It's News to Me

While chatting with my friend Mike Neel in Skype's IM, he informed me a new version of Windows Live Writer was available so I downloaded it and have just installed it.  This is my first post from it.  Mike informed me that it has more support for WordPress's features, which pleases me greatly.  One thing you can now do is create a Page, which in WordPress is different from a blog post.  You couldn't do that before, so that's a sweet feature.  (I haven't experimented with doing that yet, but if Mike says it's true, then it must be true.)  I just discovered that it now has the ability to add tags, so I'm experimenting with that below.  Now if I can publish this post and my computer doesn't start to smoke, I'll consider this experiment a success. 

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A week ago today I posted some thoughts about the tools I am currently using to discover and understand the traffic I get here at my blog. Several of you commented on that post and offered some helpful suggestions (i.e., W3counter -- thanks Dan Grossman) and encouragement, all of which were much appreciated. Since that time I have also been carrying on an email dialog with a friend and fellow blogger about his experience, and in today's post I want to relate his statistical success story and see if we can draw some lessons from it. At his request, I won't mention who he is or link to his blog, but you may, I think, find his story as interesting as I do.

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I virtually never take a vacation, last year's cruise to Alaska with Carole being a spectacularly notable exception, but I do take virtual vacations. For instance, I am participating in two vacations, vicariously and virtually this Memorial Day weekend, with my son Mike and his extended family at Ft. Walton Beach, FL, and with Andy of Yellow Swordfish and his wife, as they visit the American west and southwest from the British Isles. (Also see Andy's posts here and here.) The beauty of virtual vacations is that I can switch quickly from the beach to the Grand Canyon and I don't incur the shock to my bank account of having to stop every 300 or 400 miles to get soaked at a gas station, nor do I have to leave the familiar surroundings or the comfort of my own computer. All in all, I'm glad I'm here rather than there.

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I went to the doctor to have my eyes examined on Monday the twenty-first. It had been two years since I had had an exam and it was time, if for no other reason than to check for glaucoma. As it turns out, my «dress» glasses, meaning the ones I wear everyday when I go out of the house, the trifocals without the lines, weren't working for me as well as they used to. I need them to see things at a distance while I'm driving, to a restaurant for instance, but once I get to the restaurant those same glasses don't work as well as they used to because I now find reading the menu to be difficult. So I was due for an eye exam for that reason as well. It turns out that I do need a new prescription, which I am having filled ... for $480.50 (ouch!).

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In this post, I want to talk a bit about how I am monitoring who is viewing my blog and how often they appear to be doing so.

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I sometimes believe the wheels of technological progress would screech to a halt without the use of acronyms. And facility with acronyms seems to be the shibboleth that divides the technological cognoscenti from those who are lost in space when they walk into Best Buy or Circuit City. Seniors, in particular, find dealing with some pimply-faced geek wannabe who has scored a job selling the latest computers, digital cameras and MP3 players to an unsuspecting public to be an anathema. God forbid you should have a problem with your computer and have to try to determine whether that Geek Squad Savior who rode in on a white PT Cruiser is blowing smoke up your ass when he tells you you've got to buy a $300.00 component just to get your email to work again. They'll sling acronyms at you so fast that it'll make your head spin. As the old saying goes, «If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.»

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Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, announced this morning that version 2.2 of WordPress is available. This is very welcome news indeed, because among the other things it includes is «A new Blogger importer that is able to handle the latest version of Google's Blogger product and seamlessly import posts and comments without any user interaction beyond entering your login.» As soon as the upgrade becomes available on Dreamhost in its one-click installs, I'll be upgrading this installation to 2.2 so that I can import the almost 2 and a half years of posts and comments from my Blogger version of this blog into this installation so that all my blogging can appear in this one spot. Thank you, Matt and the whole WordPress team, for all your excellent work and effort.

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This is from an email I sent to a couple of friends this morning about the tendency to forward messages we receive advocating activism to resolve some problem we see as important.

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Yesterday or the day before, I was tagged by Tish and invited to list 5 goals of mine. I must admit that I am more into pipe dreams and fairy tales than I am into goals. It's a character flaw I suppose to be a dreamer rather than a planner. When my friend Jerry recently made some very kind remarks about me in which he said,

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