As many of you have noticed, updates to this blog have become increasingly less common. There are a number of reasons for that. One reason is that much of my energy and time is sapped by my fitness goal for the year. Another is the increased work load due to a shrinking staff at my place of employment. Yet another is that I discovered Twitter, which sucks up much of my online time. But the main reason is that I’m suffering from debate burnout.

Debating topics is one of my favorite past times. It’s one of the reasons I started the blog in the first place. I think I’ve gotten too much of something I normally enjoy. Consider the post and comment interregnums as time I am taking to rebuild interest. If I don’t get around to responding to your wonderful comments (and I love each and every one of them), I apologize. Please understand that it’s nothing personal, it’s my own flaw.

With that in mind, I’m going to try and post more often about less controversial things. I say ‘try’ because sometimes I just can’t help but offer my opinion on a hot topic even if I’m not up for a debate.

Thank you all for your understanding.

Bunnies4Buddha and I are off to canoe on the Shenandoah River for a few days so there won’t be any updates this week.  We’ll take pictures which we’ll eventually post here.

Here’s this weeks question… but first, an item of interest.

Do you see that picture to the left of this, and almost every weekly question post? It’s a pretty neat question mark. I got it here from Wikimedia Commons (that site and Creative Commons search are what I use to find a majority of the images for my blog). But that little question mark has been the source of an a minor nuisance for my blog’s statistics. For the past month, someone or something has relentlessly searched using the phrase “question mark”. It has been by far the most searched term that ends up with a visit to my site over the past 30 days. In all, I’ve had 215 visits because of this, which is about 20% of my usual monthly traffic.

The funny part about this are the variations of the search phrase that were used. Many were pluralized, a couple were typos or misspellings, others added a exclamation point and/or a dashes, still others left out the space and just searched ‘questionmark’. The best, though, were the ones that use modifiers. These tended to be odd. Here’s a list:

• “picture of the week question mark”
• “free questionmark”
• “question mark moon”
• “where is the love question mark”
• “numbers and question mark”
• “a question mark above a kid”
• “nice qustion marks”
• “alien questionmark”

and my favorite…

• “sexy questionmark”

“Sexy” question mark? Talk about an odd fetish! I wonder if it’s the curvy top or the round bottom that does it for the searcher.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tonight, we are off on another camping trip! Due to all the weddings we had to attend last year, this will be our first big outdoors trip in quite a while. We are going to spend four days and three nights in Shenandoah National Park. This will be the first time going there for both Bunnies4Buddha and myself. Bluebird will be going with us and we will meet up with Chopdeli, Bridget, and a few others (sorry that you couldn’t make it to this one, Santini). It should be a great time.

Needless to say, I’ll be absent from the blog for a while. I hope to have some nice scenery and nature photos to share with everyone once we get back.

On Sunday, I updated my blogging software. Unlike numerous past upgrades, this one proved to be problematic. A database error caused my blog to be completely unavailable for Sunday evening and Monday morning. Another issue involved the ‘Recent Comments’ widget in the right sidebar. For a while, the top of the widget contained visible code. Though I tried many edits, I was unable to fix this issue. Then, inexplicably, the problem just disappeared. All’s well for now.

The most noticeable difference for my registered readers is that the Dashboard that you see when you log in has been redesigned. Post authors will see a similarly redesigned post writing page. The visual post editor is supposedly improved. Since I never used the old visual editor, I have no idea if this is true. What I do know is that the button to switch to HTML editing doesn’t work; at least not with FireFox.

The most exciting new feature is a built-in gallery feature. I have yet to try it out, but if it works, I may be able to integrate my old picture pages with the blog. Keep an eye out for that feature.

You can read all the release notes for WordPress 2.5 here. Let me know if you notice any errors, have any problems, or have any questions.

My blog keeps track of search engine terms and phrases that have been used to find my site. Usually, I’m on page 5 or more of the results. For the first time ever, I was the top Google result! The googled phrase was “stimulate rebate program, 2007″ (without the quotes). Here’s a screen shot. The result linked directly to Santini’s recent post. Later in the day a second phrase, “spending habits economical stimulate” (without the quotes) yielded the same top result. He really struck gold with that post. I have no idea how long it will remain the top result, but in the meantime, congratulations to both Santini and myself!

And here I thought it was just my humor that was stuck in Junior High.

Thanks to Scott for this little piece of humility.

Hello Dear Readers,

I’ve made a few enhancements to the blog today. Most notable to the readers is the ability to edit your comments for a limited time after submission. I know I always hate it when I click ‘Submit’ on a comment only to realize a moment later that I made an embarrassing mistake. On many blogs, I am stuck with that error or have to issue a clarifying comment. Not so anymore for my readers! When you submit a comment, you will see a black line at the top of your comment that says: “You may click on your name and/or comment to edit.” Followed by a time limit. Once the time limit expires, you’ll be stuck with any errors (or you can ask me really, really nicely to edit it for you).

Another enhancement is more intuitive URLs for post permalinks. Instead of post numbers, I now use post titles for the URL. For myself, I’ve added a plugin that will provide me with basic stats about my blog.

The final two changes are related. First, I’ve made my blog visible to search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!. To combat the increase in spam this change may cause, I’ve also enabled a robust spam filter. Now, these spam filters can sometimes be a bit… overzealous. If you submit a comment and do not see it, it may have been filtered. Just shoot me an email and I will rectify the situation. Of course, the best way to ensure that your comments are not filtered is to register for an account on my blog, and once you have an account, login.