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Category Archives: meta

Pondering

I am grappling with what to do with this blog. Because this domain is sort of the home of my academic life, which is bound up with games, so it makes sense for that stuff to stay together. But then there’s the personal stuff and the ranting and flowcharts about shoes and kittens – which may not be seen in such a positive light if people just want to follow my academic life.

I have just read back over the last eight years or so of my life, hiding the occasional post that was too over-shary (note: this was a fairly cursory process; the story about how I broke a rib is still here, as are the negotiations about our cats’ toilet habits.). I’m still confused about what to do.

4 Comments

Posted by Melissa on February 6, 2016 in meta, Uncategorized

Increasing blog followers by 4454% overnight!

21 Apr

If you are an obsessive follower of statistics you might notice that you could join the four hundred and ninety people who hang on every word I write on this blog.

That’s right. I have four hundred and ninety subscribers. WordPress proudly tells all my readers that they can “Join 490 other followers” in subscribing to my every update.

Only thing is … it’s a cheat.

A week ago I had 11 subscribers (all of whom I love very dearly indeed, not least because they give me validation). So where did the jump come from?

Wellll, this new template has a Publicise option which auto-posts to Twitter when a new post goes live. Which is a feature that I love dearly – especially when I remember to edit what it’s going to say.

But the BEST PART of doing that is that it turns out that since I turned that on, WordPress now automatically counts EVERY SINGLE ONE OF MY TWITTER FOLLOWERS as a subscriber to my blog. So instead of 11 readers (which is not a very big number even though as mentioned I love you all dearly) I have a veritable horde of readers. Nearly three and a half gross of you.

I wonder what would happen if I connected it to Facebook as well.

11 Comments

Posted by Melissa on April 21, 2012 in meta

Summary – recent posts

20 Jan

I have not forgotten my beloved friends, and have been writing many postsf for you, my darlings, while off-line. I have now uploaded a bunch of them. Maybe I should have put them on timed release or something. To help the reader, here is the order of writing (all links open in new windows):

Day 1 – Saturday 10th January – in which we prepare to travel to Lorne and start thinking about our Big Trip
Day 3 – Monday 12th January – in which we do some more Big Trip thinking
Day 5 – Wednesday 14th January – sun, surf, sand and gaming
Big Trip – more thoughts – where we firm up and even propose some dates. Is it time to hive Big Trip off into its own blog, isolated from this one so that my family and the kids’ friends and teachers can read it when we are away? Probably.
Day 9 – Sunday 18th January – sand, Niece, donkey poo and wool cubes
Day 9 – Sunday 18th January – part 2 – berry picking, donkeys and wood carvings
Holiday reading – what i read on my holiday. by Melissa, aged 38 and 3/4. And a bit. .

1 Comment

Posted by Melissa on January 20, 2009 in family, grand plans, meta

Weird and varied

24 May

Every so often, as I wander around the Internet,

I find a blog post that links to or discusses something quite unexpected. Sometimes confronting, sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes highlighting the differences between me and the writer. And I do a double-take and think, “Wow – that’s strange!” – and think about it for as long as it needs, and then move on.

And then I think, well, I write about naming birth control.

And I hope I sometimes get to make you do double-takes too, Dear Reader.

Not a penny more, not a penny less.

29 Apr

I guess the key to making Twitter fun is to have exactly the right number of people that you follow – not so many that you can’t follow them, and not so few that it’s not worth checking in every couple of hours.

My list seems to be a fairly good mix of US and European/UK folk at the moment (OK, I think no Europeans, all UK) so there are fairly regular updates – it might help if I added an Aussie or two 🙂

Using it seems to have reduced the amount of general to-do-list blogging that I do, which is probably not really a bad thing. That’s mostly procrastination, anyway.

For example, I could blog about the weird work I am doing at the moment. Instead of, you know, doing it.

I think I’d better not, though – it’s taking a lot longer than expected.

2 Comments

Posted by Melissa on April 29, 2008 in meta, work