Oct 28 2008

broken tags

category: blog development
scribble tags:

To honour Scarlet’s request, 6 psuedo-random personal things:

  1. Peanut butter and cheese sandwiches without any bread,  spread the peanut butter directly on a wedge of cheese.
  2. At 44.9 (.9 recurring) yrs old I still wear school daps.
  3. I do not have enough hand-wind-up-clocks that tick loudly with unsynchronised chimes.   BOINGNGNGNGNGNG…
  4. Beyond name and gender allocation I bear no resemblance to JM Barrie’s Peter Pan character Wendy. 
  5. There is garden mud underneath my left index fingernail.
  6. I will be breaking the tag rules (see below) by not leaving a tag comment on the blogs of those people cited below.

Tags for these 6 people that are worth reading to see if they ring your bell,  chime your clock,  peanut butter your cheese, or dap your feet :

  1. Hilarious. Jenn’s ‘The Piehole’: http://liscious.net/piehole/index.php
  2. Serious. Twisty Faster’s ‘I blame the patriarchy’. http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/
  3. Windows. Raymond Chen’s ‘The Old New Thing’: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/default.aspx
  4. Ambulances. Tom Reynolds ‘Random Acts of Reality’: http://randomreality.blogware.com/blog
  5. Matronly. Mrs. Pouncer’s ‘Mrs Poucer’s counsel’ http://mrspouncer.blogspot.com/
  6. Paramedic. Stuart Gray’s Paramedics diary. http://theparamedicsdiary.blogspot.com/

Tag rules: Link to the person who tagged you. Post the rules on your blog. Write 6 random things about yourself. Tag 6 people at the end of your post and link to them. Let each person you have tagged know by leaving a comment on their blog. Let the tagger know when your entry is posted…


Sep 18 2008

The three R’s

category: blog development
scribble tags:

referenced by RaymondOnce upon a time, 
in July 2007,

when Raymond referenced the Wendy House I would receive around 1,000 visits in one day!  GADZOOKS! 

For the sake of introducing a new acronym, rather than an argument, we will call this the Raymond Referenced Readers effect,  or the three R’s effect henceforth to be written 3Rs pronounced ‘3 arse’ followed by an gender-irrelevant obligatory giggle.

Yesterday, Raymond referenced the Wendy House again

Raymond’s readers were so keen to click on his links that this year the Wendy House recieved nigh on 3,000 visits in the first day.  ECKY THUMP!  That’s a big 3Rs (giggle).

A couple of Raymonds fabled nitpickers have already helped improve my blog-post content accuracy with spelling details and everything,  what helpful people they are.

Hello Raymond’s readers,  I’ve added a ‘Raymond’ tag so that you can easily find cross,  rather than angry, references.  Am I just too nice to you or what?


Jul 13 2008

101 Reading Wendyhome

category: blog development
scribble tags: , ,

Google analytics reported visitor loyalty (probably unique IP addresses?) for one week in July 2008 as significantly* BIGGER than during one week in January  2007.

January 2007 (July 2008) :

  • 8 (22) visitors visited between 7 and 14 times.
  • 11 (27) visited 15-25 times.
  • 11 (21) visited 26-50 times.   
  • (32) visited 51-100 times.

 Up to 29 (101) visitors (unique IP addresses) , other than my good-self, return frequently enough for me to assume they drop-by on a daily basis.   Out of pure, unfettered, cussedness I am also assuming that at least half of these loyal visitors are naughty, naughty, spam-bots or or other bots of an icky nature, as opposed to pleasantly pert bots.  This assumption still leaves me with about 50 regular, daily, visitors who may actually be people!     

 

* Significance in a formal Statistical sense identified by using Excel’s t-test function for a one-tailed, independent groups t-test that lead to the rejection of the null hypothesis, h0, p< 0.001

 h0 ‘= there are no more people reading my blog regularly in July 2008 than in January 2007′

The result is statistically very powerful but I have low confidence levels in it because of the low signal-noise ratio introduced by the way the variable (a loyal blog reading person) is operationalised (unique IP address) that introduces a lot of noise mostly from bots. 

Even worse than low statistical confidence is my inappropriate test-selection.  Inappropriate because although the data fulfills some of the assumtions of the independent groups t-test e.g. parametric,  it is sufficiently naughty to potentially violate other assumptions such as truely independent groups. 

In summary,  we can probably ignore the statistical significance of the numbers because of all the non-number related issues. 

Statistical escapades put aside, I am still convinced that the Wendy House has quite a few more regular readers now than in January 2007. 


Jul 06 2008

on the value of benchmarks

category: blog development
scribble tags:

Not irritating graffiti or marks that appear on your fabulous benches. Benchmarking, to me, means sensible comparisons.

While I was wandering along the corridors of Technorati,  I started to sulk because the Wendyhome blog only warranted an ‘Authority of 5′.  I have no idea what an Authority of 5 means,  but it sounded fairly lowly.  My bottom lip protruded as I read the information provided by Technorati on who had linked to my blog.  Then.  OH YES… ….THEN,  I noticed that Raymond Chen’s blog got a Technorati rating of 9.  NINE.  

Lets look at this relatively.  I’m not related to Raymond but our blogs have relatively different readership and page-load numbers.  If my blog is rated 5 and I had to subjectively estimate what Raymonds blog would rate on the same scale I would guesstimate Raymond’s blog would rate at an approximate 3 zillion 4 million 5 thousand, two hundred and seventy-nine point five.  Taking regular daily hits into account and deducting 5 points for nitpickers.  

In short,  which Raymond is,  relative to Average US adult male heights,  that my blog got 5 on a scale that rates Raymonds blog as 9 is a significant achievement.  My bottom lip retracted and the champagne bottles were popped.  Hoorah.  The Technorati Benchmarks are in my good books for today.  Just for today mind,  there’s no telling what tomorrow may bring…


Apr 16 2008

wordpress 2.5 upgrade - comments

category: blog development

(housekeeping blog post)

recently I upgraded this blof from wordpress 2.3 to 2.5

Then the spam filter didn’t work - I managed to find out why and belive I have fixed it.  Then no-one could make comments - I managed to find out why and believe that I fixed it.  Then only one comment was possible on each blog post.  I only knew because you guys told me - thanks!!  :-) 

I haven’t found out why,  I’ve done personal tests at different times and the blog theme developer helped out (Tommaso Baldovino) by running tests and finding no problems.  I’ve just checked today and it seems to work.  Seems to have ‘fixed itself’.   Thankyou to everyone who told me about their frustraitions,  I believe that it works now,  let me know if it doesn’t.

 


Jan 29 2008

US visits

category: blog development

Because the US readership of the Wendy House has dropped as dramatically as my UK readership has grown I will be heading back to the US if my passport situation obliges,  on tour,  in April,  enjoying succulent hash browns and perky customer service.  Hoorah!


Nov 11 2007

strapline adjustment

category: blog development
scribble tags: ,

Obviously,  with the impending relocation,  The Wendy House will have to change its strapline from “English girl playing house in Seattle” to something more pertinent and descriptive of my scribblings once I’ve repatriated to Reading (rhymes with Heading).

You can expect the content to be of the same ilk.  Obviously I will instantly cease to have a cute accent or see too many Khaki cargo pants.  Or will I?  Expect posts on the wonderful cultural practices of the locals compared and contrasted with my passing knowledge of US folks.  

Any strapline suggestions?


Oct 21 2007

wnedyhome

category: blog development
scribble tags:

Hoorah,  even people with typing-challenges,  such as myself, can easily find my blog using Google search.  Google also seems to know in advance that I might be interested in a handyhome!


Oct 15 2007

snoopers’ network locations

category: blog development

My readers are perhaps just a bit geeky, um, like me, because they are coming from universities,  financial institutions and the software computing industry. 

Google analytics tells me the Network locations of computers that have reqested page-loads from the wendyhome servers.  Often these network locations are clearly consumer internet service providers,  sometimes they are not.  Here are some of the Network locations that do not look like consumer internet services grouped by primary business type.

Software/Computing

  • Microsoft Corp
  • APPLE COMPUTER
  • Intel Corporation
  • IBM
  • Macafee Security
  • Research Machines plc
  • Hewlett-Packard Company
  • Cisco Systems inc
  • Opera Software asa
  • Honeywell
  • Eastman Kodak Company

Financial

  • Credit Suisse group canada
  • Fidelity Investments
  • Bloomberg Financial Market
  • Bank of America
  • Barclays Capital (UK)
  • Nat West Bank group (UK)
  • First Rand Bank

Universities

  • Cornell University
  • Purdue university
  • Leeds University (UK)
  • North Carolina State university
  • University of Brighton (UK)
  • University of Cambridge (UK)
  • University of Washington
  • Charles University

Local government

  • Wolverhampton city council (UK)
  • East Sussex local education authority (UK)
  • State of Arkansas
  • State of Minesota
  • State of Tennessee
  • Government of South Africa

Aerospace

  • the boeing company
  • lockheed martin corporation
  • Patrick Air Force Base

Oct 04 2007

fuzzy categories and tag clouds

category: blog development
scribble tags: ,

I have trouble keeping my categories stable.  Evolving categories.  By using mini-series such as ‘cute accent’ and ‘dreamy cheese’ I’ve tried to curb my tendancies to create categories and re-assign posts.  The Wordpress categories are painfully insufficiently fuzzy for my taste.

The new version of Wordpress (2.3) has support for tagging and tag-clouds.  Tags could easily evolve to replace my categories because they support the natural emergent and fuzzy quality of both my categories and interests.  Hoorah! 

Replacing my categories with tags could clean-up the Wendy House archive navigation for you and me. Tags do not yet offer some of the useful properties of the category system such as hierarchical relationships and hence similarity groupings.   I’m starting to use tags on my new posts but old posts are not tagged. 

Will adding tags to old-posts spam your RSS readers?  I’ve asked the Wordpress support forum to clarify before I start wrecklessly adding tags to past-posts to while away the long winter evenings. 


Jul 28 2007

Raymond’s peaks

category: blog development
scribble tags:

Whenever Raymond cites :: The Wendy House :: in his blog my visit statistics soar to approximately 1000 in a day from their normal baseline of approximately 100 per day.  See dashboard graph below.

Looking at the dashboard,  initially,  I was extremely pleased that the average visit time is nearly 10 minutes.  Then I looked at the distribution of visit times on another graph.  The distribution was bi-modal with 75% of visitors spending less than 10 sec on :: The Wendy House ::  The good thing is that 75% of visitors can assess that this blog does not provide what they want within 10 sec.   

The second mode is for visits that last between 1 and 10 minutes. Which seems a reasonable time to read a couple of posts and take a couple of swigs from your freshly brewed cup of tea. 

 Squint to see Raymonds peaks:


Jul 23 2007

uncluttered (26%) feminist (100%) Earnie

category: blog development

My results from a couple of quizzes on a website called blogthings tells us that:

Your Mind is 26% Cluttered
Your mind is very free. You’ve liberated yourself from most worries and problems.
And even if something does start to clutter your mind, you’re easily able to let it go.

quiz link: How Cluttered is Your Mind?


You Are 100% Feminist


You are a total feminist. This doesn’t mean you’re a man hater (in fact, you may be a man).
You just think that men and women should be treated equally. It’s a simple idea but somehow complicated for the world to put into action.

quiz link: Are you a Feminist?


You Are Ernie


Playful and childlike, you are everyone’s favorite friend - even if your goofy antics get annoying at times.You are usually feeling: Amused - you are very easily entertainedYou are famous for: Always making people smile. From your silly songs to your wild pranks, you keep things fun.How you life your life: With ease. Life is only difficult when your friends won’t play with you!

quiz link: The Sesame Street Personality Quiz

Does that help us to:

  • understand and share that which is Wendy?   
  • enhance the quality of ::The Wendy House::? 

Things about blogthings.com that I found interesting are:

  1. the engagingness of the quizzes irrespective of their construction quality.  I liked doing them.
  2. lack of opportunity to compare my results to some form of position on a norm of all the people that completed the quiz so far.  For example,  if most people who completed the quiz have a 10% cluttered mind then my 25% is relatively high mind-clutter for an online person who likes doing blog postable quizzes.  Who are the other Sesame street characters I could have been?  Do bloggers normally think they are Earnies rather than Berts or Big Birds?  If I start eating a lot will I have a high metabolism or grow to be a big bird?
  3. the topics of not-provided quizzes.  For example.  Should the US pull out of Iraq?  Can you make an excellent cup of tea?  Is there one God with multiple identities or a multi God system?
  4. representations of the quiz setter’s cultural values.  For example,  this question from a quizz to assess whether a person is ‘hot stuff’ or not is based on the assumption that the person completing the quiz is a girl.  I learned that  the quizz author and editors believe that hot stuff is a self-referent for females:   

A guy with a girlfriend is:

  • A fling
  • A challenge
  • Off limits

May 26 2007

gimme gimme gimme an ’s after midnight;

category: blog development

Regular readers are familiar with my many, varied, reckless punctuation crimes.  Respite may be coming your way.   I am looking into these educational resources:

Feel free to direct me to further useful resources…


May 25 2007

visitors might not be people

category: blog development
scribble tags: ,

Blog statistics below courtesy of Google Analytics.  Google Analytics’ glossary defines visitors as:

A Visitor is a construct designed to come as close as possible to defining the number of actual, distinct people who visited a website. There is of course no way to know if two people are sharing a computer from the website’s perspective, but a good visitor-tracking system can come close to the actual number. The most accurate visitor-tracking systems generally employ cookies to maintain tallies of distinct visitors.

The method, heuristic, that Google Analytic employs to identify visitors is not detailed. The Google Analytics graph of :: Wendy House :: visitors below covers a ‘normal’ calendar month and suggests that between April and May 23rd:

  • 600-ish visitors were sent by search engines.
  • 60-ish visitors return* several times per month.  Many friends and family are in this group.
  • 40-ish visitors return on a daily basis.  If this is ‘people’ what troopers you are! :-)
  • 10-ish visitors, and me, return twice a day.  Given that I regularly post only once per day 2 visits is a tad perplexing.
  • no-one visits between 101-200 times per calendar month,  how odd is that?  As odd as a snake wearing a beanie in a wheelbarrow race,  that’s how odd.
  • 100-ish visitors return over 200 times in one calendar month.  Super Snoopers!  Now thats just SILLY.  I don’t believe it.   I wonder what this number really suggests…

*return = becomes active after more than 30 minutes inactivity in the Wendy House.


Feb 17 2007

bloggy birthday bounces

category: blog development
scribble tags:

One year of subscribing to a web service,  developing the Wendy House blog….


Feb 09 2007

blog. sacked. sue

category: blog development
scribble tags:

The Daily Telegraph reports that an:

English secretary is bringing a test case under French labour law after allegedly being sacked for bringing her employers into disrepute by writing a…    …blog describing her everyday life…

…Her blog postings… …do not reveal her own name….  …..and have never identified her employers*…. …..she made herself and therefore the firm identifiable by including her own photograph** on the weblog

ce n’est pas de ja vu

  • *my employer is the absolute dogs bollocks
  • **any similarity to me in photographs on, or linked from, this blog is purely coincidental.

Paranoid?  Moi?  Non!  I normally walk this way due to an old injury sustained by falling off a bar-stool during a fit of impudently unanounced giggles and several pints of pre-planned Marston’s Pedigree.


Feb 04 2007

favicon foisting & fiddly deflowering

category: blog development
scribble tags:

How the Wendy House got deflowered:

I took a small star provided within famfamfam’s free mini icon set, then used Microsoft’s Digital Image suite to

Then, while playfully browsing the Wordpress codex ‘plug-ins’,  I discovered  favatars, comvatars, and gravatars. 

…..ooo00OOO00oooo…  

The rest of the fun-filled friday night was spent foisting a favatar on you.  A favatar is the little picture that shows up next to a website name in the browser’s faviourites list and before the http bit in the browsers address line.  To commit this dastardly crime I used:

Cat-discombobulating-bouncing ensued when the little star revealed itself in my IE7.0 address bar and Tab.  Before Friday I knew the experience of a favicon but not what it was called or how to set-one up for my site. 

Sometimes I even suprise myself by how easily I am pleased

Hoorah!


Feb 03 2007

visitor loyalty last week

category: blog development
scribble tags: ,

Visitor loyalty,  fabulous idea!

The bar-chart below from Google Analytics shows that between 24th and 30th of January:

  • 8 visitors (probably unique IP addresses?) visited between 7 and 14 times
  • 11 visited 15-25 times, and a further
  • 11 visited 26-50 times

I’m probably one person who visited 50 times :-)

This means that I may have 29 readers (unique IP addresses) that return frequently enough for me to guess-timate that its probably on a daily basis.  I hope this isn’t really because their browser keeps crashing when they try to open the blog….  

Of those 29 I can make a good guess about who 9 of them are… …based on both verbal and blog comments, people I’ve met…  Based on this sample of 9 people I’ll develop a “Robin the Regular Reader” persona.   I’m not assuming that these loyal visitors are the same visitors who stay for more than 10 mins when they get here.  That’s a very rash assumption.  The kind of rash that could go all red after a  good scratching…


Jan 30 2007

Blog quality guidelines (part 2): Personas (US) Personae (UK)

category: blog development
scribble tags: ,

In this second post of a sporadic series on blog quality I hypothesize a classification of current blog visitors using some of the Google Analytics statistics for :: The Wendy House::  This is my first step in developing an intended user ‘Persona’Alan Cooper style, that will be used to improve your experience.  Hoorah! 

One of the many fancy displays provided by Google Analytics shows the average length of a ‘visit’ (a ’session’):

By default in Analytics, a session is defined as the period of time during which visitors are interacting with your site and there has been inactivity for less than 30 minutes. After 30 minutes of inactivity, any further page views will be treated as a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes will be counted as part of the original session

I’m hypothesising that the data in the graph below from 24hrs in :: The Wendy House :: shows 4 types of visitor*.   I’ll call them:

  1. Pat promptly leaves:  149 visits are less than 10 seconds.
  2. Sam the speedy scanner:  18 visitors stayed between 10 seconds and one minute.
  3. Charlie checks content: 24 people stayed between 1 and 10 minutes.  I suspect these people acutally read enough of the Blog to make a reasonably well informed estimation about the relevance of its content to them.
  4. Robin the reader:  13 visitors stay at the Wendy house for half an hour (10) or more (3)

*one person can appear in these statistics more than once,  by re-visiting.  Approximately 10% of the total site visits are return visits.


Jan 26 2007

24hrs in the :: Wendy House ::

category: blog development
scribble tags: ,

Google analytcis provides a web site statistics service that is free to websites that receive less than an obscenely large amount of clicks.  I set it up for the Wendy house and dropped by to look at the reports 24 hours later. 

It told me all sorts of things with graphs, pie-charts, percentages. maps and tables.More pretty data representations than you can shake a stick at.  The data can even be exported to Excel.  What does a peak at this data for Yesterday tell you?:


Jan 05 2007

December’s comment of the week

category: blog development

For the week starting Monday December:

  • 4th: joint honours to the cultfigurine for pointing out that a team of professional experts would be freakin’ at the challenge of transforming a woman into a magazine approved good-looker and HardwareJunkie for recognising the intrinsic evilness that is a concrete column.
  • 11th: Tim for introducing “sure thing short bus” into my vocabularly.
  • 18th: Mark for questioning how Cosmopolitan’s current marketing aligns with Helen Gurley Brown’s perspective.
  • 25th: Betty Cracker for promoting fashion industry subversion.

With your dedicated help I may eventually be effectively socialised into the wacky culture that is NW US…


Dec 10 2006

URL pointed to the Wendy House

category: blog development

Below I’ve copied the top of a web page, not in Excel,  from the Wendy House statistics.  It lists the top 22 URLs (Uniform Resource Locators, or URI’s, Uniform Resource Indicators?) that have requested pages from the Wendy House during November 2006.    

Speculative interpretation of the data above:

  1. The vast majority,  79% (26799/33828), of all web-site references come from people who are already here exploring the Wendy House by clicking categories or blog-referencing links within the posts.  I like this :-)
  2. At less than 1% (327/33828) Google provides the second main source of people clicking on the Wendy House.  Adding all the google numbers together (http://images.google.com/http://www.google.com/, http://64.233.161.104, http://64.233.179.104/) gives a cumulative total of 327.  A substantial proportion of these references were people looking for images.  A quick look at the search queries that bought people to this website shows they were interested in the text and photograph in my  ”High Spirited” post.  
  3. MySpace is the only Social Network that sends noticable traffic to this Blog.  4 profiles predominantly send traffic here.  2/4 profiles do this because a teenager commented on their profile including a URL to my Wendy House server stored photograph of the High Spirited beverage. 
    • 60 references from a 17 yr old boy in Utah. 
    • 58 references from a highly offensive-to-me female objectification for male jacking-off profile. I’ve reported it to the MySpace team as offensive and inappropriate.   
    • 57 references from Annie, a 17yr Rhode Island girl’s ‘private’ profile.
    • 40 references from Kate, a 17yr San Antonio girl.
  4. The remainder look like websites promoting loans, gambling and drugs that I suspect remain from when I used to allow trackbacks (now turned-off).

Dec 09 2006

weekend #1 assignment: when are you going?

category: blog development
scribble tags:

this weekend’s assignment is directly copied from a 7th grade in-class exercise:

Your science teacher Wendy has invented a time machine. You have been selected to take the first trip. Explain in a multi-paragraph letter comment to your teacher Wendy where you will go and why.”


Dec 04 2006

November’s comment of the week

category: blog development

For the week starting Monday:

  • 30th Oct: Seamus for building an outdoor coyote-proof cat enclosure using re-cycled wood.
  • 6th Nov:  AF Harrold’s mention of ‘the Goons’. Any reference to Peter Sellers, Spike MilliganHarry Secomb, or Michael Bentine, direct or indirect is pleasing. Altogether is simply outstanding.
  • 13th Nov: Katy for mentioning the Pooh
  • 20th Nov: The Cultfigurine for asking ”is your anti-spam-bot psyhcic?‘ The word ‘bot’ is particularly appealing.
  • 27th Nov: LaCroix for detailing the push:me-pull:you Seattle:snow car experience including the pulling:person’s inspection of the underside of the car.  Reality stranger than fiction!

you guy’s made my day with your cheery little published thoughts :-)


Nov 03 2006

October’s ‘comment of the week’

category: blog development

For the week starting Monday:

  • 2nd: The Cultfigurine for pointing out, with much aplomb, my misunderstanding of ‘knock you up’ may have been due to a deliberate wind-up because it is original US slang.
  • 9th: AF Harrold for pointing out that some days are more difficult to get the hang or than others.
  • 16th: Andy for pointing out that some US people have an innovative approach to tea making that by-passes the need for an electric kettle and a teapot,  they microwave water in a cup then place a teabag in it.  Ingenious!
  • 23rd: Mr. Fancypants for his invaluable knowledge of screwdriver wielding techniques.

thanks to everyone who commented,  you made this post possible….. feel the luuuurrfffffff. :-)


Oct 21 2006

big BOOTS

category: blog development

My ::The Wendy House:: statistics provide lists of the phrases that were typed into the snoop boxy.  They also list the search phrases typed into real search engines that bought people to ::The Wendy House::  There is virtually no overlap between the searches that bought people here and the within-blog snoop boxy search since July 2006:

Web statistics summary of snoop boxy searches

 

BOOTS really did need to be in all capital letters didn’t it?  for all 38 searches…

BIG BOOTS

Do I suspect all 38 snoops were from one snooper?  Yes I do!  I certainly wasn’t one of them.  


Oct 17 2006

blog quality guidelines (part 1)

category: blog development
scribble tags: ,

Which really means:

8 reasons why Wendy didn’t read a blog

together, these reasons have prevented me reading blogs that may have outstanding content… …but I’ll never know:

  1. poor publicity:  I don’t know that the blog exists,  its contents never show up in any of my internet searches,  there are no links to it in other stuff that I read, none of my friends told me about it.
  2. foriegn language:  I know it exists but I can’t read it because the language is too foriegn. For example,  German,  Instant Message or phone-text message style abbreviations like “u shud cuz u r kewl“. 
  3. personally irrelevant: I know it exists, I can read the language, but the blog content does not provide anything clearly relevant to my life. For example,  a blog on standard poodles.
  4. offensive message:   I know it exists, I can read the language, the content is relevant to my life but the message is fundamentally offensive. 
  5. squinting required:  either the text is so small that I have to squint to read, there is a low contrast between the text and the background,  the spacing between the text lines is so small it’s difficult to visually follow one line.  I can’t read it without changing my preferred browser text-size that works for most other web pages.
  6. witless: If a blog lacks wit, I stop reading it. I like to learn something or laugh,  ideally both at the same time.  Double whammy!
  7. lacking illustrative pictures:  Too much text can make my head spin,  then I fall over. Breaking the stream of text, regularly, with pictures that illustrate the message helps prevent me falling over.  It’s not essential,  but it helps.
  8. scrolling required*:  I’m too attentionally challenged to regularly read blog posts that are long enough to require scrolling the window,  especially if they don’t include pictures.  Again,  not essential,  but it helps keep my reading regular..

Apart from including an illustrative picture, what have I missed that is important to you?

* I write scrollable blog posts. My excuse is that I’m endearingly waffly rather than perfectly precise.   


Oct 09 2006

singularity popularity

category: blog development

a quick peek at the Wendy Home blog statistics suggests that my readership levels are higher on Wednesday than any other day.  Could it be that you

  • all want to know why I think that I’m single? 
  • like the predictability of a series?
  • appreciate regularity?

Certainly the ‘Cheesey dreams’ series and Player characteristics series, though irregular, proved popular.  I will introduce a Thursday series called “Thursday Tiffin“.  This series will focus on the cultural experience of ceromonies around tiffin starting by focusing on tea,  it will then delve down into specific brews and beyond tea.  I’m hoping this series will remove the Thursday page-request ’dip’ shown on the graph below.

 

 

Daily Web page requests statistics compiled June-Sept 2006

 


Sep 26 2006

touching internet connections

category: blog development

Quite by accident, while browsing, I came upon your photographs

touched by the self expression and creativity, a joyous experience,

I fell in love with you and Eric

phrases taken from a longer email received through flick-r 2006.  The shortened phrases convey the gist of the original message.  You’ll be glad to know that I also received an invitation to stop by if ever I’m in Minnesota again.  Mechanics and emails from Minnesota suggest that there are some very friendly people in the Mid West.


Aug 07 2006

respect option 42

category: blog development

Today the Wendy House received 80 non-sensical spamacious comments within 2 hrs; well above the ‘normal’ average of one per month.  Wordpress supplies 42 (my age and the meaning of the life, the universe, and everything) anti-spam ‘plug-in’s.  They appear to be based on either

  • ‘verify it’s really a fabulous person’, or 
  • ‘exculde these comment characteristics’  (e.g. words, IP source). 

Option 42.  We chose each other in a flurry of mutual recognition, respect and thigh rubbing.

Let me know what you think of my shiny new fabulous-person-verification system….

 


Jul 30 2006

popular posts

category: blog development

on the wendy house since May 30th.  Excluding information from RSS feed-readers.

Top 5 navigated to posts

  1. Device drivers to distration
  2. Commenting on US commentators
  3. Cargo pants parade
  4. Charlotte chat
  5. Portugal vs England World Cup Quarter Final

Top 5 navigated to categories

  1. in the WILD
  2. Kitchen drawer
  3. Everyday Teccy
  4. Eat it!
  5. Being Wendy

Received more than 3 comments:

  1. Commenting on US commentators
  2. England vs Sweden.  Its personal
  3. return of ‘in a state’
  4. a walk on the wrong side
  5. naughty word:  TOILET
  6. Excel told me to do it
  7. High spirits

This information will be used to blast-out-of-existence unpopular Wendyhome blog categories and focus my ramblings on things readers like to comment on (alcohol, toilets, excel, traffic directions,  soccer etc) or read (geeky teccy and footbally stuff) …  :-)  

(categories updates,  this post updated to remove broken links 28 Oct 2006)


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