Category: meta

So, I’ve been AWOL a bit recently. Part of it is paralysis; there’s actually a tremendous amount of material I could be blogging about, but since I’m not usually a fan of the linkdump, I don’t know where to start. But the main issue at present is that we have a six week baby in the house who hasn’t figured out the function of that giant yellow object in the sky, not to mention the fact that we are moving our household from Texas to Wisconsin for my wife’s residency, in less than three weeks. Related to this is the postdoc position I am trying to wind down and make sure I leave here with all i’s dotted and t’s crossed. So, things are a bit hectic to say the least.

That said, though, I intend to take some time today and fire off a few posts. Please bear with me 🙂 I haven’t abandoned this property!

UPDATE: I wrote this post without even realizing that my site was down. Its funny that while I personally am too CPU-limited to blog, my blog is being disabled by Dreamhost for consuming too many server resources. I am trying to resolve the issue with DH…

UPDATE: thanks, Astro, for noticing. I feel loved 🙂 OK I switched to the simplest theme I could find and deactivated all my plugins. Even my beloved Textile (though Akismet stays). And voila, we are back. Now I have to debug the site and figure out which plugin was causing the resource hogging.

RefScan has been pretty moribund of late, mainly because I have been preparing for a cross country move and tying up loose ends at my postdoc. Please rest assured that there will be new content regularly appearing again in the near future. For a few weeks though, the dry spell will continue.

Also, incidentally, upgrading to WordPress 2.2 kind of hosed our K2 theme install, so we are looking a bit retro until I can fix that.

According to Google Analytics, over half my traffic comes from google searches, and 70% of my readers are first-time visitors. The referral logs are fascinating, in that these searches really reflect the eclectic mix of topics I blog about here. Here are some particular cool search strings I’ve noticed:

• la grande jatte study technique
• money spent by otaku 2006
• “number 42” physics

I’m also seeing a lot of traffic related to The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and They’re Taking the Hobbits to Isengard.

Overall, I think I’m doing a good job at giving equal time to all my various interests. The roblem is that there are so many that I can’t give detailed attention to any single one 🙂 That category list just seems to keep growing. I am satisfied though – even though I like having a regular stable of returning readership, I also find it gratifying somehow that a lot of what I write isn’t scrolling off the page to oblivion, but actually does get found by someone who, for that particular moment in time, was interested in precisely that topic and nothing else. I try to keep my blogging rooted in what I want rather than what I think my readers want, and the google traffic predominance really helps give me that freedom from temptation. It’s a nice balance, one that is sorely lacking from my other blogs.

On 1st April, nothing I post will be true.

I am a big fan of the .info domain registry. They are cheap, and they are intuitive. I mean, most of my websites/blogs are informational, after all. But it’s that same quality that attracts the less savory elements of the net. A study shows that .info is actually a pretty risky domain, even more than .ru :

Although Romania and Russia did not have the highest overall percentage of malicious domains – that title belonged to the island of Sao Tome, with 18.5 percent of .st domains containing some sort of exploit – they both had some of the highest percentages among larger countries: 5.6 and 4.5 percent, respectively.
[…]
The riskiest top-level domain of the bunch was .info, with 7.5 percent of surveyed .info domains posing some sort of risk. The domain that came in second was, perhaps not too shockingly, .com at 5.5 percent, followed by .biz at 4.9 percent.

this probably explains why Shamus‘ comment system hates me. But i can assure you that all of MY .info domains are perfectly safe. If you turn into a penguin or your arms come off or something while reading, it’s not my fault.

As you may have noticed, the category list here keeps on growing 🙂 I just find that there are many things I am interested in, things that I appreciate that I want to share. I certainly am as surprised as anyone else who knows me to find that “Art” now ranks among those things – I never fancied myself much of an art critic. And yet, Art is a broad enough term that I can interpret as I see fit. I suppose I am excluding music from the definition since I already have a Sound category; likewise with food. Those are arbitrary delineations, but meaningful to me. At any rate, I am a dabbler; this blog is my canvas. Let the psychoanalyses begin 🙂

For the record, as of this writing, Meta posts every other category. Obviously, I like blogging about blogging more than everything else 😛

Astro is taking a break for a while. I fully understand blog fatigue – it’s partially why I started Haibane.info in fact. Take it easy, man, the blogsphere will still be here when you get back.

Ten thousand visits to Haibane.info, in less than one year, as of 11pm this evening. I am truly humbled. It’s small by poliblog standards, but I value each and every one far more than I would ten times that number at my other blogs. I feel like I’ve gained a lot more than just traffic; I’ve gained friends, and there’s no metric that can quantify a thing of such value. Thank you. (more…)