2007
- While only one person visited with the search phrase “what is the distribution of coins in your change jar” that is a very special visit. No doubt hitting on the Change Game, but this curious person proceeded to click on 41 more pages of the site.
- A surprising number of people put my URL “www.thingelstad.com” into a search engine so they can then click on it and go to my site. It seems the search box and the location box are a bit confusing at times.
- I’m pretty surprised by how many searches there are for people that work with me and then somehow end up at my site.
- I’ve only ever written one post about the Earthroamer RV, but I’m stunned that it is the most popular search term of people reaching my site.
- Similarly, I once entitled a post “Pokipsy” and now 59 people have visited using that search term. Not surprisingly they left right away since there isn’t a thing about Pokipsy in the post titled Pokipsy.
- “Twitterific”, a term I used only a two weeks ago, has already resulted in 21 visits to the site. Amazing!
Really missing espresso. Really. Badly. Brew is just no substitute.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
Microsoft should have to pay reparations for creating PowerPoint.
Considering if Twitter will be the new Enterprise Resource Planning package of 2010.
Super Bowl in the rain
I’m watching the Super Bowl and I have to comment that the rain beading up on the helmets makes HDTV worth every penny. 🙂
Permalinks and SEO
I’ve been playing with different permalink structures on my site. For
the last couple of weeks I’ve been using /category/title. Supposedly
this is the most search engine optimized, however, it frustrates me
greatly since the category of a post can and does change.
I’m going to settle on /year/month/title. This is more stable and will
be simpler to manage in the archive. Some links may be sketchy – I’ll
get them fixed over time. Google is probably pretty upset with me right
now, but my sitemap is updated and correct.
Bye Bye Thunderbird, Hello GMail
I’m waving a white flag. I give up. I’ve decided to no longer attempt to host my own email. I’ve hosted my own mail for years and years, and I’ve had enough. Why?
Hosting your email used to be pretty simple. You setup your SMTP server, got a mail client and used POP to access your mailbox. You set it up, and didn’t need to worry about it again. These days are long gone.
Today, hosting your own mailbox and exposing an SMTP server to the world, whether you want to or not, engages you in the global war on spam and phishing. To host my own email I had to deal with keeping 3 software packages current at all times, and pay a monthly service fee to a service provider to filter for viruses and spam for me. This simply takes up more time and is frankly too complicated to waste time on.
I’ve dumped this whole game and am now hosting thingelstad.com email using Google Apps for your Domain. Yes, Google now can index my mail and serve me ads. I don’t care. It’s tremendously easier, will save me a bunch of time, and cut my out of pocket cost by nearly $100 a year. This is a no brainer.
I’m happy to also say that I’ve been really impressed with Gmail. I find it’s actually faster than Thunderbird was for casual usage. And I can now give up the madness of trying to keep my address book synchronized.
I’m now a much happier netizen, and no longer am worried about versions of IMAP servers and SMTP daemons and having to worry about the latest spam, phishing and virus issues. Yeah!
We had brunch at Salut today, and got to try this giant croissant that they had just put on their menu today. Note coffee cup, knife and Mazie for scale. It was crazy. Shocking actually.
Just finished watching The Devil Wears Prada. Pretty good movie.
Going over to neighbors to help put in new WiFi access point.
Are John Gordon and Dave Gordon brothers?
Minnesota Rollergirls
Last
night Tammy and I went to the Minnesota
Rollergirls with some friends. It was my
first time and it was pretty cool! I didn’t expect it to suck or
anything, but it was much more fun than I expected.
Tammy’s favorite team is the Rockits, and her favorite player is Jawbreaker. Jawbreaker is a mighty force out there. I thought Rebel Stella with the Dagger Dolls was the most fun to watch. She was fast, really athletic and always exciting.
I’d recommend checking it out, and I’d definitely go back. My main recommendation if you do go is to brush up on the rules before you go. I spent the first half hour trying to figure out what was going on.
Update on Weight Loss Program
It’s been about five weeks now since I posted about Traineo. I really started in earnest on my weight loss program a couple of weeks before that. I am happy to report that I’m feeling strong and have made a lot of progress.
I reached a high of 315 lbs (note, that isn’t a lifetime record, that was set at 332 a long time ago) and I’ve since lost 21 pounds off of that high. Most importantly I’ve been feeling good about exercising and eating healthy. I’m using the Traineo service to help keep me in line and work with my motivators (him, him, her and my trainer at the gym). I’ve been able to do this without getting completely obsessive about it as well – which is a huge step for me. Over the last two years I’ve only done really good when logging every morsel of food that passes my lips. This just isn’t sustainable, and I think ultimately reinforces bad behaviors.
I’m finding myself in a bit of a lull right now. I’m feeling great that I’ve lost over 20 pounds thus far and even more importantly I’m able to run for reasonable periods again, can do a decent job on my spin bike and am feeling my strength returning. However, I’m also feeling the challenge of so much more to go just to get to my current goal of 250 lbs. It’s a long road back to the mountaintop that I was sitting easily on a few years ago.
However, such is the reality of it all and the job that needs to be done. I don’t put the myriad of updates on my training program here on this site. I think it would overwhelm the rest of the content. If you would like to keep up with how I’m doing, stop by my Traineo page and check out my progress.
Searches Reaching My Site
I’ve had Google Analytics on my website since it became free. It’s amazing the amount of detail it gives you. I barely use 10% of the data that it provides.
Recently a friend of mine did some research on search terms that people used to get to his site. I was inspired to do some reflection on the search terms used to get to my site as well. Some observations.
Fanatical About Backpack
I think amongst my cadre of hyper-geeky, super web savvy friends I was probably a little late to get to Backpack. About a month ago however I was faced with a challenge. I had a bunch of information all over the place and I wanted to consolidate it. I’d always liked the idea of a “personal wiki” that I could have anywhere and had considered installing something on my machines for this. I had even installed OpenWiki at home but it’s a dead open source project with no future. What to do? I’d heard about Backpack so I decided to give it a serious look. I’ve been using it for a little over a month and I can’t imagine working without it now.
Backpack is a personal information management web tool from 37 Signals. It’s a great example of simplicity in design yielding great power. Backpack is one of those services that you discover new features and functions all the time, even after using it for a while. I’ve been able to get rid of at least five different “places” that I stored things and move them all onto Backpack.
Let me share a somewhat obscure example of how I’m using Backpack. I recently moved this site to a 3rd party hosting service. They don’t provide backups, so I have to do that myself. Backpack becomes a great part of this workflow. I have a script that backs up the database, compresses it, and then emails it to Backpack. Every page on Backpack has an email address so it just appears as an attached file. Awesome!
Backpack now joins the very elite ranks of web tools that I pay for — happily I may add. I can only hope that they continue to add features galore and make the experience even better.
Reading about WordPress 2.1 and thinking about how long it will take for the plug-ins I use to get cool with 2.1.
Mazie screaming after waking up too early from her nap. Debating what to do.
Proud of bench pressing 225 lbs at the gym today. 🏋️♂️
Upgraded to WordPress 2.0.7. Saw this on my WordPress Dashboard. “WordPress 2.0.7 5 hours ago.” Now that’s what I call fresh bits! :-)
thingelstad.com Moves Out
I spent a couple of hours getting this website moved out of the server in my laundry room and to the faster server that I’m now renting in a remote data center at ValueWeb. This will finally give the site more bandwidth for you – the valued reader.
It wasn’t pain free, and in fact there is a bit of a mess to clean up still with some things not working. I’ll get that resolved shortly.
On the plus side of got big huge bandwidth pipes and the URL structure for the site is much more friendly than it was before (no more index.php). I also updated to the newest version of WordPress which may be some of my pain.
Transfering data to Garmin GPS60CSx over USB and so happy to be done with serial ports.