The Monday Traffic Spike

Having kept track of my site traffic-- that is, all of my 50 readers-- for all of five minutes (well, okay, more like 30 days), I find it interesting that there is a drop-off in blogging on weekends. As a general trend across the majority of blogs, not just here. This goes for both blog posts and blog readers. And then there is usually a little uptick in traffic every Monday. I would have assumed the opposite. But then, it's been so long since I worked behind a desk with a computer. And perhaps other people are less likely than I am to spend their weekends vegging out in front of a screen.

I feel sort of bad, Monday traffickers, that I neglected to post.

Do you randomly surf more on Mondays? Does being at work make you depressed (imagine how much MORE depressed you'd be if you were like me and didn't have access to a computer at work)? Did you expect me to post something brilliant and insightful about my cat on this Mondayest of Mondays?

Well, I didn't.

Is That a Lightsaber or a Hydrospanner?

Or a post about Mara Jade! By yours truly! Imagine that!

You expect Mara to have a romance with Karrde, her boss, but she doesn't. You expect her to have a romance with Luke, and she doesn't. She's not there for anyone else, but is instead portrayed as a character in her own right, with an emotional arc that has nothing to do with a man. It certainly defied my expectations when I was twelve.

Read the rest here...


(I'm referring, btw, to the nerdiest IM conversation ever, in which my brother and I argued about whether that's a lightsaber or a hydrospanner clipped to Mara's belt, above, in my header. And then felt like huge geeks because we knew what a hydrospanner was. WHICH REMINDS ME. I swear to god, the other week we realized they have hydrospanners on Star Trek too! Or something that also performs a screwdriver-like function that sounds like the characters are saying hydrospanner. And now I'm going to have to go look that up, and I feel like an even bigger loser. THANKS, BLOG.)

Yeah, Bear With Me Here

I'm trying a couple experiments to get Technorati to see me. It's not going to work. But I've been inspired to waste an hour trying. I was just going to spend that hour getting stomped by the T-Rex in Tomb Raider anyway.

Edited 11:13 AM: You know what? Fuck Technorati. It indexes my old URL, and it's not even updated anymore. I thought it might be a problem with my HTML validation, but guess what-- it's the EXACT SAME TEMPLATE over there. I don't do ANYTHING to that blog, and it's still seeing it. If I go post over there, it will show up immediately. WTF. Every time I try to deal with this, I just end up getting annoyed. I shouldn't even use their tags or link them. I think I'm going to stop. I certainly don't get anything out of it. Fuck Technorati. I need a California Turkey wrap from Roly Poly right this second. You wouldn't even believe it.

We're In the Money!

So today I talked with the principal of the school where I'm pretty sure I'll be teaching in the fall... and I found out my salary will actually be $5-6K more than I thought it would be. This is pretty exciting to me, since I've been in 'starving student' mode for way too many years now. Seriously, if someone gave me ONE thousand dollars right now I'd flip for joy.

You might be like, "You got a job? I didn't know that!" or "Wait, teaching? You have a mouth like a sailor!" I've made the decision that I'm not going to blog about work AT ALL, or mention where I work, or anything like that. I'm also in the process of anonymizing (anonymous-izing?) this blog. I think there ought to be enough Sarahs in the City of New Orleans that I'll be OK. So this will be the last you hear about work. Except my summer job as Magazine St. door girl, naturally, because it might lead to some amusing stories and, well, I'm pretty certain no one there particularly cares.

I want to be able to be myself on this blog. But I'm not entirely stupid.

This Is My 500th Post, Oh Yes It Is

Yeah, so I can't really think of anything interesting to celebrate it with. I could post a picture of my cat, since I would hazard a guess that 40% of the aforementioned 500 posts have featured my cat. But then I'd have to take the many cute pictures (and oh, they are cute) off my camera and put them on the computer, and I don't really feel like it.

So what am I doing? I'm having a day off. I'm writing a short story. I'm trying to decide what I should have for lunch. I'm doing a couple loads of laundry. I'm currently listening to "Perfect Blue Buildings" by Counting Crows.

I feel like I should be wearing a sign that says "THIS IS ME IN THE CREATIVE PROCESS," so people understand why I am zoned out and not responding to them. And also, why I look slightly like crap.

Why Don't You See Me???

Wah. No matter how many times I manually ping Technorati, it won't see my posts. I'm still fiddling with my settings, but it's getting to be super irritating. I used to be able to use it as a resource to see who'd linked to me recently. But now it's like the new URL isn't here (although the old URL which I haven't posted to in months still has a ranking that's twenty times better, go figure). I've tried all different settings to get it to see my posts. I had this problem with the old site, until one day they up and indexed me just like that after months of complaining.

So. Go, like, link to me or something. Maybe it'll get the freakin' idea already.

New Gig At The Hathor Legacy

Just FYI, for anyone who's interested, I am proud to announce that I'm going to be blogging on The Hathor Legacy's new book blog. I've been a fan of the site for several months now. They are a site dedicated to critical analysis of female characters in TV and film. Recently they branched out and added two additional blogs, one on books and one on feminist issues in general.

If you want to know which posts are mine, my nickname there is Duru Antilles, and I have the blue twi'lek icon. I posted this weekend on Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness series.

Testing

OK, I just migrated to Blogger Beta, which seems to have gone well except for the fact that it's anonymous-ized several of my previous comments. I don't know whether that depends on what kind of Blogger account you guys have. I see I can now use labels for my posts. I might incorporate that into my sidebar... but then, I already use Technorati tags, so would that look stupid with both? I don't know, I was going to move my whole blog off "the Spot," but I have free hosting for my site, and I won't be able to if my blog is there. It would take up too much space and bandwidth. Blogger has never eaten any of my posts or given me any disasters like it appears to have given others. So I'm going to stay here for now, and continue to upgrade my other site, until I have enough extra cash kicking around to buy a nice hosting package.

ETA: Yes, I do believe that does look stupid.

Tags: blogger beta, blogging