an exercise in percussive maintenance
Tag: blogging
I’m not one to obsess over my stats. I can go for weeks without even looking at my stats page. But I was pretty pleased when my August stats showed an average view for the month of 37, the highest yet on if all else fails… I had no idea what was coming.
The past three days have seen my stats climb to 171, 198, and 197 so far today. At the current rate it will pass 200 views before midnight. (Correction, it passed the 200-mark while I was writing this and it now stands at 201 views.)
The first day of spring has always felt like a holiday to me. Not a stay-away-from-work holiday, but a special day that deserves to be celebrated. And this September first is worthy of celebration indeed. It has been warming up over here for the past two weeks, so much so that we’ve been sleeping with the window open, the better to enjoy the chirping and croaking of seemingly hundreds of frogs that had woken from hibernation early.
But my favourite part is when, apparently overnight, almost without one noticing, everything suddenly erupts in the most beautiful and varied shades of green. Spring is a time of new life. It’s time of new beginnings, at least for me, much more than New Year’s is.
At one point last year I started volunteering in the WordPress.com support forums. It started out as a way to procrastinate on my writing and studies, but I soon became hooked. Partly it was the great bunch of established volunteers who welcomed me into their midst and taught me (and are still teaching me) the ropes.
But the true reward is that rush of endorphins every time I successfully help someone solve a problem with their site. That, and the fact that my knowledge of WordPress.com has grown with leaps and bounds as I really dug into the support pages looking for solutions to other people’s problems. In fact, I’ve already incorporated some of the things I discovered thanks to the forums into this blog.
It’s not all fun and games, though. People come to the forums because they have a problem, and unsolved problems lead to frustration. Frustrated people can become…not nice. Some people take their blogs VERY seriously.
But then you also get people who take things in their stride, like the user whose ENTER-key started misbehaving in the post editor. His final reply to the thread really made me smile, and I thought I’d share it with you:
I refreshed Firefox and that fixed the problem. Kind of like electro-shock therapy — not sure exactly what it did, but it made a big difference. The ENTER key behaves as expected now. Who knows for sure what happened to trigger the weirdness, but several possibilities occur to me:
a) I leaned my elbow on the keyboard when reaching for Kleenex and hit a strange key combo that a malicious coder set up when she was passed over for promotion at Mozilla
b) The cat walked on the keyboard and did some sort of feline reconfig
c) An angry God looked down and said, “Let’s fuck with him for awhile”.
d) None of the above
Anyway. Thanks for your help and suggestions.
Onward toward the abyss!
And on that note I wish you a happy weekend 😀
So I actually got one of these things this year, and thought it would be fitting to end 2014 on if all else fails… by publishing it for posterity. I know a lot of people have been publishing these, and if you’re anything like me you’ve been routinely ignoring the similar year-in-review posts on Facebook the past week, so please do not feel obligated to click the link below. I’m posting this merely for my own interest.
If, however, you actually enjoy reading these things, I can’t very well stop you, can I? Anyway, thanks for everyone who commented, participated, shared or just read the past year. Blogging won’t be half as much fun without you guys.
Enjoy the last day of 2014 (or evening, depending on your time zone when this post goes live), don’t party too hard and please don’t drink and drive. See y’all next year…
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 8,200 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Man, I’m out of practice with fiction writing.
NaNoWriMo is going quite well, word count-wise. Day one started with a bang, well, actually not, as I started writing at midnight and the wife was already in bed, so I kept it quiet. But it started well with me exceeding my quota in the first day. The following few days saw me missing my quota, though it was still a vast improvement over last year where I couldn’t start writing until day four.
I reached both the five and ten thousand word milestones only two days behind schedule and was all set of a 5k-Sunday which would have put me back on track and in a good position to build up a lead for the three days I’ll be missing when I attend a conference from tomorrow.
if all else fails...use a hammer 