Facebook.com/TedCarnahan
LinkedIn.com/in/TedCarnahan
Twitter.com/TedCarnahan
WP Greet Box is Great
I just installed a new Wordpress plugin called WP Greet Box. It’s responsible for the nifty little “Welcome, X user!” (for values of X that include Google, Bing, Facebook, etc.) that you see when you visit my website. I had been wanting something like this for a while, and long-time readers might remember that I had a very ugly, homemade version that ran on certain posts for while that I finally got rid of when I upgraded to my current Wordpress theme.
I did consider an alternative, Referrer Detector. WP Greet Box appears to be more friendly to my caching plugin, and is Javascript/AJAX based so that it doesn’t slow down page generation times. Referrer Detector also appears to have a few more rough edges just based on the comments and changelog information I was able to find.
Usually, though, I want to choose the plugin that has the biggest community because that plugin will be more likely to be around for the long haul – and on this account, WP Greet Box wins handily with nearly 40,000 downloads. Referrer Detector’s 5,000 was nothing to sneeze at, but the community’s vote seems to be squarely with WP Greet Box. So far, I’ve been very happy with it.
200+ posts
Wow – my blog finally reached 200 posts after several years of writing. I guess it has taken me this long because I try to keep this site the place where I put substantive content, not the pithy, sarcastic stuff I’m more likely to throw on Facebook. Altogether, it’s a pretty big milestone for me. Maybe I’ll hit 500 in fewer years than it took to reach this milestone – with internship starting soon, I’ll have no shortage of topics to write about.
Liturgical Wordpress, part deux
Speaking of changing the color of your website based on the liturgical calendar, Scott Lenger has up on his site a Wordpress plugin to do exactly that. I can’t decide if that’s good or bad.
I’ve been thinking of a site re-design for a while, and I blame Dean for getting me started on it again. This is not what I needed to get my final papers completed this semester.
Why bother blogging?
Sometimes I really wonder why I bother. I’m not getting all depressive and “woe is me” about it, but I find that I often hang too many hopes on how successful my website is. I have a few dozen regular readers, about a thousand visitors a month (who are mostly interested in technical information I publish), and that’s the extent of it. Then I happened across a old-ish article by Seth Finkelstein arguing that blogs don’t really get around old media, they just reinforce a different hierarchy of contributors.
I also found an article written in 2006 on Rough Type which argues quite pointedly that the “blogosphere,” as such, is really just a new feudal structure for information distribution. If you’re looking to get around “old media,” a blog isn’t what you’re looking for.
And yet. And yet I never started writing on this site because I wanted to get around “old media” – though to be honest, I wouldn’t mind if my political ideas got some more traction. I really started writing here to distributed ideas. A lot of those technical posts have been quite successful. Yet at the same time, a post I wrote about prosthetic dog testicles continues to be one of my most popular writings. Not the series I’ve been working on about the ethics of Freedom Software in the church, not my pictures of family and friends, plastic dog balls. Fulfilling, indeed.
I’m not planning on stopping writing – in fact, I often find myself planning to write here more. My Blogfodder file is longer than ever. But, for my own sake, I need to say – indeed, I need it to be true – that I’m writing to share ideas with the world, find solutions to computer-y problems, to present my hobbies and what’s going on in my life to family and friends. Few people are interested in regularly subscribing to a blog that is about such a personal and eclectic mix of stuff. Few still are interested in my peculiar mixture of hobbies, politics, and religion. I’m not interested in splitting the site, starting new ones, or anything else like that right now. And… (deep breath)… I’m okay with that!
Now I just need to find a 12-step program for addiction to Google Analytics…
Blogfodder
I suppose some people just blog everything they see, but I like to let things ruminate for a while. I keep a “Blogfodder” file in Tomboy where I paste URLs (with a little note about what they are) and then go back a few days later and look at them again. The things that stand out twice get written up.
Copyright 2006-2010 Ted Carnahan. Except where noted, the content of this site is licensed under CC-SA-BY.