This is one hundredth post since I moved to scienceblogs.com! Wow - that was fast! And only nine of those are re-published old posts from old blogs.
OK, tomorrow at noon will be the second septidieversary (two weeks, OK?) of this blog. Time to take stock again.
I got 183 comments in two weeks! Thank you all - that is great! Only a few of those I had to dig out of the Junk Folder. The spam-prevention software appears to be working just fine, especially for Trackbacks.
This blog is ranked 8th out of SEED scienceblogs in the total amount given by readers to the DonorsChoose educational programs. Do you think we can do better than that? Just click on this button:
MovableType is still a challenge. I am a computeridiot and I got spoiled by Blogger. MT does not have a WYSYWIG! This means I have to do everything in HTML. This is the biggest problem with inserting images. In Blogger, once you download the image you can play with it any way you want: move it, make multiple copies of it, expand it, shrink it, stretch it - all just by pulling at the edge of the picture. Here, I have to calculate how much is a decrease by 30% going to be and then download the picture again...and again and again!
Finally - traffic. After the initial huge boom (links from Digg, Fark/tech and Stumbleupon), the traffic is settling down to about 820 visits per day according to Sitemeter (about 1000 by Google Analytics). That is like my old three blogs combined at the best time of year - and now it is summer with its slump in traffic.
Also, unlike the old blogs, this one is too new to have much content or to be rated high enough by Google, so there are preciously few people coming here via Google searches. This is bound to steadily increase over time.
In the meantime, most of the visitors are coming from the main page or the "Last 24 Hours" page of SEED scienceblogs, as well as via direct hits. Some arrive via Bloglines (apparently the /atom.xml feed is working better than the /index.xml feed, so you may want to switch), which is nice to see - those are the die-hard regulars. Please, if you have not done this yet, change your bookmarks, blogrolls and newsfeeds to reflect my move here to this URL.
Most importantly, it feels really good to be a part of a lively scienceblogging community. I hope that the readers are also enjoying the one-stop shopping of science blogging that SEED provides. I will keep trying to link to blogs outside of SEED - they should not be left out of the loop just because they are not part of scienceblogs.com (yet).
- Log in to post comments
Have you considered the Performancing plugin for Firefox? It's a "full featured FREE Blog Editor" that integrates right into Mozilla Firefox. I tried it out a while ago and it works very well. The WYSIWG is nice, but I don't think it does images yet (it's been a while since I used it so it may well do that now too). Ultimately I decided to install WYSIWG editing directly into my site but nto for the fault of this extension. There's also the Xinha Here! plugin which allows you to use the Xinha WYSIWG editor inside of Firefox.
I actually had Perfomancing before, to use on Blogger, but I rarely used it, did not really need it, and finally got rid of it as it was popping up unexpectedly when I did not want it. I'll look at it again - it's been a while - to see if it can help me with images.
I'll also check Xingha - I have heard about it from some other SB bloggers - I guess I should check it out. Thanks.