A Wired Magazine infographic charts the life cycle of a blog entry.

My “Well, Hey How About That?” moment: a recent entry I posted on DCist the other day was picked up by Towleroad.

Granted, it’s really not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. Considering that Towleroad is probably one of the most well known gay blogs out there, though, I can’t help but feel like it’s a pretty nifty thing to happen. Just sayin’.

November was National Blog Posting Month — NaBloPoMo for short — and it ended a couple of days ago. So, how did I do?

All told, I wrote 38 entries throughout the month. If we were going by averages, that’s just over 1.25 entries per day (38 entries ÷ 30 days = 1.26666… entries/day); but we’re not. The goal was to write just one entry every day and in the last month I missed 8 days. Most of them were Wednesdays (the 7th, 14th and 21st); missed Saturdays came in second (the 10th and 24th); and Sunday, Tuesday and Friday tied for third with one missed day apiece (the 25th, 20th and 30th, respectively). One of those Wednesdays (the 14th) wouldn’t have been missed if I hadn’t neglected to save an entry in advance for it.

Chalk it up to several factors: unusually busy days at the main job; days floating around the Gulf of Mexico without a reliable net connection; plain laziness, and so forth.

Writing is something I like to do, even if my efforts are a bit hackneyed at times. And I imagine that those of you with weblogs of your own like to do the same thing.

That said, I signed up for NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) a couple of days ago. The idea was inspired by NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), but requires a little less effort in the sense that there are no word counts involved; just one blog post per day, every day, for the month of November.

My goal in this is twofold. First, to write a quality post every day; something that engages my readers (all three of you) and (hopefully) elicits comments. (Not that I’m a comment whore. If I was, I’d be posting nothing but naughty photos of myself… and those wouldn’t be very flattering.) Second, to keep from breaking the chain.

I do have a few entries in the hopper that I haven’t finished yet, including that 100 More Things list I have yet to even start.

It also just occurred to me that I could turn this into a charitable fund raising thing. I’ll have to think that one through, though.

Today is a considerably slow day here at the office. The bulk of us are either in meetings or preparing for our Major Annual Event (™ patent pending) that takes place tomorrow night.

Me? I’m in the office, “on call” as it were; basically if something happens (or needs to happen) to the web site, it’s up to me to take care of it.

So yeah, we’re doomed.

Once I settle in for the morning (read, “fanning myself with a paper plate to cool down, followed by deleting most of my unread work email”), one of the first things I do is check out my web server stats. I don’t check out the numbers, though; I’m more interested in referrers. Specifically, where are people coming from?

Because I’ve gone through four blogging systems to date — Blogger, Greymatter, Movable Type and now WordPress — I sometimes get referrals from internal broken links. If a particular broken link keeps popping up, I’ll set a redirect to the proper entry in my .htaccess file. Such is the case with a brief entry dated 7 July, 2002, about me going to see Pigmaleon, a play written by Sam Schwartz, a good friend of mine who passed away quite unexpectedly earlier that year.

I got to reading subsequent entries from the summer of 2002. Some were about trips for business and pleasure. A couple for a mini contest I held (I’d do that again if I had more readers, now that I can theoretically afford better prizes.). Others about random things, like a horoscope. And of course, what would my blog be without me bitching about the Metro?

Looking back is kinda fun, actually. I see how things in my life have changed — from my work life to my perspective on the world — and how some things never change.

I also realized that I don’t have the same passion for blogging I once held. Then, posts were relatively frequent and usually about personal things. Now, I post once a day at best and don’t reveal much about my personal life. There are different factors going into that I suppose, including the current busyness of my life. (Two jobs and a new-ish boyfriend; yes, I am dating again in case you didn’t know. He’s teh awesome.)

Assuming my sites are still online in five years, I’ll probably look back on this period at random and think that I didn’t have a lot to say, when in reality I do have a lot to say, I just rarely have the chance to commit it to paper pixels.

Oh, and that broken internal link is now fixed.

I wasn’t sure it was possible, but I’m actually blogging from my Wii. Mind you, this is perhaps the most impractical way to do it. “Typing” with a Wiimote is quite time consuming, and is very reminiscent of the hunt-and-peck method of typing.

All those days I soent sitting in my high school typing class would be all for naught if I blogged via the Wii regularly.

Unless of course soneone came up with a keyboard accessory to plug into the Wiimote.

Blogger turned 8 years old yesterday. It was the service I used for over a year when I first started blogging just over 7 years ago. Spurred by Blogger’s then-frequent outages, I jumped over to Greymatter (figuring a self-hosted solution would be more reliable), Movable Type (for expanded functionality), and now WordPress (for easier setup).

I could never get completely away from Blogger though. A couple of years after I left Blogger, a few projects here at work required its use. The service had changed drastically in that it was more stable and usable, but still far from a perfect solution for us. Our current blog project has a Movable Type/TypePad backend.

Happy 8th, darling!

These are my links for 27 Jun:

• Why the iPhone matters (Machinist/Salon) - Everything you’ve always wanted to know about Apple’s new phone, and why it could change your life even if you don’t buy one.
• 100 Blogs We Love (PC World) - PC World’s favorite stops in the blogosphere, covering everything from high tech to low comedy and all manner of pursuits in between.

In a recent conversation I had with Shel, we started to talk a bit about blogging and what our respective plans were toward that end. (Incidentally, he’ll be moving his blog over to grapefeed — stay tuned for that.) That night, he told me he spent some time reading through the last few months of archives and he said that my blog is “less navel-gazing than most.”

I guess that is true — I try to be humble about myself. So I think I’ll be adopting that for my tagline.

For the last few weeks, though, I’ve been plotting out my personal web projects. Things will change here at grapefeed.org, and there will finally be some movement at fredo.us. Details are still to be finalized, but that’s what’s going on in my web world. Stay tuned.