vapourtrails.ca

Has it really been that long? Work has been keeping me very busy, and most of my remaining time has been taken up by various pursuits such as randonneuring (more on that later). But after spending the last week or so cleaning up the 4000+ comments held in moderation here (95% spam), it’s finally time to write a bit.

I’ll start with answering a few questions Erik Pöhler sent my way in the form of a “Stöckchen”:

Why are you weblogging? I started this site mainly as an outlet for things that are on my mind, and also as a means to practice writing. I never expected anyone to read it, so the amount of traffic passing through here is kind of intimidating. Granted, most stick around only long enough to download [my keywords plugin][plugin], but there’s still a small stream of people interested in non-plugin stuff. That’s the true reason for my long absence: I feel somewhat uncomfortable writing knowing that people are likely to read it. Especially people I know. I suppose I could start another site under a pseudonym, but I’ll give it another try here and see how it goes.

Since when? I suppose if you dig around in the archives, you’ll see that I started here in November 2004. (Has it really been that long?) But I actually had a personal website (or “home page”) way back in 1995 which lasted probably until ‘99 or so. And I’m pretty sure it never saw any visitors, so maybe that doesn’t really count.

Why do your readers read your articles? “My readers” — that has a weird ring to it. I don’t really know the answer to that one, but I hope it’s because they’re useful or interesting in some way.

What was the last search query that a search engine forwarded to your site? If I had to guess, it would be for “Jerome’s Keywords” — about 11% of search engine hits here use that phrase. Variations including “WordPress”, “jerome”, “keywords”, “plugin” and “tags” account for about 45% of all search engine traffic. Checking the logs only confirms it: the last search engine hit was indeed for “jerome’s keywords”.

What is your most underrated entry? All of the non-plugin ones?

What weblog have you been reading recently? I haven’t been reading many weblogs lately, but I have been re-reading a lot of older Joel on Software articles in the last week or so. He’s got a great style that’s fun to read.

How many feeds are in your newsreader? Roughly 20, although I only check a handful regularly — one folder has 632 unread posts!

Ok, so if you’ve read this far and you’re a plugin fan, then I’ll let you in on a secret: Jerome’s Keywords 2.0 is code complete. In fact, I may even put up a beta version tomorrow.