Random Blogging

Sunday

Largely spent researching and blogging about Malachy, and also re-did my layout for this blog. It wasn't all at the screen, I've done laundry, cooked some chili tofu and vegies (vegan) for lunch & am seriously considering a large slab of red meat for dinner ... Either that or open a can of beans.

Blog

As I reported a few days back when I installed Haloscan trackback I badly damaged my publishing template, and also ended up with a second, unrelated, set of comments. I knew I had to fix it, and started again from a default template, applying my personalisations. I hadn't been too happy with the look of the site before, so I selected a different starting point. I like it more.
The Blog was supposed to be a kind of diary. Looking at recent efforts I seem to have wandered off into current affairs. I'm going to make a conscious effort to bring the subject of the blog back to my life.

John Paul II & Malachy

I've spent a fair amount of time on this, see next entry for what I came up with. It's Interesting how what started out as a brief article on his death turned into major blogging research on Malarchy. I'd heard about Malachy long ago - I've been on the Internet for 13 years, and I first heard about him long before then. I remember trying to find out about his predictions way back in my late teens. Today, thanks to the internet it wasn't that hard.

Yahoo 360

Environment

I've decided I really don't like the Yahoo 360 environment as much as I like this one. It's only customisable within very tightly constrained parameters. I'll keep it around for a while, but only are a place to store the Software Patents blog.

Arrogance

There are a number of extras they throw in my face that are only available overseas, they have my country code on file, so why do they insist on presenting me with the suggestion I add them to my start page?

Copyright Debacle

This must have hurt. The disclaimer that they added to my original Yahoo 360 entry, is found several other sites around the blogosphere, Geek News for example. Weirdly enough, they started with "How a cut-n-paste can ruin your day", and cut-n-pasted it to several pages. I hope they checked it first.

Site Stats and Search Engines

I've been looking at my site stats from Statcounter It's revealed some interesting things.

• 71% of my search engine originating traffic is from Technorati, and the other 29% from Google. I also had a search from Blogpulse, presumably they don't consider this a search engine.Looking at Technorati it is much more up-to-date and seems a much better option than Google for searching current blogs.
• 68% of my search traffic was from "Yahoo 360", with other search terms: Albania, "take3 movie newmarket", "kiore personal firewall", and "simplified characters". Only the movie one gave me pause for thought. It was Google having several postings on my main page that happened to contain those words in different entries.
• A fair amount of my traffic seems to be coming from the next blog button. I know it's coming from other blogs on blogspot, and I can't find any links to me from those blogs.
• I'm getting no traffic from the web ring I joined.

Quote of the day

"Always live your life with one dream to fulfill. No matter how many of your dreams you have realized in the past, always have a dream to go. Because when you stop dreaming, life becomes a mundane existence."

-- Sara Henderson, Writer