Category: meta

So, pouring over my site statistics lately. There was a huge, atypical surge in traffic on March 1st, and I’ve been trying to figure out what caused it. I mean, I normally see around 10,000 hits for the month since around October last year, but so far for March I’ve got over 12,000 as of midnight last night (when the site stats update), and over 4500 of them came on one day.

In looking over all the stats that webalizer is providing, I can trace the huge spike to my posting about Jef Raskin’s passing over that weekend. Come Monday, a site called “Web Pro News” found my site and included my small posting along with several others as a tribute. Web Pro News was the referrer for 4400 of those hits, linking to me that day. Interesting. And now I link back to Mr. Rich Ord, completing the circle.

I’ll bet that I don’t generate as much traffic for him as he generated for me… I’m OK with asymmetry, though.

Incidentally, I posted some new pictures over in my gallery.

Like these cool pictures of the Portland waterfront.

Sorry, no new Smacky pictures. Yet.

If you notice broken pictures back in the archives, just know that I’m rearranging stuff on the server. Sorry.

Added RSS (well, technically, Atom) feed support to Lunar Obverse.

Firefox users should now see an orange icon in the toolbar in the lower right-hand of the toolbar. Other RSS- or Atom-feed savvy users can use this link.

More about RSS (a.k.a. Really Simple Syndication) here.

Apparently Blogger has changed the way it handles comments: No longer is a Blogger account required for your name to be attached to a post, for instance. This change happened over the weekend.

Another change they implemented (but I haven’t decided to turn on yet) is to let comments appear in a popup window. Comment on whether you prefer it or not…

Here’s the details for those who want them.

(Hint: please leave a name on any comments…)

Site update notes:

• First, I rearranged the pictures in the picture gallery, which probably broke a bunch of links back in the archive. Sorry. Maybe someday I’ll get around to updating all of those. After I move the site to Blogtastic, maybe.
• Speaking of Blogtastic, (a blogging program developed by Caleb) I intend to spend this week working on the final design for my new site design and to get it moved over. I’ll still post here; all my development is going to be done at brian-moon.com (as I post this there’s nothing there. I’ll throw up an index so at least there’ll be something to look at).
• There is no third thing.
• Fourth thing is, I wanted to warn everyone that when I do update my site, it looks like I’ll probably lose all the past comments. So if there’s something you’re particularly attached to, I don’t know, save it and email it to me or something.

Those who follow this space closely (which is all of you, right?) will realize that my “Picture of the Week” has been the same for two weeks.

Normally I change it on Saturday or Sunday. But I haven’t changed it for a while because there’s some controversy over how it should work.

I haven’t made any of the suggested changes yet, but I wanted you all to know that I will be changing the picture. It’s going to work the same as it’s always worked.

Also, I can’t keep up with Friday Night Cat Blogging. Just too much stuff going on on Fridays for that.

I’ve had a request that I’m asking for input on:

Over on the right I have my “Picture of the Week”.

I prefer to have it simply be a link to my picture gallery. But someone asked if it could be a link to the larger version of the picture.

Which would folks prefer?

While scanning my web logs, which are not the same thing as weblogs; what I was scanning was the logs associated with my web host… er, OK, at any rate…

I found a site that includes me in their links (or “blog roll”, which is another term for links or bookmarks posted online of other blogs; damn, the terminology is really getting out of hand, huh?)

…er, where was I? Oh, right: The Modulator has a page of the most complete blog links I’ve seen in a while. And, way down under the heading “Visual Arts” (which surprises the heck outta me, since I think of myself as a writer) is “Lunar Obverse”!

Coolio!

The folk at The Modulator also archive any and all “Friday Night Cat Blogging” (also dog, spider, etc., etc.), which I’ve learned is a long-standing tradition amongst bloggers. Little did I know…

Other things I’ve learned from reading the logs is that someone, somewhere, used the Belgian Google to search for something on my page. Twice! Yeah, baby! Bring on the Belgians!

Did you know that it can take 5 minutes or more for my blog to load if you’re on dial-up? Yeah, bad, I know. If any of you are out there reading it after waiting that long, I probably owe you booze or something. I like the way it looks but a) my page doesn’t validate as CSS-anything, and b) it’s super-resource-intensive, and c) it really only looks good in the browsers I use, which means that the majority browser (Internets Exploder from MS) wasn’t even considered when I designed it. So, I need to come up with something new. And I’ve kinda been putting it off, since I haven’t been, y’know, inspired.

However, I’m happy to announce that I’m much closer to a final design for Lunar Obverse v2.0. I worked on a mock-up tonight, just sketching something out and getting the colors down. And I’m not even sure these are the final colors and right now none of the elements are in place but, what the hell, I’m posting a tiny scaled-down version of it just to show everyone that I’m working on it:

click on image for larger version; opens in new window

See, the image at the top will be an actual picture (grabbed from NASA, since all that stuff is public domain for taxpayers) — the grey area will be the surface of the moon and the blue blob is the Earth. The tiny little bar underneath that will be the navigation menu. The wide left-hand column will be the main content, my posts; the right-hand column will have the extra stuff, like the Picture of the Week, the archive links, and maybe a poll someday or something.

I haven’t decided if the sections will all be boxed in like that. I mainly did that to show myself where they’d go.

I’ll work on it some more tomorrow and when I’m done, I’ll use it to throw together some HTML/CSS and then mock up a couple of posts, ’cause I still have to decide what color text to use for all the elements. I still like light text on a dark background but might flip that and just have dark borders around everything. Decisions, decisions… and I’m not a graphic designer, dammit, I’m a writer and a geek. So comments are welcome. But hold off until I’ve got more of the total design filled in.

Then I’ll post a link to it, hopefully later next week, and let people comment on it.

One thing I don’t have now is an “About Me” page. But the whole damn blog is about me, so why would I be redundant?