Tomorrow, with the summer solstice, marks the official beginning of summer. This is not to say I have any big plans for this blog over the summer. I have some interesting issues to contend with, though. I’ll be out of town on a few separate occasions, which will make putting up new posts challenging. That will likely result in shorter posts–perhaps brief comments on links of interest, as I’ve done in the past–or posts relevant to whatever I happen to be doing at the time.

Believe it or not, I’m two-thirds of the way to having a year’s worth of posts! This week, I passed another (albeit arbitrary) milestone. I’ve now made over 244 posts, which means I’m two-thirds of the way through a whole year. As you may remember, my original goal with this blog was to make a post every day for a year. Being most of the way there is pretty good, I’d say.

It’s been quite a while since I did any fiction writing, and I got struck with the urge this past week. I may have said it before, but writing editorials every day is a lot harder than adding the same volume to a novel on a daily basis. In fact, when I participate in National Novel Writing Month, the daily quota is 1666 words. The average length of a post on this blog is a bit over 1000 words.

It’s weird when something you write almost as a joke ends up getting a lot of unexpected attention. It didn’t go viral or anything, but my rather cheeky piece about Stellaris has racked up more views in the space of a couple weeks than anything else on the site. I didn’t expect that at all. I figured it would be like my handful of other video game related posts: it might get a view once every few weeks, but otherwise go unnoticed.

This site has a lot of links on it. Sometimes, some of them break. What a disaster. I would have no idea which links are broken without either manually checking all of them or using a plugin that automates it. I’m sure you can guess which option I choose. I use Broken Link Checker, which is both simple and very effective. Finding broken links is one thing–doing something about them is another matter, and it wasn’t something I’d thought much about until I decided to find out which links has broken.

Some minor changes, and thoughts on tone. The latest feature added to this site is the “related posts” section at the end of each post. This automatically comes up with links to other posts on this site based on titles, contents, and categories. Having looked at the results of several posts, I’d say it works pretty well, probably better than if I picked them myself. I took a shot at using an automatic tag generation system, which did not produce agreeable results at all.

Yup, it’s time to talk about myself and the blog again. It was announced this past week that the company I work for has been sold to another. The particulars aren’t important–these things tend to unfold similarly from company to company. When two organizations merge, there’s an adjustment period as management is rearranged, priorities are reevaluated, and a future course for the combined organization is plotted. Almost inevitably, personnel redundancies will be found, and positions eliminated.

But it’s all lean here. I don’t know, I’m bad at jokes. And puns. Everyone should be good at puns, because puns are terrible, but I am even bad at those. Anyway, no huge changes this week, except you might have noticed the new “Popular Posts” box to the right, which shows posts that have received a lot of traffic recently. This is nice for presenting a more or less random selection of articles to visitors, I think.

Relatively speaking, this was not a good week. The Internet theme was sound, in my opinion, and I don’t think all the posts on it were bad, although they could have used some refinement. Once again, stressors outside the blog impacted the quality. That’s a well-worn song and dance for this blog by now. There were a couple posts that were downright defective, although I fixed them. One had a blurb of notes that I had meant to delete before publishing, but neglected to do so.

Time for more of that silly meta stuff I do on Sundays. I changed a few things this week. Some of them aren’t really visible. I had a bit of a snafu with the Facebook linkage because, long story short, I realized the Facebook app I made for it was still in developer mode, and had to put it into production mode, and this was a little harder (rather, more confusing) than I expected.