I upgraded to WordPress v2.5 which gives an rehaul of the UI and some added features. My hosting is via Dreamhost and their one click installs and upgrades made it a breeze.

I would really recommend WordPress as the blog platform of choice. Its free, open-source, and has an active community which means tons of great plug-ins and themes.

Old WordPress Admin Page

New WordPress Admin Page

or: How I Still Worry and Hate Internet Explorer

It’s been longer than I wanted in making some (mostly) cosmetic and programmatic changes to the site. Since last week was finals preparation for my students and this week is all tests, my classes are dramatically decreased, so I thought I’d take some time to spice things up.

I know what you’re thinking, “Oh, my God, the sidebar is on the left!”

Well, yes, it is. But that’s not all. Here are some of the other changes:

• Massive changes to the About page with widgets, pictures and a rewrite.
• Fixed formatting issues in Explorer so now the columns display properly. This has been bugging me for awhile.
• Added Fancy Zoom, nifty little javascript image zoomer. Click the polaroid above to see it in action.
• Archives and search results now display headlines only so you can quickly and easily scan the content.
• Links are now highlighted in a light red, making them easier to see and moving towards a more info-centric navigation.
• Changed the Flickr feed in the sidebar.
• Now using FeedBurner to track my RSS feed.
• Added a favicon (the icon in the URL bar).
• Cleaned up the footer links.
• Inter-post navigation better formatted.
• Cleaned the code up and added some comments. Rewrote much of the CSS.
• Minor color changes to unify the overall design.
• Last, but not least, the top banner now says ‘Version 1.6′. Yeah!

As totally suspected, it took hours and hours to properly style everything for IE, the bane of a web designer. IE interprets some of the positioning elements differently than, well, every other browser. IE is a pile of crap. There, I said it.

Whew! I set a goal for myself during the month of November to blog every weekday and I can now breathe a sigh of relief. At times it seemed a chore but I’m glad I did it. My posts often strayed from stuff about me to stuff I find interesting which make for an eclectic group of posts.

I thought it would be an interesting exercise to see what affect it would have on the stats for my site. The verdict: not much. Granted, a month is not that long so I really didn’t expect much.

Via Google’s free site statistics tool Analytics, I have been able to track page views and visits among other things.

Unique Visits:

My traffic has never been high and probably comes from friends and family primarily (though most of them don’t really visit actually). Some of my posts, like 11 Tokyo Recommendations and Impressions of Nagasaki, I link to various travel forums like Lonely Planet’s useful Thorn Tree Forum. This gets me a noticeable bump in traffic (but I feel kinda dirty blog spamming sometimes, oh well, it’s useful to travelers).

During November, I had 540 unique visits (daily max of 33 and min of 5). About 254 of these came from what I’ll call “cold visits,” or someone use just typing the address into the browser. Another 130 came from Thorn Tree and 92 or so from search engines. The average time is about 1 minute 42 seconds, pretty fast!

Page Views:

Amazingly, I had exactly 1000 page views! Most people are only looking at one page and then bouncing, which makes sense since you can read most posts in their entireity from the main blog page with no need to click on ‘read more.’ Some have that, but I suspect most people don’t notice it?

As you can see, there are a lot of up and down spikes. I had a daily max of 68 page views and min of 10.

So, basically the basics of it all is that not many are coming to the site, but I have marginal statistics that are still kinda encouraging. This blog is more about letting my friends and family know what I am doing, giving me experience running a blog and using WordPress for future projects. And in that respect it’s successful.

November (blue) vs. October (green) Page Views:

I am going to miss looking at the calendar to the right and seeing all the days I have posted show up. I probably won’t be posting everyday in December, especially since I have more travel plans….

So, I have decided to add a new featured section on my blog to give me a venue to tell you about some of the coolest tracks I find. It will be called ‘Tune Blog‘ (for now).

In addition to my commentary you will be able to stream the song for your enjoyment. So, what is the best way to read them? Why, listen to the song as you read, of course! Start looking for them soon.

Okay, so my last attempt at keeping a blog was a bit pathetic. So I have relaunched the site with better validation and navigation.

This time I promise to post regularly. Topics will range from my personal wandering, music, technology, and anything else I fancy.

As always, some things need to be tweaked yet….