Hi. My name is Rich and I'm a tortured artist.

The Confession

Well, really, I'm more tortured, than artistic. And it may be argued that the artistic is more artifice than artful. But I try, nonetheless.

Folks who don't know me well (meaning just about everybody) don't realize I have this creative half that doesn't wield its powers in the company of friends and coworkers until long after we meet. In fact, not knowing myself as well as I ought, even I remained largely unaware of this need to create until the beast was unleashed during my final year of high school. My more "public" facing personna tends to be bookish, I suppose — and there's a good reason for that: I'm rarely without a book. Even in good company.

Not quite a misanthrope…

As long as I'm in the

If you're like me, you want to know whether anyone's eating the meat you grind out from the butcher shop of ideas called your blog. Sure, there's some measure of pride and ego involved: as your stats move ever upward your sense of confidence inflates proportionately. So does your sense of importance and pride. We all want at least a little touch of fame.

Problem is, unless you get a lot of comments on your blog, it's difficult to know how many subscribers you have reading your feed, or which posts are getting the most attention, or whether your visitors are first-timers who never return, or old die hards who just can't get enough of your tasty cuts. Yes, traffic analysis is more than just pretty charts, it's a window into

I apologize for any difficulty you've had recently connecting to the site. This blog is hosted on a shared server at SiteGround.com. Unfortunately, when you're on a shared box you suffer along with hundreds of other providers whenever someone gets spammed, DDOSed, or hit by a runaway process or script. I know — I've been the culprit a few times before, and paid the price for it. But once in a while I'm also the victim, and that seems to be what's happening today.

According to the SiteGround support center, everything's hunkey dory. According to the server notification center, there are no updates or information that I should know about. So, when I go through the laborious process of collecting information, pulling together stats on server performance (see the graph behind

Hello, Gentle Readers.

If you're part of the one-percenters who comment here from time-to-time you might be happy to know that I have enabled a feature to edit comments after you've posted them, and you don't even have to leave the page! (Thanks to Ronald Huereca.)

Come on, leave a comment and give it a whirl! You know you want to.

I've set the tool to allow you to edit your comments for 90 minutes after you've submitted it. I have no idea what the system will do if you've never commented before and your missive winds up in the moderation pool. But it would be useful to find out. (Hint.)

Here are some tips I've learned from nearly two years of blogging and consistently raising my site's traffic from month to month, often doubling it from previous months. Compared to some, I'm a rank newbie and have no business offering you any sort of pseudo-sage advice, but whatever I have to say below has already been said by others smarter than me. Most of it is hard-won insight that has worked for somebody somewhere, sometimes even me.

Sorry for the thrashing around on the blog lately. I've got too many plugins running here, so I'm pulling a lot of stuff off the server, cleaning junk up, and trying to get things running faster, faster, faster. This'll probably mean another change in themes. Whatever theme you see now is likely just a placeholder.

Thank you for your patience!

Rich.

[tags]BlogRodent, WordPress, weblog, site-updates, Blog Flux[/tags]

Okay, so I'm trying out the Windows Live Writer — because I'm a sucker for new tools and I'm always on the lookout for the better (free) blogging tool. Besides, Amy at GentleWhisper made me do it. ...

Installation

The install went okay ... the second time. The installer wants to add the Windows Live toolbar to Internet Explorer. I initially opted for it, but after Live Writer failed to read my blog settings, I uninstalled everything and started over — this time without the toolbar.

On the second install I de-opted for the MSIE toolbar, since I rarely use MSIE anyhow. This time, Live Writer started up nicely and read my blog settings without halting. Not sure why the toolbar would've made a difference. Not sure if it did or not, but second time was the charm.

Setup

After installing,

Since we're a year older here at the BlogRodent's bolt-hole on the Web (I use the royal "We," of course, any blame accruing from this blog is entirely mine--my wife happily observes), I thought it'd be a good time to effect a complete redesign. My WordPress install has gone from something pre-1.5 to something post 2.0 while my blog template has remained steadily prehistoric, and the maker of the old theme had dropped off the Web. It's long been time for an upgrade just on technical reasons, alone. Visually, I was due for an upgrade not long after launching. :: sigh ::

After carefully pawing through several dozen WordPress themes I settled on several I liked and tried them all out. If you were browsing the blog last Thursday night, you probably noticed the design dance the site was going through. Or maybe you thought you needed medication?

I settled on the WuCoco theme designed by Mike Lococo for a few reasons: 1) it was three-column, and I wasn't ready to leave that design structure. 2) It was WordPress 2.0-ready, so I didn't have to worry about the theme breaking in three weeks. 3) It was widget-enabled, which would allow me to fiddle with the contents of my sidebars without having to muck around in the template. And, more importantly, 4) It was very CSS-driven, no tables, and visually pleasing. Unfortunately, it's a big design. Anybody surfing with less than 800x600 resolution will be profoundly irritated right now.

For some reason, my weblog became the target of hundreds of referrer spam hits from pornographic websites over the last week or so. I keep an eye on my referrer logs (a record of URLs that generated traffic to my site), and lately a bunch of URLs showed up which had no business being there. Some URLs are obviously pornographic, but there were one or two that looked innocent enough that when I clicked through to see who had linked to me, I got an eyeful. I really, really, don't need that.

So, I did some research. I didn't want to get into a trap of having to hand-modify my .htaccess file or a whitelist or a blacklist file for obvious reasons: the universe of porn and poker sites is potentially infinite. I waste enough time on this blog anyhow!

Angsuman's Referrer Bouncer looked

Updated: See, instead, a live list of plugins, here.

For any who care, here are the plugins currently in use here on BlogRodent. I turned off BAStats for a while to improve performance, but then installed WP-Cache and performance improved so dramatically I’ve turned it back on for a test. However, if you use BA-Stats, yourself, you should know that there are serious performance hits as your database grows larger and larger. I may still have to turn it off as traffic here grows. We’ll see.

Akismet 1.12
“Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use this service.” (This has caught a ton of comment-spam since I installed it, however, there have been some concerns raised lately that spammers could be using Akismet themselves

Never realized how easy it is to set up a blog with WordPress. This is pretty sharp.

Now, let's see if I can come up with something to write about. Of course, this being the first post of the blog, there's literally nothing to write about except yet further inane drivel about the futility of writing when one has nothing to say.

And isn't that what blogging is all about?

(What I really want to do is podcast. )