curious traffic increase

Anyone happen to know why my blog has been suddenly popular in Brazil, Singapore, and Vietnam?

[Edit, Aug 12: Total traffic level jumped up a magnitude. Seems to be the same posts getting hits as before. /Edit]

More Cleaning

If I ever pick coding back up, I should:

• rebuild my "History of BattleTech" chart to be dynamic and interactive;
• make a widget which scrapes my blog & then graphs my posting activity over time (I guess similar to the visitor activity graph that's already on the back end);
• figure a way to refactor all these labels;
• get the archive widget to highlight relevant entries when a "search:label" page is up [Edit, July 3rd: and maybe show how many comments each has /Edit];
• and make some sort of corkboard viewer for email or message chains, to trace the flow of ideas better. Existing formats (including forum threading, forking and other tricks) aren't totally adequate.

More Blogs Removed:

Housecleaning

Planet Stuff:

• Planet Sizes and Tilts - (graphic) 
• orbital inclinations (graph, lost it)
• Orbital Distances - (charts)
• Solar Barycenter - (animation)
• Asteroid Belt - (animation)
• Colors of the Planets - (chart, inaccurate) 
• NASA Planetary Fact Sheet - (table)
• [July 4 Edit: Entire Universe in Log Scale /Edit]

Podcasts Removed and Stashed Here:

Comments

• Still unable to comment on my own posts. Verification appears bugged. 
• Your comments are up now. That's on me. I will probably continue to be slow on that. 
• Browsing to your blogs, my browser seems  confused about which version (desktop or mobile) is being displayed. 

[Update, June 19: attempting to comment on my own blog, failing, and then following a link in my post takes me not to the linked page but to the HTML of the linked page. /Update]

• Fun(?) Fact: Google's product landing page does not link to its products on the first screen. Zipping halfway down the page doesn't reach a product list either. 
• I use youtube help pages to reach my youtube comment history because the normal links are broken or bugged and my comment history is literally inaccessible any other way. 

Housekeeping

This past spring I pruned a couple thousand dead or outdated bookmarks from my BattleTech folder. More to go; not yet halfway.  Not to worry! Still working on 3025 production numbers. Light 'Mechs are solved, heavy and assault are trickier. More on that in a week or two.

[Edit, Aug 1: checking my other folders for webrot and it looks like some haven't been cleaned in over a decade. Did you know Real Ultimate Power is still up?! /Edit]

My natural pace is to blog about three times per month. I'd rather post twice a week - BattleTech on Sundays and fantasy RPGs on Thursdays - but every time I try, I end up posting less. Que sera sera.

Would like to rebuild my "archive" widget so it shows more posts at a time. Should probably also shuffle my "labels" a bit, I'm sure some of them are redundant. Today is just housekeeping though - chopping links I don't use from the sidebars (and stashing them below the cut so I can find them again if I need to).

CUT

Happy Thanksgiving!

Posting three times a week was interesting. My human readership seemed to rise steadily, and American bots even started to outnumber Russian bots. But I am my own primary audience, and I don't want to put stuff out half-baked; so--as I'm sure you've already noticed--I'm slowing down to one post a week, at least through the New Year's.

Ancient History

I wouldn't describe myself as a particular fan of Star Trek, but I have watched an awful lot of it, so I want to give a very belated thanks to Real Life Comics for posting this strip and then hiding my forum post to preserve this gag. It still tickles me.

I'd acknowledge other people who've read me or who I read, but it's late, and I don't have many meaningful things to say which aren't better off being rolled into more topical gaming posts. 

No gaming content today.

I will say I'm amused at how my comment about setting a guard and fighting wargs was followed a week later by commentary here about setting watch and being attacked by dire wolves. Because that's the true meaning of Thanksgiving--not being eaten by wolves.

(One session I played in high school involved a large fraction of the party being eaten by random wolves (there was a recurring chorus of "allll, eaten by wollllllves"), due largely to poor spell casting on my part. I generally choose spells badly and time them badly, which is why I rarely play mages.)

widgets breaking

Soooo obviously blogspot is having some problems. I should look at the code (what it'll let me) now that I've learned a few things but I really don't want to. Let's wait and see what else breaks first. 

Spring Thaw

Been less active online the last few months due to being more active offline - studying towards an Associates degree, and some old circles have been reconvening for videogames or boardgames or RPG or drinks or potlucks. Basically just enough to stay in touch, and to remind me I know zero dances and zero recipes.

An old friend invited me to join him in MechWarrior Online. I've not tried yet; my technology ain't up to par, and I'm not sure I can spare the time it'd take to enjoy it.

Might have a little time again now to dig back into the mechanics of BattleTech gameplay; I'll see which of my shelved half-thoughts are worth dusting off and posting.

Unrelated: I finally saw the Speed Racer movie. Surprisingly fun.

Obstacles to Designing This Blog

I have been using xanga for my blogging (I dislike how it displays my archives) and my browser's "open all in tabs" bookmark function to check other blogs for updates -- Blogspot gadgets handle these things much better. So I'm trying to design a blog here, but I've hit some problems, and blogger's help guides are shockingly unhelpful.

1. The sidebars waste so much space with their giant margins. I zeroed out every value that the "edit HTML" page let me zero out and the margin still didn't go away. The sidebar text is so stupidly cramped! I can't sacrifice one column to give the other room because I need both the "Blog List" and "Archive" to be visible without scrolling.
2. Need a color scheme, once I figure out where all the page elements are hidden.
3. Need to find how the "Recent Comments" gadget limits the size of each snippet, and splice that code into the "Blogs List" gadget.
4. Need to find a version of the twitter gadgets that (like the "Blogs List" gadget) compiles tweets from several different twitter feeds, and then figure out where I can put it that has enough room. An extra column running off the right side of the screen, maybe.
5. The mandatory "Attribution" is superfluous. (Hell, it even duplicates a link from the toolbar up top.) Since users can't drag-and-drop rows and columns like they do gadgets, or adjust margins/padding/spacing/shadows on a similar easy diagram (ie, can't create new templates), there simply aren't enough to warrant "Attributions." I've tried moving the gadget somewhere less wasteful, but then a new one spawns and adds extra fields to the foot of the layout.
6. The default "Profile" gadget has two separate links with the exact same URL, neither of which occupies the box's title ("About User")? Assuming I can uncramp the sidebar, definitely sticking my bio inside a simple text box instead.
7. The point of the "Followers" gadget is to help people who like your blog find other people who like your blog? Blogger keeps telling me that it adds to my "Reading list," but half the reason I'm trying Blogspot at all is to track people's updates from my public front page.
8. Why can't I "configure blog posts" to have the hour (or other mobile items) alongside the date (or other immobile items)? How come "Day, Month Date, Year" is listed twice -- shouldn't one entry reverse the order?
9. The editor has options and effects I can't get to or see without posting at least one entry.
   

If I do adopt Blogspot, I am really going to miss the ability to indent text inside a post.