This morning’s WordPress update appears to have messed around with the theme I’ve been using for the last several years. Most of the formatting looks to be okay … except that I’ve lost the banner graphic at the top of the page. I don’t have time to fix it properly now (not to mention that I don’t remember what I did back in 2009 to get it working in the first place), so I’ve just dropped a placeholder banner there (it’s the banner from the old MovableType site, actually).
February 27, 2015
February 20, 2015
My Twitter word cloud
If you’d like to generate one of these for your own (or someone else’s) Twitter account, the instructions are here.
Click to see full-sized at imgur.com
Because I use my Twitter account primarily for auto-posting links to my blog, the word “post” is by far the most common word, followed by “qotd” for my daily quotation posts. After that, it seems pretty representative of what I’ve been blogging about for the last year or so.
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February 11, 2015
December 31, 2014
Blog traffic in 2014
The annual statistics update on traffic to Quotulatiousness since January 1st (it’s also co-incidentally, the 2,000th day since I started posting here after moving from the original MovableType site at Jon’s website).
Over five million hits. That’s a pretty good number for an obscure Canadian blog. Certainly better numbers than The New Republic was managing just recently.
If I had any Photoshop skillz at all, I’d put together a Quotulatiousness version of the old McDonalds sign with the caption “Over Five Million Served”.
The final count of visitors to the blog will be about 1,500-2,500 higher, as I did the screen captures at around 11:30 in the morning.
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December 14, 2014
The New Republic was probably doomed anyway…
Let’s just say that there’s not a lot of profit for a monthly magazine with single-issue newsstand sales as low as this:
From a business standpoint, The New Republic was undoubtedly facing an uphill battle for profitability, even before last week’s events. According to the Pew Research Center and the Alliance for Audited Media, single copy sales of the magazine (considered the most objective measure of a magazine’s print appeal) have steadily declined over the past year, dropping to around 1,900 per issue.
They note that, between the first and second halves of 2013, newsstand sales fell by 57%, and fell a further 20% in the first of half of 2014.
One thousand, nine hundred readers. Per month.
Let me just give you a bit of perspective here:
At shortly after 10 a.m. on a quiet Sunday, I’ve already had more visitors to my obscure little personal blog today than there were copies of The New Republic sold in a recent month (not counting subscriptions).
That is not a viable business.
H/T to Kathy Shaidle, who also gets more daily traffic than TNR sells in a month.
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June 25, 2014
Long live the Oxford Comma
Sonny Bunch on the serial comma, single-spaces after periods and other pressing concerns:
Via 538, I’m proud to announce that those of us who support using the serial, or Oxford, comma are on The Right Side of History™:
The poll of 1,129 Americans, conducted from June 3 to 5, showed that the pro-Oxford comma crowd has a somewhat substantial lead overall: 57 percent to 43 percent. …
Readers had asked how the responses broke down by age, so here’s a chart to show who falls into each comma camp. The younger crowd overwhelmingly prefers the Oxford comma.
This makes sense, since refusing to use the Oxford comma is stupid and barbaric, a product of a bygone era. See also:
I don’t know who made this originally, but they’re a genius.
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June 23, 2014
Sir Humphrey signs off
I’m very sorry to learn that Sir Humphrey will no longer be updating his well-written and informative blog on British (and allied) military affairs:
I started this blog in late 2011 as a response to the levels of debate which surrounded many issues impacting on Defence and wider UK security policy. I felt a keen frustration that all too often the debate quickly descended into poor reporting, tired clichés (e.g. more admirals than ships) and a general sense that the UK was a declining nation with good armed forces who were being betrayed by the MOD.
In starting it I wanted to try to address some of these myths, try to put across an alternate viewpoint and suggest that actually the UK remains a relatively influential nation with capable armed forces and that there is often very logical reasons why things have been done as they are. In other words, I wanted to put across that it is possible to be very positive about Defence in the UK and that there is a remarkably good story to tell. In the intervening two and a half years, nearly 200 articles, over 2600 comments and over 650,000 page hits later, I feel that hopefully some of this has been achieved.
That said, I’ve now reached a point where the decision has been made to close down this blog. There are several reasons why I feel this is the right time to do this: Firstly, from a career perspective, it is increasingly difficult to balance holding down busy jobs as both a civilian and a reservist, and be able to comment objectively here. Recent changes to both commitments mean I don’t think I can continue to be able to post material here without having a conflict of interest in my professional roles.
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May 10, 2014
Ten years of Quotulatiousness
Today is the tenth anniversary of my very first blog post. It wasn’t really a barn burner: El Neil on the Iraqi Prisoners. With only two posts on the first day, it wasn’t clear that the blog would last even to the end of May. Eleven posts on the second day were a more hopeful sign. I’d been reading and commenting on blogs for a few years at that point, so the transition to being a blogger was relatively easy. Managing some kind of consistency — that was more of a challenge.
Becoming a long-term blogger just sort of happened: my friend Jon installed MovableType and invited me to start a blog of my own on his site. Jon eventually decided that blogging wasn’t for him so he shut down his blog, but allowed me to keep my blog hosted at his site for over five years as a primary and my first five years of posts are still available there. Jon’s short experiment in blogging was called Blogulatiousness, and I named my own blog as a back-handed reference to his … which is why I still have the least easily pronounced blog name in the Anglosphere. Initially, I expected the blog to be primarily quotations, although even from the start, I didn’t post a QotD entry all that regularly.
Advice for anyone wanting to start a blog? (Especially if you’re involved in the gaming-oriented Newbie Blogger Initiative this year.) Blog every day. Even if you don’t have much to say, make sure you post something. It’s dual purpose: you need to get yourself into the habit of posting regularly, and you need to have something new every time a reader loads your page, or they’ll stop coming back. I have a stockpile of QotD posts ready to go for those days when I’m too busy or too pre-occupied to come up with regular posts. I recommend you do something similar, although it should be something that ties in with your general theme (if you have one): original artwork, YouTube videos, quotations, short poems or drabbles if you write fiction, historical photos, a list of assorted links, etc. But do remember that a blog isn’t Instagram or Tumblr or Facebook: don’t post photos of your lunch. Please. You’re trying to build your own audience, and it’s unlikely you’ll do better than those services, as they’re optimized for their particular niches.
Whatever you choose to do, remember to link back to your sources every time. It’s courteous and it’s common sense: you want your work to be appreciated, and so do the other writers/artists/musicians you link to.
Earlier anniversary postings:
- Ninth anniversary
- Eighth anniversary
- Seventh anniversary
- Sixth anniversary
- (Very belated) Fifth anniversary
- (Premature) Fourth anniversary (a few days later, I welcomed my 150,000th visitor)
- Third anniversary
- (Belated) Second anniversary
- First anniversary
Update, 13 May: I just discovered that May 10 in 2004 was the same day that ArenaNet announced the development of their first MMO, Guild Wars (now known as Guild Wars Prophecies. I didn’t play the game until a year or so later, but I’m amused and pleased that we share an anniversary date.
March 18, 2014
Social justice travesty generator
ESR linked to this. It’s a generator site for “social justice” that produces simulated Tumblr and blog post rants that are indistinguishable from the “real thing”:
March 6, 2014
December 31, 2013
Blog traffic, 2013
While the blogging “revolution” may be over, I think that providing links and interesting posts that generated nearly 1.5 million unique visits shows there’s still a bit of life in the blogging world:
As I took these screenshots at about 10:30 in the morning, the final numbers for 2013 will be 2,000-2,500 higher than shown.
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October 25, 2013
QotD: The dangers of reading internet comments
I joke — hilariously — but there is a serious issue here. At least, I assume there is. Frankly, I can’t remember, because I made the mistake of scrolling down to the reader comments about the visa story. Reading online comments is like letting someone punch your brain in the face with a fistful of stupid. If you doubt this, consider that I’ve been hit with the “fist of stupid” so many times, I now think brains have faces. Kudos, Internet.
Scott Feschuk, “Mexico is ‘really mad’ at us, and it is so a big whoop: Diplomacy should be more like ‘Mean Girls’”, Maclean’s, 2013-09-20
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September 25, 2013
Potential service interruption
A while back, I mentioned that my hosting service was moving the site to a new server. Fortunately, this change appears to have happened without disrupting anything. Today, however, I had to make a DNS setting change that may take up to 24 hours to take effect. If you get a 404 message that the site is unreachable, try again in an hour or so and hopefully the new settings will be in place. Or, I could be worried over nothing and this will also be a transparent change from the users’ point of view (fingers crossed, anyway).
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September 8, 2013
There may be some slight interruptions in service
I got notice from my site host that they will be making some changes to the server that this site is hosted on, and you may have difficulty getting to the site. The cutover to a new server is due in the next couple of days, but they don’t expect the interruption to last very long. If you can’t get the site to load at some point this week, just try again in a few minutes.
We plan to facilitate this upgrade as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Ensuring your total satisfaction with this maintenance is our primary objective. We will keep you updated via e-mail throughout. The upgrade process itself will result in an exact copy of your account being moved to new hardware and will ensure that the freshest possible up to the minute data is retained.
Once your data switchover is complete we will begin diverting all traffic to your new server so that you do not miss any traffic or experience connectivity problems. Please be aware that there may be minimal amounts of downtime, however we will do everything within our power to ensure a smooth transition. Please note, if you are currently using custom name servers, this process may require a change of IP addresses.
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July 31, 2013
Vikings training camp in full swing … and evil genius Rick Spielman is proven right again
The Vikings are at their off-site training camp in Mankato this week, and the various fan blogs are doing a great job of covering the event (especially The Daily Norseman which has bloggers accredited and attending all open sessions). 1500ESPN has filled the void left when the great Tom Pelissero moved on to USA Today‘s sports department with Andrew Krammer (to team up with Judd Zulgad), while the main ESPN coverage is by Kevin Seifert. I hit my “maximum number of articles viewed” limit at the Minneapolis Star Tribune earlier this week, so the coverage from the St. Paul Pioneer Press is filling that gap for me until rollover.
I know most of you don’t much care for sports chatter, so I’ll put the rest of this post behind the curtain…
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