Some of you may have seen the link on my sidebar a couple months ago, but I will officially unveil what will inevitably be a work in progress, BC Election 2009. It is my intention for that site to be a resource for the upcoming provincial election on May 12, 2009.
Most commentary I have on provincial politics will be directed toward that site.
I finally took the plunge and upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1. They completely changed the writer’s interface and I must say it will take some getting used to.
Some of the changes they made I took quite some exception to, mainly that the path it takes to actually get a post out is hindered somewhat by not having everything on a single screen – I now have to scroll down to mark which category I want this post attached to, or whether I want this post done in the future.
I guess I shouldn’t have touched something that worked so well.
Update: I have edited the RSS feed footer – this got upgraded by default and the last thing I want to be doing is spamming the readers for Digg or Reddit “hits”.
Getting sick is never fun, but this was not the best of weeks for me to catch the flu. As such, I’ll likely start posting later this week.
Posting will be very light for the next few days.
Well, it took four and a half years to get here, but I’ve finally managed to ink up 1000 posts on this weblog. I wish I had something more inspirational to say, but that’s about it. This isn’t even an April Fool’s day joke either.
While gaining a readership has not been the goal of this weblog, certainly quite a few people read this site daily. According to Google Analytics, since 2007, the most read post on this site was my rather inflammatory post about Hurricane Dean. This caused my visitor count to spike up to 655 visits. Second place was 255 visits on March 17, 2008 (an analysis of the March 17 by-elections).
Unfortunately I don’t have reliable data on anything before that, but I have been averaging about 100 visits a day; this is compared to about 50 visits a day back early in 2007.
Oddly enough, my post on How to Best Exploit Aeroplan, despite being posted in the middle of 2006, continues to be the second most popular topic.
According to HTTP logs, I get about 400 unique visitors a day, but most of them are likely bots and spammers trying to get stuff posted in the comments section of this weblog. Akismet has been quite effective at filtering out most of the junk.
Geographically, 66% of my visitors are from Canada, 21% are from the USA and 2.6% are from the United Kingdom.
In terms of who’s driving traffic to the site, Google is referring 67% of the traffic, while 15% of the traffic is being brought direct (e.g. people’s bookmarks) and 3.3% is from Yahoo.
Will be away in the Interior for the Easter weekend. See you Monday!
I got back from my 50-hour trip in Washington State and came back with nearly close to my limit in customs exemptions (currently $400). Especially with the Canadian currency performing strongly, everything in the USA is about 30% cheaper than their equivalents in Vancouver, so it was an easy decision to load up on some items that I had been waiting to get for quite some time (cookware, clothing, and a run at Costco to name a few).
Staying overnight in the States is also relatively cheap if you use a source like Priceline to secure inexpensive lodging. Since it is currently the off-season, one can bid ridiculously low rates for rooms and actually win bids.
Finally a note about posting – normally I sequence posts to go between 11:00 to 12:00pm daily. This is why I seem to be posting from vacation, but I’m really far away from a computer. Right now there is a lot of time-sensitive material which I would like to post on, so I will put them all out at once. This will be at the expense of having this site perhaps not being updated within 48 hours or so.
I’ll be out of the country for a couple days, taking advantage of the strength of the Canadian dollar relative to the US. Don’t spam the weblog too much!
Update: Back now! Nice, small break.
I’ve decided to enable the full text in my RSS feeds. I notice most other blogs just put the full text of their articles on RSS, and I will do the same. I’m not sure why I just put in the first 100 words or so in the first place, I think it was due to space considerations. I’m going to try to find some plugins to make sure that the number of comments per article is in the RSS feed as well. So if you see some silly “test” posts, please ignore them. Thanks.
Update: Interesting how Firefox truncates the RSS feeds, while Internet Explorer actually displays the correct status… so if you’re testing your RSS mechanism, I would be using Internet Explorer, or just the source view function in Firefox.
Since I have written approximately 900 articles on the site, I have created The Best of Double Blind and selected a bunch of articles that I have written which were “interesting”. Right now there are 35 articles there, which I think is a bit too much, but I will keep it there anyway.
Also, I have introduced the “Travel” category and retroactively gone through my articles and re-indexed them. Writing about vacation is always fun.