Eight years ago, a fellow writer set up his own blog and invited me to set up my own blog on his site. Jon stopped blogging (far too soon, in my opinion), but allowed me to maintain my blog on his site for over five years and still graciously hosts the archives from that period. I probably wrote more and quoted less in the early days, but it’s now hard to remember what I did online before I became a blogger.

I did a retrospective round-up of the first year for the 2010 anniversary, and I collected the “best of 2005″ for last year’s anniversary post. I guess this year requires a look at what I posted in 2006 (and may still have some relevance or interest):

January, 2006

• Woodbutchering, New Year’s style and Woodbutchery, part two, as I got some sawdust flying around the basement.
• Jon live-blogs the debate, where Jon sets the standard for commentary on political debates in the minimalist style.
• Woodworking follies (I was doing a lot more woodworking in 2006 than I am now).
• Why scrutineers are important (yes, a frequent repost, but still relevant)
• Missing the point of “intellectual property”, at the intersection of 21st century law and 14th century technology.
• Austin Bay on the Canadian Forces, a friendly fisking of Bay’s complimentary view of Canadian troops and disparaging view of Canadian politicians.

February, 2006

• Replacing the Browning High Power? Conditions for Canadian troops in Afghanistan indicate that a new standard side arm is needed.
• Harper’s new cabinet. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s first cabinet had some unexpected and controversial choices.
• More on the ethical side of healthcare: a case where medical ethics, economics, and basic humanity all rumble for supremacy.
• Another myth … busted. S.L.A. Marshall, faux-historian (or should that be “fabulist”) of the US military experience. He’s the one who promulgated the myth that most American soldiers were too cowardly to fire their weapons in combat.
• Guest Editorial: Union and Management. Brendan McKenna on the adversarial nature of labour relations (and rediscovering the old truth that companies often get the unions they deserve).
• The Tiger takes down the ID card proposal. Disparaging Stockwell Day’s mandatory internal passport proposal.
• Well, at least I’m not this bad… some thoughts on the decline of “collecting” hobbies.

March, 2006

March was a particularly fraught month with serious work deadlines, followed by a vacation at a hotel that didn’t offer internet access, then a debilitating cold, and a business trip. As a consequence, blogging suffered a sharp drop in output.

• Daunte Culpepper traded by Vikings? It may well have been the right decision, but it ushered in the quarterback-by-platoon era that lasted until 2011 when the Vikings finally drafted Christian Ponder.
• Will MPAC be reined in? I’d documented our run-in with the folks at MPAC in 2004 and 2005. Others were having much worse experiences.

April, 2006

• Trying to understand Afghanistan. About how we in the post-tribal West fail to understand the structure of everyday life in tribal societies.
• They make it sound so … unappealing. On the dramatization of the 1972 Canada-Russia hockey series.
• A Florida motel that James Lileks missed. A few photos from a Florida motel I stayed in. It’s full of “character”.

May, 2006

• Oil prices. Examining implication “that Canada wasn’t considered a “well-established liberal democracy”! And the Fascists [had] only been in power for a few months!”
• Conspiracy theory top 10 list, where the polarity of currently popular theories is highlighted.
• The play’s the thing. Visiting the youth theatre group we used to work with in Stratford, being able to watch the stage combat without worrying intensely (I used help out with basic fight choreography).
• A possible answer … to the question of why we have troops in Afghanistan (on the life and death of Captain Nicola Goddard, RCHA).
• Doors. It took a few months, but there was finally more woodworking progress to report.
• Mid-century comic books. From early comics to blaming NASA for the suspended animation of the space program in a few short sentences.
• The mystery of “Canadian Content” rules. I didn’t like ‘em then, and I don’t like ‘em now. But if you’ve got rules, at least try to have them make some kind of sense.

June, 2006

• Completed Cabinets. Finally got those bookcases out of the basement and into the office.
• Accidental humour. A cameo appearance by the once-obscure former Ontario premier Bob Rae.
• Today is P-Day. The kingdom of cats is disturbed by the arrival of a new pet.
• More puppy pictures. Canine cuteness.
• Saturday Puppy Pictures. The cuteness continues, with the horror of the first bath.

July, 2006

• Mister Ghost asks “What does Canada stand for?”. An odd one, as it’s a link to another blog where I have an extended go at answering that question (it’s the very last item in the post).
• Soccer stadium to be built in Toronto. I’m glad they built it, but I still wish it had been funded privately rather than with involuntary “contributions” from the taxpayers.
• O pleez spehr mi! Yet another silly attempt to “simplify” the language.
• Saturday evening photos. Playing around with the new digital camera.
• Red Ensign Standard 44. One of the last instances of the once-common blog round-up post.

August, 2006

• Travelling by air can be fun. My top travel tip garnered from this little gem of a trip is “don’t try to travel at the same time some would-be terrorist launches their new operational plan”.
• Travel restrictions, British style. The British security theatre festival’s latest season.
• Another nice game, with a good result. One of the weekly soccer game reports, this one from one of Victor’s better games of the season.
• Guilty Money. Emiliano Gonzolez is rescued by police after being in the hands of a desperate gang of dollar bills. 124,000 of them.
• User-friendly technology. My computer starts to act out-of-sorts.

September, 2006

• Carnival of Liberty no. 61. I hosted the weekly Carnival of Liberty round-up for the Life, Liberty, Property (LLP) blog group on my birthday.
• How not to fire someone. Being fired is a traumatic experience. With care and attention to detail, an employer can make it far worse for the employee being terminated.
• To fall just short of fame …. Photos from the end-of-season soccer tournament, where Victor is seen demonstrating heading the ball while highland dancing.
• QotD: Mutability of Human Sexuality. A vintage quote from Dan Savage — NSFW, of course.

October, 2006

October was another light-blogging month, as my employer of the time had been taken over and we were all busy trying to be seen to justify our continued existence on the payroll. Mid-month, along with most of my department, I got a termination notice.

• Sorry for the extra-light blogging lately. A short note of thanks to the readers who sent good wishes at the awkward moment of termination.
• Algonquin Park in Autumn. A few small photos (I was trying not to destroy Jon’s bandwidth cap in those days) from a pleasant drive in the southern part of Algonquin.

November, 2006

• This could get ugly. Ontario starts introducing roundabouts to replace some low-traffic intersections.
• Why did the Republicans lose? Explaining why the GOP was “beaten like a rented mule” in the mid-term elections.
• “… a serious flaw …” An unforeseen drawback to blogging.
• Most recent project. A minor home improvement project bloated out to full-day workload by the use of science. Or powertools.

December, 2006

• Unscheduled downtime. Power outage and a badminton tournament.
• A bright new day … for unions? How unions could change to remain relevant in the modern workplace.
• Absurd to the nth degree. Young teens charged with, in effect, being young teens.

I don’t have a complete series of annual numbers, as the tools under MovableType (the old site) and WordPress (the current site) don’t provide quite the same slices of data. I installed SiteMeter on the old site a couple of months after I started blogging and it shows 414,416 unique visits from 17 August, 2004 to today (and it still gets around 100 visits per day, even though I haven’t been posting there for more than two years).

Since I switched to the current site the traffic has been going up, although the big blogs don’t have to worry that I’m drawing too much of their readership:

• 2009: 58,121 unique visits, 131,825 hits (site went live in July, stats date from mid-August)
• 2010: 328,374 unique visits, 825,381 hits
• 2011: 413,463 unique visits, 1,118,497 hits

That concludes our occasional dip into the statistics. Thanks for coming by, and especially thanks to folks that link to my blog.

Update: I happened across this bit from July, 2009 on the old blog that still seems relevant:

I’m not sure why I’ve been blogging for five years … it’s certainly not the money, booze, and groupies! I’ve thought about stepping away from the keyboard every now and again, but I don’t actually write as much as I once did, so large chunks of my “blogging” time are actually copy-paste-and-code sessions, rather than writing.

The blogroll has certainly diminished in importance over the last couple of years. The Red Ensign bloggers, my primary affiliation, has diminished to about a dozen active blogs, of whom perhaps 5-6 produce the vast majority of posts. Other blogrolls I’m on have similar profiles of activity. Blogrolls don’t matter compared to when I first started blogging back in 2004.

I remember worrying about SiteMeter and the Ecosystem, as they showed me what my visitors were reading, where they came from and where they went. Time has also not been kind to the ease of gathering that sort of information, as more readers come in from search engine results, RSS feeds, and goodness knows what other channels. If/when I move the blog over to the new site, I may not bother including the links for those tools. They’re no longer all that useful or informative.

I do miss the cameraderie of the early blogging years … but as more of the early blogs go dark, the replacements are less likely to be bloggers and more likely to be Twitterers, Facebookers, YouTubers, Farkers, Slashdotters, and all the other Web 2.0/New Media options that are now available. What was that old expression about the only constant being change?

Google made secure search the default option for logged in users last month — primarily for privacy protection reasons. But the move has had the beneficial side-effect of making life for difficult for fraudsters seeking to manipulate search engine rankings in order to promote scam sites, according to security researchers.

Users signed into Google were offered the ability to send search queries over secure (https) connections last month. This meant that search queries sent while using insecure networks, such as Wi-Fi hotspots, are no longer visible (and easily captured) by other users on the same network.

However Google also made a second (under-reported) change last month by omitting the search terms used to reach websites from the HTTP referrer header, where secure search is used. The approach means it has become harder for legitimate websites to see the search terms surfers fed through Google before reaching their website, making it harder for site to optimise or tune their content without using Google’s analytics service.

I’d assumed that there had been some kind of change in the way Google was handling searches, because even though Google pretty much disappeared from my logs (having been the #1 referring site forever), the volume of traffic remained about the same.

My apologies to anyone who tried loading the page over the last hour or two!

All the necessary files now reside on the new laptop, and the old laptop has been dedicated to a new life as a genealogy workstation for Elizabeth. Today’s problem was network connectivity.

But not just network connectivity for the laptop, as I discovered when I tried turning on my desktop machine a little while ago.

At some point while we were away, the wireless router seems to have had some hiccoughs, because now it seems to imagine that it’s actually two separate machines. When I tried to connect to the internet this morning (from the new laptop), it insisted that I was connected to both a public network and our own named private network. But because it thought the public network was the primary, it refused to actually interact with our named network. It took several iterations of running diagnostics and power-cycling the router before the phantom “public” network disappeared and I was able to connect to the internet normally.

This evening, I had a similar problem with my desktop, except that my desktop machine is connected by ethernet cable, not wireless. That phantom “public” network re-appeared, and nothing I could do would get rid of it. The physical connections were fine, but nothing could persuade my desktop that it actually had a connection to the router and it was unable to get an IP address.

Having just bought a new laptop, I’m hoping that these symptoms do not imply that I need to also buy a new router, as you can imagine.

Now, I’ve got all the stuff to catch up on that happened last week, so blog posts will happen, just delayed a bit by all the other things that need catching up.

Today’s plan is to do it in two stages: back up the old machine’s files to the NAS, then install the files from the NAS to the new laptop.

Update, 8 August: I had to turn it off, as it was interfering with the stylesheet for both comments and extended entries. In both cases, whatever it was doing was reducing the space between paragraphs to the same as the ordinary inter-line spacing, and treating bulleted lists as if they were just ordinary paragraphs.

Nice idea, needs either a better (less intrusive) implementation, or should only be used by bloggers who know much more about the innards of stylesheets than I do.