Housekeeping Notes 10/27

Posted on October 27, 2007    Posted by John Scalzi      9 Comments

Some housekeepery:

* After a better part of a month of spammers not knowing Whatever was back, they seem to have discovered me again; I just got about 250 spam comments in the last six hours. The good news is Askimet seems to be keeping them from the rest of you. The bad news is that it makes the occasional legitimate comment that lands in the spam basket harder to find. I’m seeing about two a day in there at the moment, but it’s possible some comments slip through the cracks.

So this is a general reminder that no, I don’t filter for comment prior to posting (nor usually after, either), so if something you write doesn’t immediately post, it’s probably been sent to either the spam or moderation queue by WordPress. Don’t panic, I usually dig it out within the day. If it doesn’t post in a couple of days, go ahead and try again.

*As a reminder to folks, from 10/30 through 11/6 I’ll be traveling, this time to France, to participate in the Utopiales Festival in Nantes. The festival itself runs from the 31st through the 4th; the rest of that time is given over to travel. During that time I may or may not be checking in every day, depending on my ability to access the Internet. It’s not that I don’t think France is without Internet, mind you; the question is whether I can find access that won’t cost an arm and a leg. If I can’t I suspect what I may end up doing is hearkening back to the good old days of dial-up behavior, in which one writes everything off line, signs on, quickly uploads everything, downloads new stuff, and then signs off. Ah, the not-so-good old days. How I do not miss them.

Also, you know. Being it’ll be my first time in France, and that I am supposed to be participating in the festival, maybe I won’t want to spend all my time staring into a computer screen. I can do that in Ohio, after all.

Anyway, fair warning. Remember that even when I’m not updating here, you can amuse yourself with other Whatever readers at Whateveresque: the world’s foremost online forum of Whatever enthusiasts!

* WordPress has released an update to its software, which I won’t be installing now, because I think we all know how fraught with danger my updating stuff can be, and I don’t want to be fraught over the next couple of days, especially seeing how what I really need to be doing is catching up on a bunch of paid writing. So this is me resisting upgrade temptation. You should be proud of me.

* An ego note, if you’ll allow me: Last week Whatever broke the 40,000 daily unique visitor barrier, which was a record for a “normal” day around here — i.e., one in which I am not linked to by Fark and others for taping meat to a pet, or otherwise doing attention-garnering tomfoolery — and the really nice thing is it happened not once but three times. And there’s a small possibility that Whatever will hit the one million monthly visitors mark by Halloween, which wouldn’t suck, either. This is a nice reversal from August and September, in which due to my hiatus and my technical ineptness at dealing with the blog keeping me from posting, the attendence quite naturally dropped like a stone. Thank you all for coming back, and apparently bringing your friends along too.

One irony is that despite record visitorship, Whatever’s Technorati ranking’s been tanking, relatively speaking: It’s at about 2,500 at the moment, which is down from a high of about 800 eighteen months ago or so (that’s right, before BaconCat). I believe Technorati’s changed its ranking formula since then, and anyway, the Whatever being more or less out of commission in August and September will work to reduce links in. I suspect switching blog software might fiddle with things as well. It’s a reminder that quantifying one’s place in the online world is highly dependent on factors that may or may not actually have anything to do with you. Which I find kind of comforting; I avoid worrying about things I can’t control.