samadhisoft.com

Sunday morning 40 miles northeast of downtown Seattle I’m sitting at my local Starbucks at 8 AM and I’m sweating.   Yesterday was a bear at our nursery.  Over 90 and high humidity and the customers were out in force.  It was hard to walk outside without being fairly miserable and today looks like it’s going to be a repeat except that today, it’s only my wife, Sharon, and I working.  Nancy’s off to the Olympic Pennisula.

This morning, I’ve already posted on the United States’ failure to ratify the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and I’ve just seen another article I’m going to link to on the record heat wave sweeping California.   Hard to believe that folks  still disbelieve the Global Warming theory when  temperature records are falling all over the world this year.   I suppose when their hair catches on fire like in that episode of Seinfeld, they’ll get the idea.

We’re off for two weeks to New Zealand’s South Island on August 22nd and I’m beginning to get excited about it.   I’ll post more here as this unfolds.

Writing a Blog is, for me, a new experience. I tend to fuss with it a lot – tweaking this, tweaking that. Obsessive optimization you might call it. Then I worry, are people reading it. But then, after a bit of reflection, I think – it doesn’t matter, whether anyone reads it or not is an issue that will take care of itself. Just make sure the information is out there and you’ve done the obvious things to spread awareness of it and then let it go.

That usually lasts about a day, then I start tinkering again.

Yesterday, I changed how my RSS feed logic works. Originally, I just used the default RSS logic that’s part of a WordPress blog (this is a WordPress blog, by the way). But then I heard about Feedburner and decided to link into their services. Soon, I had a small icon that folks could use to link to my feeds and it routed through Feedburner so that they could collect statistics on how much traffic went through here via automatic feed links (verses people actually visiting the site using a web browser). But, then I read that if I used Feedburner this way, part of my RSS traffic would go by the Feedburner route and part by the original WordPress route and I would never have a complete picture of traffic.

Then I dug for awhile on-line to find out how to rearrange things so that all my RSS traffic would pass through Feedburner. I’d seen the method earlier but not saved the link. We’ve all been there and so I spent an hour or two launching searches, reading and getting distracted until I finally found methods for doing what I wanted.

Because so much of this blogging software is open-source stuff, there’s a real variation in the quality of documentation and a distinct lack of co-ordination. So, one method will seem very clear until you realize that this author’s solution deals with a very specific set of circumstances that applied to him and not, necessarily, to you. So, you’ll have to keep looking or wade into adjusting his method to fit your particular circumstances.

I found some stuff that looked reasonable but when I tried it, things stopped working altogether and I had to carefully backup. That’s the danger of cook-booking it without real understanding of what’s happening. I hate doing that but the truth is that much of the blogging software I am messing with is still beyond my grasp.

Eventually, I did it and all my RSS traffic is routed through Feedburner. Yah! I fully expected to see the little Feedburner icon show 40, 60, or 100 subscriptions. Yah, right. After several hours, it showed one. Overnight, the number advanced to three. I was underwhelmed.

I also use a plugin for WordPress called ShortStats and it shows me a lot of information about traffic. After the Feeedburner routing was installed, I noted that ShortStats no longer showed any RSS traffic. And as I thought about this, I realized also that much of the non-RSS traffic it had been showing me – was me!

I run an RSS News Aggregator named RSS Bandit and I’ve had it looking at my samadhisoft.com blog every 15 minutes (to see if new stuff has been posted) just like it does on a dozen other blogs I follow. So, it was going to my blog every 15 minutes day in and day out. That’s 96 visits in 24 hours. Grrrrr. That’s more than half of the non-RSS traffic I was thinking I had.

So, I blunder about obsessing on readership and wondering how after 25 years as a professional computer programmer, it seems that every 19 year-old in the world, full of caffine and with no education or experience seems to be able to figure this blogging stuff out at light speed while I’m stumbling in a fog.

Then there’s another aspect to all of this. I’ve written a few personal pieces here on the blog; philosophical and personal things but most of my content is reposts from news sites and other blogs. To be sure, these interest me and reflect my convictions but they are hardly value added content. Rather they are redistributions of things already out there.

I want to write more original stuff. Indeed, I’m bursting inside with stuff to say but good writing takes time and after I’ve tweaked things for an hour or two and checked my stats for the 15th time, I hardly have time to do anything but scan other blogs via RSS Bandit looking for something interesting to repost so I have the feeling of contributing.

But then I look at that little Feedburner icon saying I have three readers and I think, what could I do to get better distribution?

Meanwhile, other projects lie fallow. We have a website that our business uses. It works fine but it has needed some freshening up for months. More than 50% or our new walk-in business comes from that site’s out-reach so there’s every reason to give it some attention – If I could only get that pesky blog’s stats up first.

Then there’s the Windows based C++ software I run on our PDAs here at the nursery. it is a deep and complex puddle of stuff but I understand it well because of my previous professional experience – unlike the internals of WordPress and its plugins. Several years in the making, this s/w I’ve written could, if I pounded on it for a few more months, be a commercial product.

Blogs… Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh-grrrrrrrrr.

Ok, there. I feel better. Now, I wonder if anyone will ever read this.