Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

I’m not so sure about those people at WordPress who look after our blogs and make our lives easy and fun.  Did I say “fun”?

A part-time blogger like me spends more time than he’d care to admit, checking on his vital statistics.  No not those ones; the amazing graphs and detail provided by WordPress of people who visit (and, we like to think, read) our blogs.  We can tell where you come from and which pages are read.  But, of course, we don’t know who you are or who reads what.  Your personal details don’t show up anywhere (this isn’t Facebook after all).

Of course, I know, we should just be writing for the sheer joy of it, whether or not anyone reads what we write.  And we do, we do.  But, still, it’s very difficult to leave the stats alone when they are so easy to find.  Just one more look before….  Did they like that one?  I haven’t written for a few days; have they stopped coming?

Last night I sneaked a peak before going to bed.  What a shock I received.  FOUR HUNDRED views!  Ten times my normal traffic.  What happened?  What grabbed everyone’s attention and why?  Did they like the “Squiggles on a page”?  Surely I wasn’t Freshly Pressed again?  But the number of views on individual pages didn’t add up.  Then I moved the mouse over the graph with the 400 on it.  A little window, which usually shows the date and the number of views, popped up.  This time it read, “April Fools – 40 views”.

Well done WordPress, I guess.  I have to confess, I did have a good laugh, sort of.  But the rapid transition from ecstatic to…well, suffice to say, I’m going to have to call my therapist; there’s work to do.

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• An Open Letter to the WordPress Staff (sdobbie46.wordpress.com)

From PressRow to Pilcrow

 

Image via Wikipedia

This post comes with a warning to regular visitors.

It’s a warning from WordPress who host my blog (along with a few million others).  The warning is that PressRow, the theme or “look” that I have used from the start with this blog, is to be no more.  It will be replaced with “Pilcrow”.  While pilcrow is a real word fron the world of typography, it doesn’t do it for me like “PressRow” did.

I am hopeful, however, that the new theme will allow for interesting options. And I’m hopful that I will be savvy enough to make use of them.  My friend at 365 Days of Peace is also having to pick her way through the pitfalls from PressRow to Pilcrow. I shall have to steal a glance to see how she’s doing and pick up some hints.

Anyway, be warned. Wondering Preacher has not been taken over by an alien, but there will be changes.
The moth (a picture taken on a retreat) will be gone and an elephant (one I met in Kruger National Park) will take over. 

I hope you like it.
Enjoy the ride.

Freshly Pressed with Harry Potter

I cannot begin to express the incredible sense of privilege I feel at having been “Freshly Pressed” by the Editor, Joy Victory, at WordPress.

Using her particular guidelines, Joy takes what she considers to be her “choice” WordPress blogs of the day and highlights them for a day. The result is that instead of a trickle of visits, hundreds of people stopped by to read what I had written about Harry Potter. That in itself was an honour, but the responses people left behind were humbling and hugely encouraging for my writing.

A colleague once said that, in the face of much praise, one should breathe in but not inhale. I’m trying hard not to inhale…..

There have been a couple of detractors of course. The saddest thing about these is that there is no room for debate. On the strength of one blog post it is decreed that I am so far gone that others should “leave him to his fate”. Quite convenient, really, because then we don’t have to engage, encourage, embrace or, of course, love.

Like the Pharisees, who stood by watching to see if they could trap Jesus, we seem only interested in the keeping of laws. Bible laws, of course, but only those we feel comfortable with. None of this namby pamby love that Jesus sought to demonstrate. “Rightness over intimacy” is what Mark Buchanan called it in his excellent book, The Rest of God. I struggle with the same tendency so I’m not pointing fingers here. Anyway, next week it’ll be back to the realities of a bloggers lonely existence but, for now, I am on top of the world. (Don’t inhale! Don’t inhale! Don’t inh……………..)