MetaMiscellanyStatsPost

Hello, again. I feel like I’ve been neglecting you. It’s not from a lack of desire to post here, but lack of time. It seems like there is never enough time, and what time there is, I’m quite effective at whiling away. And then as more time passes, I feel like I need to post something substantive and meaty. But if you’ve been reading movingtofreedom.org, you probably know that I’m not really about deep thoughts. I’m more of a used-to-wanna-be intellectual. I think I’m still kind of a wanna-be, but I’m working on simply being who I am. So here is a post about this and that to keep things going.

I have been spending time reading and commenting at other blogs about the subject of freedom, including more discussion in this post at Unbounded Freedom. I liked Bob’s question about the John Kerry picture and wonder if I should have been more circumspect in my reply when referring to El Presidente Bush. (Must… stay… out of… politics.)

I’m doing things backwards. Standard operating procedure for attention hungry and needy people like myself is to briefly comment on other blogs that you’ve written more about the current topic back at your own blog and try to drive more traffic that way. Instead I’m posting elsewhere and then directing you away. I’ve caught myself writing longer comments and thinking, “I should turn this in to a post at my own site,” but that doesn’t seem like a good way to do it. You should participate in the discussion you’re in. I think it’s fine to point elsewhere if you’ve previously written about the topic and it seems relevant, but you should offer more than just the link. At least try to provide a reason to follow the link.

(That said, I’ve been thinking since the early days of this blog that I want to post my thoughts on the preferable way to refer to free software, free vs. open source vs. etc., just as a basic position sort of thing, and then I see that Free Software Magazine has a poll on the question and that seems like the perfect opportunity to comment and point back to my own breathless opinion on the subject. But not sure if I’ll get that written soon enough for a timely threadjacking.)

More Wallpaper

On with the miscellany. First, another picture that may serve as decent wallpaper. I shot it with a much nicer camera than mine. The picture at the top of this post was taken from the Charles H. Bell Ruin Courtyard at the Mill City Museum in Minneapolis. The museum is built around the ruins of the Washburn “A” Mill. The picture links to a 1920×1440 pixel, 284KB version.

Blogformation

I was thrilled that last week’s FSM entry, 5 ways to save on your monthly software rental bill in the year 2056, got over 300 diggs. As a result of that, there were over 8,000 reads at FSM and a fair amount of spillover traffic to this godforsaken outpost. Thanks to everyone who read, visited, and commented at FSM and digg.

From the department of meager statistics, you can see that the secondary digg effect caused quite a jump in the normal traffic flow around here:

Still, these are humble numbers. But when you’re riding along at about 30-50 visitors per day, 475 is quite a party.

Google Analytics filters out various kinds of bots and whatnot. The party looks slightly more “happening” with Webalizer:

(I was surprised there wasn’t an image of a chart on the Webalizer Wikipedia page, so I added one showing my October daily usage and linked back here. We’ll see how long that hangs around.)

In addition to FSM, which normally sends me about half of my traffic, I saw that I was “stumbled upon” a number of times:

Now What?

The exposure was nice, but what does it really mean? Why am I doing this? Like most people, I feel like I have something to say and I want people to read what I write. But how far does that get you, if you don’t really have much to say? Not very far. I might be on to something with the free software, free society thing, because even though it can be draining to write, I keep wanting to promote the free software and free culture movements. If I can help advance the cause at all, even if in small ways, I’ll be satisfied.

All this web reading and writing is taking time that I could be using for moving to GNU/Linux. I’ll see what kind of balance I can find, but I need to start tinkering with software and that may take time from writing. I should learn how to write more briefly.

In Support of Free

I mentioned previously that I might post about contributions to free projects and freedom-related organizations, in an attempt to promote voluntary support of these worthwhile projects. Well, yesterday I made these donations:

• Electronic Frontier Foundation ($50)
• Project Gutenberg ($25)
• Wikimedia Foundation ($25)
• WordPress ($25)

I’m planning on contributing to the Free Software Foundation early next year. This past summer I bought a t-shirt and books from them so I feel like I did my part there for now.