dianaschnuth

Yesterday, I suddenly got the bug to redesign my website. I’ve had this iteration of the design for almost two years — the one previous was the longest run yet, at over three years.

I’m going to do it right this time, though, and rethink everything. The comment form, the design differences between individual entries and the index pages (sidebar or no sidebar?), a fluid layout, a mobile layout. Plus, I’m going to get to the bottom of why dynamic publishing and pagination aren’t working with my installation of Movable Type.

So, it’ll likely take some time, but those of you who actually look at my site every now and then (as opposed to an RSS reader) will see a change sometime in the relatively near future.

I’ve been getting some amusing Engrish-y comment spam from various permutations of a JoanSmith0999:

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Hey, I guess if I’m going to get comment spam, it might as well be amusing, right?

It’s funny: I have, let’s see, no less than fifteen ideas for blog entries written in my faux-Moleskine notebook, yet I can’t make myself sit down and write.

Part of the problem, at least for today, is that I let myself get sucked into video games during my tiny bit of productive, brain-is-working time. Part of the problem is that my body has reacted unusually strongly to the time change this year, and demands to be put to bed an hour earlier.

If I want to write a coherent blog entry that’s worth reading, I need to get my ass in my desk chair shortly after dinner, without any TV or gaming. If I want to watch TV or play games, I need to resign myself to that being the only thing that gets done that evening.

Tomorrow is Photo Thursday. That I can do.

Somehow, between Thursday and Friday evenings, my Movable Type installation got slightly hosed. The permissions on all my cgi scripts were wrong — not sure how or when that happened, since my hosting provider claims they haven’t made any changes — but setting those back didn’t fix everything. At least now I can post from my iPhone again, even though the normal New Entry screen is still hosed.

So, although I have several posts in the mental queue (new scanner, weekend with Amy, various photos), entries may be scarce while I’m having to tickety-tap them out on my iPhone keyboard.

Here’s hoping the nice people on the MT forums will be able to help…

Usually, when I’m curious about who finds my blog and what they’re looking for, I check my Google Analytics. It rarely shows me anything I didn’t already know, honestly; for instance, most people find my blog by searching for either CC’s Archibald Barasol joke, t-shirt surgery, or the lyrics for “What the Fuck Chuck” by the Phunk Junkeez.

One thing I’d forgotten, though, is that Google Analytics only works for pages on which I’ve stuck its code; that is, only on my blog proper. This evening, I checked my server’s AWStats page to see usage/hit stats on everything in the dianaschnuth.com domain, including all my archived websites of old. What I found was intriguing.

My top referrer so far this year? A Wikipedia article on the RCA tape cartridge (1958-1964). Back in college, I had a brief fascination with audio recording media, including various cassette media. I created a small sub-site on my personal homepage (circa 1998) that housed all the research I’d done, including a page on this oversized early cassette tape by RCA.

It’s a damn shame I didn’t notice earlier that the Back link was broken. This was an archive of a page I hadn’t touched in YEARS, but wanted to keep for posterity (and because I’d done a decent amount of research). I’m going in right now and fixing broken internal links — but that fantastic late-90s design is staying the same. Again, for posterity, despite the fact that the damn background with that tiny font makes my eyes bleed.

Another surprise was that my review of Fujiyama / Domo on Urbanspoon is generating a decent amount of traffic for me, too. When I look up this stat on Google Analytics and drill through for more detailed info, it seems that people usually only stay on my site for about a minute after clicking through to read my full review, unfortunately.

Sometimes I consider looking into some sort of banner ads for the pages that get the most traffic. But then I realize that a single page getting 100 hits a month is peanuts.

I think I’ll stick with blogging for the sake of blogging. Monetizing this motherfucker would be too much work.