You might have noticed some new stuff in the sidebar. I was recently approached by Newsmax about putting one of their “content boxes” on this site. At the same time, Google offered me some free AdWords money to run ads for this blog in their search engine. Well, why not run ads in Google to boost my search placement, while making a little money from ads on the site itself? Win-win, right?

I apologize for the inconvenience, but no post today! I’m just way too busy. I’ll be back Monday!

I’ll be taking a few breaks soon. No need for alarm, but here are the deets if you care. I’ll be gone: * March 18-19 * March 25-26 * April 1-9 For the March weekends, I’ll be on the road. I’ll be on vacation the first week of April, and traveling for a good part of it, possibly with limited Internet access. Can’t post if I can’t Internet! I might manage to get some updates in during those days anyway, but no promises.

I’ve been doing this every day for a year. It’s time for a change. Regular readers of this blog won’t find this announcement a surprise. On October 12, 2015, I launched this blog. I have made at least one post for every day since. Whether sick, on vacation, entertaining guests, on the road, or working late nights, I made sure a new post went up every day for the past year.

Had a bit of trouble this week, although with any luck you didn’t even notice. It all began when WordPress told me my social media plugins–you know, the ones I use to update Facebook–had updates available. You’d think at this point I would know better than to just update things, given how often it results in breakage. But I was not prepared for just how bad this one would be. I clicked the button to trigger the updates, and… my blog went down.

Autumn is here. It’s raining and the temperature is going down. The days are shortening. It’s my favorite time of year. I suppose I should be happier that it’s autumn, but I’m not. I’ve been under a lot of stress lately. It’s all I can do to get these posts done each day. I’m not looking for sympathy or anything, though. There is light at the end of the tunnel. I think this blog will be better off when I’m not updating it every day.

I guess I’m going to be complaining again! After problems with Jetpack’s “publicize” module, I switched to a plugin I had used before in order to manage my Facebook posts. The latter had always been inelegant and imperfect, but at least it worked. Unfortunately, it has some problems of its own, still. Normally, the way I write each post is by putting in a teaser/header line of a sentence or three, then the “read more” tag.

This blog will officially be a year old in a few weeks. When I started this blog, my goal was to see if I could make a post every day for a year. So far, I’ve not yet missed a day. Sometimes I’ve had to queue up multiple posts go up on a schedule, but I’ve never had a gap. The only times when a post failed to go up on its scheduled day, it was due to technical issues.

I’m going to rant here. Be warned! Let’s talk about software updates. Isn’t it great when a new update brings some cool new features, and fixes bugs that have annoyed you for months or years? It’s not so great when a new update brings a lot of bells and whistles while breaking well-established functionality. In this case, I’m referring to the “publicize” feature of the Jetpack plugin. If you aren’t familiar with it, Jetpack is a WordPress plugin that brings all kinds of different features.

I like statistics and patterns so I am going to talk about some. You know what you’re in for. Every so often, I like to go through what my most popular posts are and see if I can determine any patterns. Not all popular pages are created equal–they have “tails” of varying lengths. By this, I mean that they continue to attract search traffic and other clicks to different degrees over time.