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.