wendy house

In 2004, when I first started blogging, the people I followed (Jenn, Lacroix, Raymond, Jen) posted* between 1 and 3 times a day. Over the years, I’ve seen novice bloggers start with the enthusiasm of daily posting then watched that proliferation fade with one or more of these symptoms:

• not posting every day, sporadically missing a days
• posting every other day
• posting a couple of times a week
• taking a break from posting for a while – a week, 2 weeks, a month, a season….
• posting once a week on a pre-arranged day – Darlings I’ll post on Sunday…
• deleting or ‘hiding’ the blog
• dropping one blog and moving onto another or rebranding the blog with a new name and theme
• stop posting altogether

Raymond is the only blogger that I followed in 2004 who persistently, reliably, posts once a day. Most bloggers seemed to stop posting within 3 or 4 years of starting.  Sunday afternoon posting won’t be a reality for me while I keep recieving encouraging personal emails

* Posting is not a euphemism for any other activity. No, definitiely not, I can’t protest enough that this post should be read at face value without drawing analogies between posting and any other activities

PS 198 word post before the PS

I’m rationing myself to scribbling one blog post every-other day in the hope that -

• I wont run out of words, before I die
• I’ll get a life, before I die

So far I can’t tell if it’s working or not. I might have to take emergency precautions, like Nurofen, or maybe I tried that already…

PS 55 word post before the PS

Blogger service has been down for at least 20 hours now. Please feel free to get your comments off your chest below.

Park them here…

Pick them up later…

Tell us where Blogger alternatives have popped-up?

• Scarlet Blue can be found at  http://scarls.wordpress.com/

Once upon a time, with the aid of Excel, I conducted a thorough and systematic exploration of how to elicit excellent comments from excellent people.  Since then I’ve not really done anything to grow my comment list length. Blog-posters do all sorts of different, often subtle things, to manage their comment lists. These managing strategies are first  influenced by the technical environment that enables people to leave blog comments (or not):

1. Exclusive members (entrance criteria). The registration, vetting,  process ensures the potential commenter understands the blog’s ethos and policies. Members only.  For example, iblamethepatriarchy uses this approach to filter-out people who do not blame the patriarchy.I found the approach refreshing because it cut-out, irritating and irrelevant comments. Comments on iblamethepatriarchy are almost always worth reading.
2. Join the service (anyone can). Services like Blogger require registration prior to commenting. The blogger can control comments within their blog. Essentially an open approach within the (Blogger and partner services) community. One friend described their blogger blog as ‘ a pub – the regulars stop by for a banter and a chinwag and for something undemanding’. The commenters themselves moderate their own and each others comments. This can lead to long chatty comment lists with light entertainment and engagement value.
3. Independent. Publishing a muse (comment) on the Wendy House does not require people to register with a service. There is some moderation. First-time muses are held for review before publication. This allows them to judge whether it aligns with the Wendy House muse moderation guidance. Once a person has one approved muse they can continue to publish without this pre-emptive moderation.

Once you have access to comment on a blog, how do you comment? Commenters self-moderate, and moderate each other, often following unnwritten social rules. On blogger self-moderation appears to focus on providing

• positive feedback on the original post -  “what a lovely post, I really enjoyed that“
• positive feedback on other commenters comments – “I agree with madge, that was a lovely post”
• their own stories inspired by the original post – “this bought back so many memories, my cat also died in a bizarre lawnmower accident“

Occassionally a commenter may step outside the social norms for commenting. For example, they may

• question a detail or perspective expressed in the original post – “not everyone has a garden that they can bury their cat in”
• disagree with, correct, another commenter – “@madge – the HRH536 lawnmower is a rotary, not a flymo“
• present a personal experience not consistent with expressed views “for me, knowing that my cat’s out of pain and in heaven is a really happy, not sad, thing“
• write something mean “get over it, she’s a domestic cat, get a life”
• write something that is difficult to understand – “typofilia can boggle the waffledog so puddlemaina it“

These non-conformist comments are rare. Recently I watched one blog post where someone wrote a comment that was difficult to understand. The blogger’s twitter feed lept into action with a flurry of advice on how to deal with this, things like - ignore it, ask the commenter what they mean, or reassuring the blogger that the original post was high quality etc.

Another blogger recently wrote about how their engagement with comments distracted them from writing. Other bloggers have mentioned how addictive they find comments – wanting to get more, and more-flattering comments.

One blogger is trying to remove the distraction of blog post comments by:

• disabling the comment facility on their blog – people can no longer leave commentds
• suggesting commenters provide feedback by another means such as tweeting, emailing the blogger directly or linking to the post from their own blog or facebook account.

This will probably:

• increase links to the blog (from facebook, tweets, other blogs)
• have an emotional impact on commenters who cannot visit the comment box to read fellow commenters contributions in one place

I’m looking forward to finding out about the other techniques bloggers use and how they work. Here at the Wendy House post quality is assessed by a team meeting of the Wendy House judges and Excel. We use a rune reading and lashings of tea for the diagnositc process.

PARTY!!!!!

6 years since my first post on my own domain (Wendyhome.com), and this Wendy House blog.  There were some forays in 2004 to use other services to host the Wendy House (Blogger, MSN groups). It soon became clear that WordPress and my own domain provided an excellent team. Celebrations include

Spanking big TRIFFLE

Domain ownership renewal purchase until 2020

Lashings of tea

Google analytics tells me the search phrases that have resulted in people opening a page in the wendy house. Do you think they were sated searchers?

Searches number 2, 10, 11, 13, and 15 were probably actually looking for my blog at wendyhome.com. Outstanding, I suspect they were happy searchers when they landed here

The other searches apppear to be a mix of  a childrens play toy, my blog-tags (Passport, Sylvac), or my blog posts (e.g. Breaking distances, Scaffolding font, Hardware malfunction). It’s less certain whether these searchers found what they wanted here.

Nonetheless, this looks like a reasonable match between searchers queries and blog content when searchers land here. More overlap match between search term and overall content than when I last looked in July 2006. I’m all in favour of reasonable matches

2000 quality comments over the 5 years of the wendy house

All the wendy house blog posts dating back to February 2005 are back, BACK!   With a few bonus letters appearing as-if by magic.

My back is BACK. Sneaky little vertebrae untwisted by Paul’s expert manipulation.  Hoorah!

Matrix is back chasing birds, and Sampo is starting a weight-loss diet to get BACK to being lythe

Normal service is…   …..BACK

Update nightmares (ongoing) will be reported in this thread. 

I should have known I would feel impelled to publish my experience of the (cough) service…

First I tried simplifying things by cutting  my web-hosting company out of the communication loop because they literally can’t help as they sell services and that are all separately password protected – know nothing of each other.  This means I have to work out exactly who provides what and what they can support me with. 

I tried directly using the UI of the company that hosts the databases (Starfieldtech) because the problem appears to be moving the contents from my ‘old’ (V4 sql database) to my new (V5 sql database) – essentially the ‘back-up’ and ‘restore’ UI settings in my webhost’s (GoDaddy) environment did not work – system feedback said they did work – in reality they failed. 

I’ve tried ‘export’ and ‘import’ in the database services (Starfieldtech UI) – but that hasn’t worked either.  It did give me feedback that the new database-user did not have permission to access the the V4 database (pressumably username and password).

Next I tried creating a 3rd database with the same username and password as the V4 database that contains my blog history.  BUT, the ‘username’ already exists so I cant create another database with the same username.

Next I looked for a way to add the user(name) for my archive database to my new database – no obivous way to do this.

Next I wrote to GoDaddy and to Starfieldtech explaining my goal and understanding of the problem then pleading for thier help. 

This could be the time that I change providers to a local UK hosting service – if they can set-up my blog database then I’ll switch my hosting. For now after 3 hours I’m taking a well deserved curry and rest break…..

I’ve just upgraded my database and it hasn’t worked. 

Lots of fiddling and support service usage on the way. 

No new posts are planned for May. 

Normal service will be resumed in June

Have a good spring

The wendy house has spent 4 years together with wordpress. This is one of the longer technology-service relationships that I’ve participated in.  

Still feels good

Happy valentines day

Fiddling.  

With the wendy house blog and fireplace.

Updating my banner with a stylized picture of a gravestone that sits under a Cedar tree in the Cemetry junction graveyard.  

A speedy idealised  self-portrait on a post-it note without the aid of a mirror has become gravatar.   The hair looks like it has a little more volume than in real life.   I may fiddle with impovised product for volume to capture that ’80 big hair thing in real life.  

Some things move on and others move around and some things  get sketched on post-it notes then blogged.   Tis the way of things.

Google analytics provides a ‘site overlay’ that shows your website with in-place click-through statistics.   A geek like me will spend time wandering through such statistics saying ‘oOOoooo‘   and ‘Aaah‘ and ‘what does it all  mean?‘

For 4 weeks,   September 2009, Google analytics says that I had 4,681 ‘visits’.  

I rashly infer that visitors want to know something about who is writing this nonsense (8.1% on who’s wendy) or are interested in finding food (0.3%), or why I’m bothering to write about anything at all (0.2%).   Some people consider whether to comment, or why I might consider stopping people from publishing their commentson my blog, (0.1%).  

More than no-one,   some-one,   is interested in who inspired me to blog ( >0.0%) while no-one wants to  sign-up to receive notifications of my posting in thier RSS reader.

Here’s what Google Analytics says, in numbers, about what visitors click on:

• Scribbles (The Wendy House home page) = 5.9%
• Who’s Wendy = 8.1%
• Why Scribble = 0.2%
• Comment control = 0.1%
• Food foraging = 0.3%
• Credits =   > 0.0%
• RSS = 0%

I prefer the notion of ‘somone’ over the numerical representation of more than no-one  (> 0.0) looked at who I credit with inspiring my blogging.   The relationship between significant (meaning) and signifiers (often numbers) is frequently obscure and sometimes misleading.

Ho hum

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 Fasters˜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…

Once 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?

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.      
• 0   (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.  

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…

(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.

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!

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?

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!

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

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.  

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:

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

quiz link: How Cluttered is Your Mind?

quiz link: Are you a Feminist?

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

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

• Apostrophe abuse:   http://apostrophe-abuse.blogspot.com/
• Quotation mark:    http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/

Feel free to direct me to further useful resources…

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.

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

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.