Tag Archives: Blogging

Beware the fish!

I’d like you to take a look at something. Here it is:

Nemo

That image brings more people to my blog than anything, anything else. Yesterday I had 145 visitors. Of those 145 visitors, 128 were here to look at that image. How do I know this? Well, take a quick look at the top search terms from yesterday:

nemo
find nemo
nemo images
pictures of nemo
nemo image
photo of nemo
image de nemo

I also had a good one, “why is starship troopers 2 so bad,” but as you can see the thing people want, nay, demand to see is a picture of a cartoon fish. You may notice that my name does not appear anywhere on that list of search terms, too, in case the blow to my pride wasn’t sharp enough to make me feel really badly about myself.

If you’re a regular reader, and I assume there are some of you out there, then you know I try my best to make this blog interesting and eyeball-worthy. I’m not as colorful as some crime writers who blog, choosing instead to maintain a certain level of decorum, but I do want you to have a good time reading what I’ve written. And if you happen to get something of value out of my ramblings about writing and publishing, so much the better.

Or you can stare at Nemo. Just stare at him. Be hypnotized by his stripes.

Probably the most frustrating thing about the whole Nemo situation is that I have no idea how to fix it. The easiest thing would be to delete or rename the image, thus forcing web searchers into a broken link, but Google is such an efficient mechanism that it would find the picture wherever I put it, whatever I called it, and we’d be back in the same boat all over again.

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DIY

Normally I would only post one blog entry per day, but those of you who come here often may have noticed a somewhat remarkable change and I felt it was worth addressing now. And for those who’ve never been here before: the change has to do with the blog template.

I’ve been using one of WordPress’ old templates for time out of mind and had grown quite used to it. This morning, however, I noticed I’d fallen behind in my installed version of the software and decided, in my own clumsy way, to update it myself. The update was, in fact, successful, but in the process I blitzed my old template and all the images I’ve ever uploaded to the blog. Every. Image.

Some of the images I’ve managed to replace. You’ll notice they’re much bigger and bolder, which is thanks to the snazzy new default WordPress theme. The background may not be as colorful and/or moody as I have used before, but I think overall the change is a positive one. My wife has been after me for some time to use a template with a larger default text size and this definitely fits the bill, as the entries are much easier to read in the enhanced font.

The down side to all of this, besides my having to spend an hour fixing all the broken images on my front page, is that I now have to go through every single entry I’ve ever made and a replace the images I used there. To give you some idea of the magnitude of this task, I had roughly 350-odd images spread out over all the various entries I’ve made in the last three years. All of them have to be uploaded again, given the appropriate links… it’s going to be a real pain.

All of this won’t happen overnight, of course. I expect I’ll do this for weeks a little bit at a time, starting with the oldest of the posts (circa 2010) and working my way up to posts made just a scant couple of weeks ago. The plus of this will be, again, larger and brighter graphics, as I have expanded room to make the entries a bit more vivid. So it’s not all bad news.

Those of you who are just now coming to the blog will, of course, have very little (or no) idea what I’m talking about, which I suppose is just as well. For those of you who’ve spent a decent amount of time on the blog over the years, I’m curious to know your thoughts concerning my forced redesign. I realize it’s a pretty shocking transformation, but do you think I’m right that it’s a little prettier, a little more reader friendly and so forth?

Anyway, comments remain open as always. For some reason you can now comment on the pages for my novels, which is a little annoying, but I can’t figure out how to shut that off. If you know the secret, by all means share it with me.

And, as always, enjoy.

Be mindful of the time.

Thanks to the miracle of Jetpack (read about it elsewhere), I now have a much better idea of what people read on this blog and how they find it. Believe you me when I say that I get some very strange search terms via Google, some of which are kind of disturbing. I still find all of that pretty fascinating however, so I’m willing to let the creepy searches for mary louise weller rappe, for example, slide in favor of fun ones like did they realy blow up a building in the making of the expendables. The answer to that latter question is, no, they didn’t really blow up a building when they made The Expendables. That’s what we call movie magic.

Anyway, I have almost three years’ worth of archives tucked away in this blog, and since I update more or less five days a week, that represents a lot of material. I wasn’t sure how often people actually looked at that stuff until I finally had Jetpack to show me the way, but now I see that the older entries actually get a surprising number of hits.

The material itself is just as it always was, though occasionally the information is dated, and everyone’s free to dig around in those archives to their heart’s content. But the one thing they cannot do is comment.

The why of this is pretty simple: I have WordPress set up to keep comments open for 90 days after an entry is posted. After that time, the comments are closed whether anyone took advantage of the opportunity or not. And there are a couple of reasons for my doing this. One of them has to do with spam. So far Akismet has swatted down 26,841 comments and it continues to intercept (on average) dozens every day. These spam comments usually don’t show up on the front-page entries, but on entries from weeks or even months before. Now can you imagine if I left open comments for all three years of this blog’s lifespan? Who knows how much spam I’d drown in?

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The eyes have it.

If you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the first page of this blog, you will see that my site (such as it is) is powered by WordPress. A long time ago I used Movable Type, but when they shifted their attention away from individual bloggers and toward commercial clients, I jumped ship and switched to what I use now. I have not regretted the decision, as WordPress is an excellent product at an even better price: free.

One of the things that makes WordPress such a great platform for blogging is the existence of a large developer community. WordPress utilizes “plugins,” little sub-apps that do different things. I use a plugin for polls, though I haven’t posted a poll in ages, and those boxes you see over on the left-hand side of the screen when you look at a single entry — with buttons for Facebook, Google+ and others — is likewise a plugin. That one’s called Digg Digg and it’s great. I highly recommend it.

Anyway, all of these plugins are mostly developed by designers working on their own with no expectation of profit. These people just want to make WordPress better, and by and large they do. WordPress can be customized in so many different ways that, really, no two installations are exactly alike. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s pretty cool. If you want uniformity, make an account at LiveJournal.

In the latest update of WordPress there became available an optional, plugin-like thing called Jetpack. Now as I say, ordinarily WordPress doesn’t do this sort of thing itself, so I was intrigued. I had my tech department (my wife) install Jetpack and poked around inside it. I have been pleased with what I found.

For one thing, Jetpack folds in a plugin called Akismet. This is the plugin that keeps spam comments from appearing on the blog. The comment-spammers are relentless, and over the last three years Akismet has intercepted and destroyed over 26,000 spam comments on this blog alone. That’s pretty damned impressive. Occasionally it’ll miss one and I have to spam-filter it manually, but that happens so rarely that I don’t even consider that an issue worth getting exercised about.

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