
Thus, this site by itself has been around for about six years, but back in February—just a couple months ago—I hit my 10th anniversary of bloggeryness. I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have. And if you haven’t, I hope it hasn’t made you wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat too often.
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Opening posts for sharing is caring
I’m continuing to copy and paste old entries—I opened Document61 earlier this afternoon—and getting things organized by month and year on my hard drive. The whole process was getting a little too frustrating because when I wanted to search for a particular entry, loading all of the “Share this” buttons was taking forever. (You probably noticed it already and were too polite to say anything.) Thus, for the sake of limiting further pains in the tushie, those buttons are no longer on the main page. If you want to “like” something or tweet it or share it somehow, you’ll have to open the individual post. I hope the change makes for better surfing for the rest of you as well.
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Hacked, shmacked…
Some of you may have tried accessing shawnbakken.net over the last few days and it looked a little screwy. Well, that’s because we keep getting hacked. The web host is doing everything it can to fix the problem, but these hackers are apparently very persistent. It’s possible that by the time you click a link to get here via Twitter, Facebook or some other feed, the site’ll be down again, I really don’t know. That’s a shame because I have a couple entries I want to write, but before that point, I need to start backing up blog entries: I haven’t done any copying and pasting since June ’11. That’s a lot of months, so I better get to work in case we get both hacked and shmacked the next time around.
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Lies, damned lies, and WordPress statistics
Two or three months ago, @dangergirl101 tweeted that the website she operates with her husband had just reached one million views. She’s an old friend, so I sent her a reply to say “Guess I lost the popularity contest we weren’t actually having… Congrats on hitting 1M!” She thanked me, said she always reads my blog, then assured me that I’d hit one million in no time.
I couldn’t help but smile when I read that. Why? Because WordPress Site Stats started monitoring views back in February, 2011 and I finally reached 15,000 views in November, 2012. At that pace, it’ll be many, many years before I can even start sniffing the nether regions of a million.
A few days ago, I decided to look for some new plugins to add to the blog. That’s how I found the “Share this” buttons that are at the bottom of each entry, so maybe I’d find something else interesting. I eventually stumbled upon NewStatPress, which keeps track of a lot more than the number of views and top posts and pages.
It shows the most recent hits, search terms, referrals, page views, etc. Basically, it gives me a lot more information. Most of it isn’t necessary. I mean, I don’t really need to know that the last referrer to the site was www.myreliabledating.com. It’s interesting and amusing, but not necessary.
The reason I’m bringing this up is because of Sunday and Monday. I’ll admit that I’ve never thought this blog was really popular. For the most part, I write it because I enjoy it. That said, I’m not the only person who reads it—my parents occasionally ask me questions—which is why I was disappointed when I looked at the WordPress Stats page and saw zero views on Sunday and two on Monday. Two visitors in two days. *sigh*
Then I clicked on the NewStatPress overview page, thinking that a referrer with a name like pervertedcookie.au.pn would lift my spirits. What I saw first was that the number of visitors on Sunday was 39 and Monday was 41. Eighty visitors instead of two. Let’s see here… 80/2 = 40 x 15,000 WordPress views = 600,000 NewStatPress views. Huh… so that’s what the nether regions of one million smells like.
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Testing the comments section
I got a message from someone this morning to let me know that she tried to leave a comment on the previous entry, but it wouldn’t let her. I have no idea why that was the case, so I’m writing a quick blog post that I can use to try some stuff. If I can’t figure out what’s wrong, you’ll see a line under this paragraph that includes a lot of crying.
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I’m not sure what the problem was before, but it seems to working okay now (at least from my IP address). Fingers crossed that no one else has similar issues in the future…
