Walt at Random

This blog’s been using WordPress 2.0.6. Just a wee bit behind the times.

Maybe that’s part of the reason I’ve had so much trouble with paragraph-swallowing.

Since PLN Highlights is moving to the current WP version in the near future, and was already much closer to current form, I thought it finally made sense to move.

Downsides: I don’t get an immediate overall comment count, the Category list is well down the screen instead of being on the right side of the editing window, and you can’t add HTML directly to the visual-editing screen–which is terrible practice anyway. Or, rather, you can add HTML directly to the screen, and WordPress will turn it into displayable text, e.g., attempting to embolden a word by using <b>word</b>–well, you can see the results.

Upsides: For one, I don’t believe this editor will swallow paragraphs, and on any post longer than 200-300 words, the old version was getting really bad in that regard–sometimes, even after I went into HTML view and added explicit marks, it would turn them into line breaks.

Also, the visual editor is much cleaner, is resizable and, tada, you can even go to a full-screen editing mode. What a concept!

Post and comment management also seems much cleaner.

Hmm. This is interesting: In HTML mode, paragraphs show as spaces rather than <p></p> pairs. I don’t believe that was true before. I switched to HTML because horizontal rules won’t work in visual mode.

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So I inserted that as <hr> in HTML mode–also much smoother than in WP 2.0.6, since that version popped up a little HTML window as a separate window, where this has it as a tab.

Now, let me complain about LISHost service. Nahh, not really…I don’t have any complaints about LISHost service. I may disagree with Blake Carver about the future for public libraries (“may” is an understatement), but he runs one heck of a hosting service.

I see other library folks migrating to LISHost–and even more folks migrating to WordPress. I’m trying to remember the last time I saw a liblogger migrate away from WordPress… (well, except to move from a WordPress-hosted blog to a WordPress blog on their own domain).

Enough blather. For once, I’m up to date. Well, heck, my new(ish) computer is a Core2 Duo, so that’s fairly up to date also. And it’s maroon–that’s something not everybody can say.

Oh, I just noticed something else that makes me happy: “Uncategorized” is no longer tagged by default, so I don’t have to remember to unclick it. Nice.

Now, about tags…well, not this week, not on this blog.

This exercise in randomness began three years ago today, not at all by accident. (Technically, I wrote the first post earlier…WordPress lets you schedule posts for a future date. They don’t let you go backward; only Gmail does that, and then only on certain days…)

So how’s it going since last year?

Prior to this post, the blog has a total of 729 posts and 2,480 comments. I’m still proud of the comment-to-post ratio: More than three comments per post is on the high side for liblogs, if not for Big Deal Bloggers. And I’m still bemused at the partially-random nature of which posts get lots of comments. For example, of the small handful of posts with more than 20 comments, most were “on topic”–but the one with the most comments of all was about as random as you can get: 27 comments on Tri-tip: A food question.

I guess I’m slowing down a little (not that the last year has been troublesome or anything…): There were slightly fewer posts than in the second year (210 as compared to 247) and significantly fewer comments (733 as compared to 936).

Readership? At the end of the first year (that is, for March 2006), the blog was up to 1,064 sessions/day and 2,370 pageviews/day.

Some alternate months for this past year, compared to the second year:

• May: 2007 = 1,693 sessions/day, 2,072 pageviews/day, 10,001 unique IP addresses. (2006: 1,254, 3,001, 6,930.)
• July: 2007 = 1,712 sessions, 2,546 pageviews, 8,194 IP addresses. (2006: 1,215, 2,549, 6,223.)
• September: 2007 = 1,320 sessions, 2,185 pageviews, 6,456 IP addresses. (2006: 1,219, 2,393, 6,303.)
• November: 2007 = 1,295 sessions, 2,233 pageviews, 5,839 IP addresses. (2006: 1,389, 2,433, 6,639.)
• January: 2008 = 1,362 sessions, 2,604 pageviews, 6,139 IP addresses. (2007: 1,445, 3,328, 7,173.)
• March: 2008 = 1,443 sessions, 2,462 pageviews, 7,115 IP addresses. (2007: 1,628, 3,298, 8,823.)

Over the past year, some 58,762 different IP addresses have visited this blog for a total of 541,816 sessions–and 911,817 pageviews. Last year, I was a little astonished that the IP count for this blog was almost three times that of Cites & Insights for its first nine months on LISHost. This year, it appears that C&I is making up ground: It shows 36,805 IP addresses for the last 12 months, about two-thirds of the W.a.r. total.

If you look at year-to-year trends, if this was a “brand” blog, I might be upset: It’s trending slightly downward year to year. But this isn’t a “brand” blog, and I’m thrilled at there being almost a million pageviews for a blog that ain’t all that much.

As for subscribers…since I didn’t force everyone to resubscribe via Feedburner, I really don’t know how many there are overall. As of mid-March, I had 510 Bloglines subscriptions and 192 Google Reader subscriptions (for one feed, at least); since, of the Feedburner subscriptions I do have (only 77 of the 510 Bloglines, pretty much all of the Google Reader), about three-quarters are for those two readers, I’m inclined to believe there are between 800 and 900 subscriptions in all. That’s probably about the same as a year ago.
It looks as though readership probably reached its peak in the blog’s second year. So did my blogging, for that matter, so I’m not surprised. I’m inclined to believe that blogging in general may have peaked in 2007, and that liblogs might have peaked then, but that’s just a belief.

“Peaked” doesn’t mean “and is now falling apart,” to be sure. I’m not going away, and I continue to be astonished at the number of people who apparently read and respond to what I write here. Neither are liblogs going away (or library blogs, for that matter).

Enough metablogging for one day. (Did I mention: buy my books and join the PALINET Leadership Network?)