As a follow up to a previous 30D2BBB post, I’ve made some minor updates to my About page and I’ve created a new header for the blog. This new image puts my mug up there right and center. Too creepy? Let me know.
Archive for the 'Meta' Category
![Supplementary Web badge for the 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger program, modeled after a green and yellow highway sign [250x150, 16K]](http://cephalopodcast.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/28d2bbb1.png "28D2BBB, © Jason Robertshaw")
This is my third entry in the 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger. Today’s topic is about traffic analysis: figuring out who’s visiting, where they’re coming from and how long they’re staying.
You may not know this, but as you route around the Interwebs, you leave a glistening trail of data behind. You produce this information mucus anytime you make contact with the Internet and it acts to both reduce friction and provide propulsion as you move from page to page. But this also means that just like some predatory flatworm, I can follow your spoor whenever you enter my domain. Lucky for both of us, I don’t do much with the data you secrete. And really there is no easy way for me to single anyone out for identification. I just see the aggregated image of all the visitors squiggling around the sidewalks of my site. With this, I can tell how folks find their way here and when they leave. I can also see where the trail dead ends (404) or is blocked (403).
To see these trails, I use a couple of different tools. In the beginning, I would just download the daily visitor logs as a spreadsheet and try to parse the tables out manually. After a couple thousand rows it would get tedious. Not that there is really that much traffic. It is just that every thing you touch gets tagged, every graphic, file and page and that adds up quickly. Fortunately my hosting company offers two options for parsing Web statistics easily, Webalizer or AWStats. Webalizer is the default and the one that I use. Because of this I can show you what it looks like when PZ Myers touches me.
That big spike on 10/8/2008 is for International Cephalopod Appreciation Day. It’s a fun tradition and many people contribute to the bump, but Myers always ends up being the biggest skew. Webalizer also gives me monthly, daily and hourly statistics, as well as top URLs by hit and by Kilobytes and top entry and exit pages. Because of it, I also learned that oddly enough snapping turtle is one of the most frequent terms searched for on this site.
I have Google Analytics running too. Fun fact: the original company that developed Google’s analytic software was called Urchin Software Corporation and you can see their invertebrate mascot in this picture. Google usually gives a more nuanced and attractive image of my traffic than Webalizer. With it I can easily parse out the perennial popularity of my PowerBook/Macbook power adapter wrapping tutorial.
And because of all these traffic tools, I can easily see so many of you worming your way into my heart. Thanks for stopping by and please pick up a cookie while you are here.
Hey, it’s NaNoWriMo time again. I had a dream about this back in June. I dreamt that I was trying to write my first novel. I could see myself sitting at an old-fashioned typewriter, pecking away, reading and re-reading the words you see below. I woke up and immediately wrote down for real what I could remember. It is not as good as I remember, but I thought it was novel 
enough to share.
In a very long room with an even longer table, Ed Stanwick was about to sit down to an elaborate meal. From the look of the imported linens, the silver and china you might think it was dinner but in fact it was brunch. Ed was an eleven week virgin to the world of high-finance, so he was not expecting the phone call he was about to receive. He was also not expecting the sudden departure party thrown for him at one of those swank bar with too many highballs and too much slipping on acrylic chairs. Nor was he expecting the prospect of spending the rest of his life in Thailand. But this story is not about him.
Instead, it is about Clairice, the girl Ed left behind. She told herself it would have hurt worse if they were married instead of just living together for five years.
![Supplementary Web badge for the 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger program, modeled after a green and yellow highway sign [250x150, 16K]](http://cephalopodcast.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/29d2bbb.png "29D2BBB, © Jason Robertshaw")
Continuing with the notion that this 30 Days business is something more linearly sequential than chronological, here’s my next entry. This one is supposed to be about cleaning up the About page, but I thought I’d work on my backstory instead.
Origins
Somewhere early in 2005 I got an iPod shuffle (thanks Aunt C!). Like a many men my age, I was still on dial-up and had a meager selection of CDs, most of which I did not like and hardly ever listened to. So what use was this new little nugget of technology? Fortunately, Apple soon added podcasting support in iTunes and I had more random audio than my one little gigabyte of portable media storage could carry. I quickly added broadband, a Mac mini and a 5G iPod (with video) to my home (how’s that for a halo effect?). Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn that my first podcast experience was something technological. Later I added things like science and the oceans to the mix. And somewhere during that time I became convinced that this was something that I could do*, despite a history of mild stage fright and and an overdeveloped sense of self-deprecation.
It was not until August that I woke up with a headache and the name of the show rattling around in my brain: The Cephalopodcast. It seemed more clever at the time, but I’ve since learned that there are a disheartening number of people who have never heard the word cephalopod before, much less know how to pronounce it or know what it means.
I knew I couldn’t have a podcast without a companion Web site, so I registered my first domain, found a hosting service, figured out how to install MySQL and Wordpress and wrote my first blog entry. It was not until December that I recorded and posted my first show (when RSS was not so simple) and it has been a middling success ever since.
What is this blog all about?
The tag line for the Cephalopodcast is science edu + ocean info. It is about:
- science
- education
- science education
- marine science
- marine science education
You might notice a little overlap in those subject areas. Diagrammatically, it shapes up something like this:
However, this is not a complete picture. If I am honest, there is actually another factor at play here, and a more accurate formula might look something like: (science edu + ocean info) x tech. Adding the tech multiplier might seem self-evident if you are reading this blog or listening to the podcast but I mention it for completeness sake. Also, there is an environmental variable which is sometimes thrown in to balance the equation.
*I mentioned my rationale for being here in an earlier entry.
![Web badge for the 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger program, modeled after a green and yellow highway sign [240x204, 20K]](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3294/3005168677_1e0c81af1e_m.jpg "30D2BBB, CC Jason Robertshaw, delsarabel.com")
30d2bbb by Jason Robertshaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at 30d2bbb . pbwiki . com.
Remember when I made that 100 days of 100 words blog challenge? Yeah, that did not turn out so well. But I thought, why not get back on the yo-yo and try a new dietchallenge? This one is called 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger. And since blogging is by nature an iterative process, no one will notice anyway, right?
This latest craze is an initiative started by Steven Dembo, author of the Teach42 blog and Online Community Manager for the Discovery Educator Network. A similar program is going on over at the National Blog Posting Month site (NaBloPoMo).
Steve has a Web badge to go along with the program, but I’ve made one too (above). Using the highway sign motif may be a tad trite, but it is the image that came to mind when I first heard of the 30 Days idea (and I already had the pieces handy). To me, the concept seems as much about distance as about time, like there is some destination up ahead on the Information Super Highway and each day is another mile marker along that road. Let me know what you think, or if you have a better idea.
The support wiki is at 30d2bbb.pbwiki.com. It is a work in progress, and if you would like to contribute, please join in. And keep your readers pointed here if you want to see where this thing goes. With any luck, it won’t end up in the drink again.
- Teach42.com: Be a Better Blogger in just 30 Days
- See also: 31 Day Comment Challenge Activities. Blogging is ideally a two-way thing, so even if you only like to read, there is an improvement program for you too.
Travelling to the Tidewater region of Virginia this week. It is a business trip but it will include stops at the Mariner’s Museum and Nauticus. Hope to try some moblogging along the way. Anyone have sugestions for sights to see or places to dine while around Williamsburg and Newport News?
![Adorable dachshund in a yellow rain coat [300x225, 28K]](http://cephalopodcast.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/cephalopodcast-tsfay1.jpg "Live blogging the storm with Tupper Puppers, cephalopodcast.com")
TS Fay Live Coverage with Tupper Puppers
We are hunkering down at Cephalopodcast HQ as tropical storm Fay makes her way northward. As you can see, our crack reporting team is standing by in the sideyard to bring you the latest updates as the eyewall approaches. So far, no reports of structural damage, but there is an good chance for sporadic power outages. Stayed tuned for updates.
I’ve been taking short day hikes along a leg of the Appalachian Trail this weekend. I hope to share some photos and videos of my salamander and crayfish hunts soon. But there are other buggers I’ve been dealing with in the evenings, and most of them live underneath this old blog.
Climbing K2
In the past I’ve used one of the default templates that comes with every Wordpress install called Kubrick. Despite the lure of fancier templates, the clean lines and spartan markup of Kubrick have kept me from wandering. But lately some of the theme’s limitations were beginning to chafe. So I was happy to come across a suitable replacement that adds a lot of razzmatazz without altering the overall look and feel. It is called K2, and no surprise, it has its origins in the same place as Kubrick.
Please feel free to kick the tires of this new template and let me know if anything breaks or looks off. I still have some work to do under the dashboard, but I am ever so much happier with the way it is turning out.
Tags vs. Categories in Wordpress
Another nagging details that has bothered me is the proliferation of categories and tags in my blog. Tags are a recent option in Wordpress and I am afraid my whole blog taxonomy has gotten messy. Fortunately, I came across this post over at Lorelle on Wordpress and it cleared the difference up for me instantly:
A category is a table of contents for your blog posts, segregating your posts with grouped like-content.
A tag is an index word that helps you micro-categorize your blog posts.
I just published the 300th post and am not relishing the idea of going back to sort this matter out. But I’ve got one more day of vacation and the OCD in me really does enjoy making things tidy.
Other than that, most of the work is done and now I hope to get back to my goal of focused features. As a teaser, here’s a delightful photo of my family’s dog making a funny face. He seems to be wildly pleased with the 12 ft burrow he dug into the mountain side.
![Dog laying before its burrow [300x225, 24K]](http://cephalopodcast.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/charles.jpg)
Another round of Cephaloblog maintenance today. Please pardon our sediment.
Today is Cephaloblog maintenance day. Please pardon our sediment.
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