Category: Uncategorized

two years of blogging

This month marks the two-year anniversary of Buffet o’ Blog.  And what a time it has been!  Randomness reigns, and traffic is skyrocketing.

Now, after two years, our stats are :

  • 412 posts
  • 1,564 comments
  • 29,901 spam comments
  • 40,740 page hits

I’m really thankful for Akismet, which catches most of our spam comments!  (FYI, the spam comments don’t count toward page hits.)

blog trafficAs you can see by this chart, traffic is growing at a significant rate.  (Click the image for a larger picture.)

Thank you to all the readers here, who partake of my ramblings.  And thanks for all the comments, because it helps make this into more of a community, with all of the recurring “characters”.  🙂  It’s exciting to have this kind of traffic, and I enjoy producing this site.  And we’ve got some new features in the works, which you shall see and experience shortly.  It’s just an exciting time!

To celebrate, I’d like to take all my regular readers to Larry’s Pizza, where we will conquer the seemingly endless buffet of pizza.  However, there is a flaw in the slaw — our budget.  So while I’d like to buy pizza for everyone, the funds are at $0.00, which doesn’t buy much pizza.  So you’ll just have to pay for your own (because I still plan to go).

how to get your own avatar

You may notice that I enlarged the avatars (pictures) in the Recent Comments in the sidebar.  The gravatar.com site is finally working correctly, so pictures are now showing up for your ID.  The idea of global avatars is really neat, and I’m glad that feature is available in WordPress.

Do you want your own?  It’s really simple.  Just go to gravatar.com, create an account, and upload a picture to go with your e-mail address.  Then when you write a comment using that e-mail address on a WordPress blog (or possibly others, too), the image shows up next to your name, if they have avatars enabled.

One thing I’ve noticed is that I had to use all lowercase when putting my e-mail address in the comment form.  Perhaps that will get fixed, but try doing that if you’re having any issues with it not showing up.

an interactive Christmas card for you

It’s almost Christmas here, so for all my regular readers (and whoever just happened to show up here), I’m linking to an interactive Christmas card.  You get to make it start snowing, and there’s various other things you get to do, too.  Have fun.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

And let us all remember the real Reason for the Season…

adding site search tags

I’m going to start adding tags to the end of posts to help with search engine optimization.  Or, in other words, to help bring more people to the site.  The more, the merrier, they say.  (Whoever “they” is.)  You’ll notice it as links after the post.  In most cases, they will just search this blog for other posts with that word or phrase in it.  The tags have to be a link, hence the search capability.  The words will just be “tags” that specify what the post is about.

Hopefully this helps more people find the random goodness that is Buffet o’ Blog.  If it helps, I’ll keep them.  If there is no difference in traffic, then they’ll go the way of the dodo.  So it’s like an experiment.  And I just wanted to let my regular readers know what’s going on.  They’ll be visible, because they have to be.  Google penalizes your Page Rank if you hide text behind pictures or make it the same color as the background.

And the experiment starts now…  🙂

Site search tags: , , , , ,