What Kind of Designs?

I just noticed today blogspot/google has a stats tab on my blog dashboard. I like stats, I do work for a statistical agency after all.

I clicked on the tab to find out what blogger offered. I already employ two other free stat services on my blog, how does blogger's stats compare?

Blogger's stats are simpler in content and to use. The summary page shows a graph of page views, traffic, audience and posts; the detail pages show more info about each category. I clicked on the traffic page and viewed a list of referring URLs, those pages that point to my blog, this very one you're reading. How did you get here, anyway? I see on the list a variety of sources, Google is to be expected as is other friends' blogs. What I didn't expect was what was listed second on the all-time list: tattoodesignsvault.com with 69 instances.

I'm still scratching my head over that.

 

Westward Bound

Monday I leave for a week in Seattle for work. I've set my blogger settings to publish a post directly when it comes in through the email. I plan on snapping a lot of pictures with the camera phone and sending them for blog posts. It will be a semi-realtime travelogue. I don't think I'll be able to title the posts or explain the picture, so it should be very different for my blogging style.

I will be able to read comments from the road, so you'll have to let me know what you're thinking.

In the mean time before I leave I'll be doing laundry and deciding what to wear next week. I hate that. I always forget something, wonder what it'll be this time?
 

Staying the Same?

I've been playing with blogger and can't decide how I like the changes. Blogger has many new widgets available now. With one you can create a list of blogs you read and it will list them in order of most recently updated.

Pros: You can immediately see who has a new post up and who doesn't, which means no wasted clicking.

Cons: The new list format takes up a lot of real estate in the sidebar and you still have to click on the blog to read subsequent comments. Your list isn't alphabetical anymore if you sort by time.

What do you think about the changes?

Have you tried the bubble popping game at the bottom of my side bar? What's your high score?
 

Are you smarter than a fifth grader?

I found this gadget to determine the readability of your blog and ran my blog through it.



Not the high-brow result I expected or feel I deserve. A friend of mine, an English department chair at a local high school, told me these programs look for "big words" and words not oft-used. So I did an experiment.

I gave it the URL for yesterday's post as well as a post from a couple weeks ago, both having "big words" and got this [better] result:



OK, so what's your blog's reading level? Are you surprised? Did you think you were smarter? Or dumber?

Vocabulary Test

Lorraine refers to our blogging world as "Blogopia." I and think she's just plain wrong.

Let's examine the words myopia, hyperopia, and presbyopia . These words with the 'opia' suffix relate to how we see, nearsighted, farsighted, and needs reading glasses. (Do all Presbyterians need reading glasses or is that just me?) Blogopia therefore would mean how we see our blogging world.

Let's examine the words utopia and dystopia. These two words with the 'topia' suffix describe the places where we live: well, Utopia, obviously, and its evil twin, the land of doom (characterized by an oppressive social control).

Therefore, our little blog world should be Blogtopia. Right?

I'm sure Lorraine will disagree, anyone else?

This is my 204th post. I went and missed my 200th. I posted it all right, I just didn't know it at the time. Oh well.

I updated my sidebar today. I had bookmarked a lot of blogs as I found them and today just decided to list them all on my page instead or continuing to bookmark them, and sort them into groups while I was at it.

As some of the categories fell into place, I realized I need to do more of my interests, not just read about them. I have several quilting projects hanging around and while I love to go to my bee meetings, it's not inspiration enough to get anything done or worked on.

Well, there is the kitchen thing. It's hard to feel motivated to get anything done when the heart of the household is on hold. The counter top is due for installation on Friday, but I'm not sure I'll have a working sink and dishwasher by the weekend. Living in limbo zaps all enthusiasm right out of me. I hope I'll be rejuvenated creatively when I have my kitchen back. Besides, of course, getting everything back in there. I plan to purge extraneous cookware, but I may be so tired of all this when the time comes, who knows what'll happen.

And now I leave you with the picture of the day: A kid in Curaçao

I finally converted my blog template to the new version. I picked this template design, mostly because I haven't seen a lot of other blogs using it. I've gotten blogs mixed up before, reading one, thinking I was on another because of the same template colors. I don't want anyone to credit my brilliance to anyone else. Looking at my new page is like looking in the mirror after a drastic haircut, yeah, it's me, but I'm different. do I like what I see?

I spent some time going back to old posts and adding labels so they show up in the label list. Wow, I ramble a lot. It's interesting to look back at old posts, to remember what was going on back then, and how we're moving on all the time.

Let me know what you think of the new design!