Hi!

Whoa, what happened there? I blinked and saw my last post was almost a year ago. Well, I'm not going to make any guarantees about posting frequency, but things should be a little more regular around here, at least for the short term.

I'm Back!

Hello again! Sorry to be gone for so long. Life has been busy. There's the usual workload, and on top of that, I've had colds or the flu for about 75% of the time for the last five months. Seriously, my body is not made for England's cold and wet climate. In college in Georgia, I would almost never get sick, and never miss work/class because of it. But in the UK, I often have a cold for months in the winter. Some of my Australian friends here have had similar experiences. But I'm back now, and feeling better. I'll aim for at least one or two posts a week, but no promises just yet!

An Aside About Google (and pies)

A side note: people find this site in a number of ways, and sometimes that is through Google. I can see what search terms people use, and some are fairly strange. You may remember this short post about Fahrenheit 451, in which author Ray Bradbury claimed the book had nothing to do with censorship and instead it was all about tv. Yeah, um, whatever. I said that was like writing a book about pie recipes, publicly hailed as a classic text on pies, and then 50 years later after receiving countless pie-related awards claiming it had nothing to do with pies and instead was all about the pumpkins used to make some of those pies. I called the post Fahrenheit 45pie. And now I get visitors from Taiwan searching Google for 45pie. In fact, Exeterra is the number 1 site on Google for 45pie. I have no idea what a real 45pie is, but they think I have one, or at least know something important about 45pies. That feels kind of nice. I also get visits from people trying to look up how to fold a mattress (Who knows, maybe one of them was Leon himself? See item number 81.)

It could be worse. A few blogs I read about the situation in the middle east get a significant amount of traffic from people looking for arab porn.

Also of note, my most frequently Googled page is about a native American gardening technique called the Three Sisters. I get more Google-related visits to that page than all my other pages put together. I hope those people aren't looking for porn too.

100 Posts on the Wall

Like sea turtles, blogs are born in abundance, but nearly all fail to reach maturity. Exeterra was born just over four months ago (20 March, 2007), and this is Exeterra's 100th post. At the time of this writing, the site has received over 1000 hits since March. In the blogosphere, that is tiddly-winks - no - that's sub-tiddly-winks. The Big Dogs of the blogging world each get millions of hits every month. But still, most blogs (and there are more than 71 million of them) wink out of existence after little more than a few posts and a few dozen hits. So this is something akin to Exeterra being a sea turtle adolescent. Odds of reaching full size are still remote, but I've been lucky to make it this far.

Here's a round of drinks to another 100 posts.

Housekeeping and Update

You may notice a few new buttons on the right hand side of the screen. You can subscribe to Exeterra with a reader so that you can get new posts without having to check the site itself. You can also add Exeterra to your Technorati favourites, if you're into that kind of thing.

I've also added two buttons below that, one to The Hunger Site and one to The Rainforest Site. If you click on one of the buttons, a new window will open taking you to the respective site. You will see some advertisements for hunger/environmental things and a big button. Click on the big button in the middle, and the site will donate one cup of grain to the hungry or preserve 11 sq ft of rainforest. The money used to buy grain/preserve rainforest is paid for by the advertisements on their site. It takes about 5 seconds to do each one.

On to personal matters, you may recall a few weeks ago I was unable to type with my left hand because of a repetitive stress injury. Thankfully, that is just about fully recovered now. Silly as it sounds, I think I was not holding my wrists high enough as I typed (specifically when I pressed CTRL + C and CTRL + V a few thousand times in a row.) That's a lesson learned. It's a good thing too, as I've been typing more than usual this week.

Welcome, International Visitors

Can you judge a website by its visitors? Well, probably mostly not, but maybe a little. It seems there's a small explosion in international visitors here lately. Today we've had visitors to the site from the US and UK as normal, but also Argentina, Chile, China, Germany, France, Italy, Singapore, and others. In fact, about 40% of visits to the site are from countries other than the US or the UK.

Other interesting facts: 30% of site visitors use an Apple or Linux OS, yet these are only used by 10% of the world's computers.

More than 75% of the hits to the site come from non-Internet Explorer browsers, yet only 20% of Internet users worldwide use a non-IE web browser.

So we have a very diverse, international crowd, with regular visitors from 5 continents that like to use more unusual but technically superior software. Does me proud. :)

The Dawn of a New Blog

Welcome to my new blog. People have many reasons for starting blogs, many of them silly reasons. I've started because I'm not that great at emailing friends and family, and this is a very good medium for providing unobtrusive but regular updates about what I'm thinking and doing. Currently, I'm planning on updating it a few times a week, but I know those are famous last words on many a blog and website. We'll see how it goes. Have fun.