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Overnight this blog joined the millionaire's club and I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who's visited the site since 2007 and issue a special "thank you" to my regular readers.
I'd also like to thank all the Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and other third world bot networks that helped me reach this milestone.
Onwards and upwards!
Back in the mists of time I used to write my own web pages in a simple text editor then upload them to a web server by FTP. Later I graduated to a more complex editor and added CSS to my repertoire.
None of this was really required when I started blogging in 2007 with Blogger. However, I began to find Blogger's WYSIWYG editor increasingly difficult to control. I switched to editing the "raw" HTML to get a consistent look.
Until recently, I would write a blog item directly in Blogger's HTML editor. I only switched to the WYSIWYG view for spell checking and final proof reading.
At the beginning of this year I became increasingly frustrated with Blogger's HTML editor. Not because it's a bad editor, I actually really like it, but because it distracts me.
I get tied up with HTML tags rather than writing. To speed things up I have some keyboard shortcuts that add paragraph tags and the like. Despite this, writing was still slower than I'd like.
In this post, which I admit falls into the category of "a blogger writing about blogging", I want to discuss the history of, and one possible future for, blogging from the standpoint of a wargamer and hobby blogger.
I'd also like to touch on the impact of the ever changing world of social media on the popularity of blogs.
I know I've been writing about this, and related topics, a lot recently, so if it's not your cup of tea just skip this post. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.
Anyone who spends any time online knows the benefits of using the Internet as well as the annoyances. The key is to strike a balance between the two, and ever so slightly in favour of the former.
Recently, I've been reappraising my own use of the Internet; from social media, through hobby forums, to online chat. This was prompted by a realisation that sometimes I would be "clicking for clicking's sake".
Here are two things that I've done in the last week to improve the quality of my time online and free up time to devote to my hobbies.
I recent years, blogging has become a somewhat solitary exercise. A few years ago blogging was a more communal activity. Then came social media. As a consequence, comments from readers have become increasingly rare whilst at the same time becoming all the more welcome.
I have my own reasons for writing this blog, and I'm not doing it for the glory, I just hope someone, somewhere gets pleasure from what I write. But occasionally I do wonder about the breadth of my readership.
A recent spate of page views from the USA, then from Singapore, set me to wondering once again about my readership. Since 2019 I've used the simple, in-built stats that come with Blogger but they don't help with anything other than bulk page views.
As I've said before, things change and sometimes not always for the better. Recently, I've been trying to figure out what to do about the changing nature of Twitter.
Background
I've used Twitter since Dec 2010 which, for a web service, is a long time.
I recently wrote about my dissatisfaction with the current direction of
Twitter and how I'm using
Mastodon
more and more.
Since then Twitter has got worse. The tools I use(d) to make Twitter bearable (IFTTT & Tweetdeck) have been adversely affected by the recent changes and free tools are disappearing fast.
I've also been increasingly concerned that my use of Twitter has become a waste of time. So my plan is to stop using Twitter; if at all possible. I've been cutting back my usage for a while now but I was still checking Twitter too many times a day: not ideal.
Things change and sometimes not always for the better. Recently, I've been trying to figure out why my desktop computer kept dropping its connection to the internet.
Way back in 2021 I wrote about how I use Twitter. I say way back because I'm using "technology time" which passes far quicker than real time. Needless to say, how I use it has changed significantly once again. I'm using Twitter less and using Mastodon more.
Over the last week I've gone through all 470 odd pages on this blog to:
So, as always, if you find any broken links please leave a comment and I will endeavour to fix them.
I've been considering writing this post for quite some time. The main reason for my procrastination being I wasn't sure how useful it would be to anyone else. It's a bit "techie" but not overly so. After much thought I decided that if it's useful to just one other person then it'll have been worth it.
The first thing to note is that I'm essentially a desktop user of Twitter. I do use a tablet but I don't have, or want, a smartphone. This makes a big difference in how I use Twitter. If you always use Twitter on your smartphone you can stop reading now.
In a touch over two years ago I published a post showing how active my RSS feed is. Well it's time to update the situation so here's the latest graph with data up to the end of June 2020:
The new data shows my RSS readership has settled down in the last two years to an average of a little over 100 subscribers a day which isn't too shabby.
To add to these tech savvy subscribers I have 51 followers on Blogger and get an average of 100 direct web page views a day. Not all the page views are from regular blog posts, the static pages are generating a healthy amount of traffic.
Thanks to all my readers however you read the site.
This site is based on Google's Blogger. One of the features I like is the slide show. You know the feature; you click on an image link and get a new screen showing all the images in a post. Often the images are larger than that shown in the body of the post.
Sometimes this isn't the quickest feature to use especially when there are a lot of photos. So I was pleased to find an extension for Firefox (& Chrome based browsers) that automatically shows a larger image when the mouse hovers over an image like this:
I've already found this useful and I haven't even looked at all the options yet. It works with Blogger, Twitter and Facebook and many other site. Check out the extension's home page.
I recently removed the external web counter I had been using on this blog. I became increasingly concerned that I wasn't getting the full picture (see below).
Even so I removed it mainly because I discovered (or should that be re-discovered) that Google had integrated (very) basic page stats into their Blogger platform; there's no point in duplication really. These stats nicely compliment the RSS readership data I review from time to time.
Unlike the external counter, the Blogger stats cover all visits since the blog started in 2007 and one of the more interesting things I uncovered was how popular my various static pages are:
The majority of my published articles now have epub versions to download alongside the pdf versions.
The epub files should be useful to those of you who have a dedicated ereader or an ereader app on your phone or tablet. They can also be easily read online in a browser if you have the right extension installed.
Last week I mentioned the recent announcement by Google, that they are switching their focus from Picasa Web Albums to Google Photos and that I was going to shift to Dropbox for my image hosting.
Well it’s done! All the images have been moved to Dropbox along with all the pdf resources from the site. In the process I have deleted all the silly little posts that didn’t have any long term value and checked that the older links were still live.
Not a massive task but I’ve tried really hard not to lose anything. If you find anything missing or a dead link please let me know.
