Category: Web/Tech

Okay, this is cool.

Y’know how bloggers will sometimes put updates welcoming visitors from other blogs who have linked them?

Well, my post on Sharona leaving Monk has been getting a ton of hits from Google. In fact, it’s the top page Google gives you if you type in "sharona leaves monk." Only problem was, it was written before we knew the on-screen explanation for why Sharona left.

So I just updated it with this:

UPDATE: Welcome Google visitors! More information has been revealed about the Sharona situation since the time this post was written. Basically, Sharona and her son, Benjy, moved back to the East Coast to reunite with her former husband. (This was not shown on screen but was talked about.) Subsequently, Monk hired a new assistant, a former bartender named Natalie Teeger (Traylor Howard), who has a daughter. Thus far, Natalie seems to be doing as good a job at standing up to Monk as Sharona did, but we’ll always have a special place in our hearts for Sharona. Hopefully she’ll guest star in the future.

. . . that’s the number of e-mails in my gmail inbox at the moment.

It’s significant because I’m using my gmail inbox as my staging area for e-mails I want to take action on (either blogging, sending a private reply, etc.).

Making the switch to gmail has made it much easier for me to keep track of the e-mails I need to take action on, with the result that I’ve been responding to readers more on the blog (and off) than previously.

Nevertheless, 121 is a pretty daunting number, so I just wanted to say to folks who’ve e-mailed me that I hope they’ll be patient. Gmail is making it easier for me to respond to folks, and I want to respond to as many as I can.

Muchas gracias, and God bless!

Just a note to folks visiting the site. After a year of constant labor, I’m taking a blog day off today. Posts will be back to normal tomorrow.

God bless!

Today is my fixed blogiversary (Feb. 25). My movable blogiversary is Ash Wednesday.

The reason I have two blogiversaries is that I wrote my first post (a review of The Passion of the Christ, which I had just come from seeing) on Ash Wednesday last year, which was Feb. 25th.

It was the day the movie opened, and it seemed like a good day to open the blog I had been thinking about, too.

So here we are, one year out.

In that year I switched from doing a home-designed blog in FrontPage to a professional level blog using Moveable Type. It acquired its own domain name. It migrated from cox.net to TypePad (about 10 months ago). And since that time it’s racked up almost a third of a million hits (will probably hit that mark in about a week), had 1171 posts, 5767 comments, won the best apologetics blog award from CyberCatholics, and evolved from being an insignificant microbe to a marauding marsupial in the TTLB ecosystem (large mammal or bust!).

INSTANT UPDATE: While getting the link for my page in the TTLB ecosystem, I just discovered that we not only have evolved into a large mammal (at least for the moment), we have also cracked the top 1000 blogs in the ecosystem (at this moment we’re #995).

YEEEEEEE-HAW!!!

Thanks, y’all, for making this an extra-special first fixed blogiversary!!!

On my hits & referrers page I get a list of where many of the folks visiting the site zoomed in from. Some are coming in from search engines like Google, and if I click on the link provided it takes me to the page on Google (or whatever) that they were on, so I can see the search terms they typed in to the engine. I also see where my page is in the the search engine’s ranks.

Often I’m intrigued by what I find.

Some tidbits:

• The initial post on the passing of Sr. Lucia turns up at the top of the list if you type in "Sr. Lucia" on Google.
• The post Double Crime Recap!!! is right at the top if you type in "What happened to Sharonna on Monk" on Google.
• The post The Liger Sleeps Tonight? gets a surprising number of search engine hits. I’m often intrigued by what people type in to get it. Some are very blunt ("liger picture"), others suspicious ("liger hoax"), and some are child-like ("picture of the liger"–as if there were only one).

At least these are the way things are right now. I’m sure over time other pages will come to prominence on these issues, given the way Google technology works.

Sometimes it isn’t what is in the post itself that is driving the search engine’s rank. Sometimes it’s what’s in the comments section, so kudos to all y’all for adding value to the site via your comments!

You can do anything at Zombo.Com–anything at all–the only limit is . . . yourself.

The infinite is possible at Zombo.Com. The unattainable is unknown at Zombo.Com.

VISIT ZOMBO.COM.

LEARN MORE ABOUT ZOMBO.COM (MAYBE).

[Cowboy hat tip: Southern Appeal.]

P.S. Yes, I know Zombo.Com has been around for years. Since 1999 to be precise.

A reader writes:

Is there any chance that we could have a link to "Rule 20 of Da Rulz" at the end of any post to which you think this rule applies? That way, we’ll know to think twice before contradicting.

I don’t want to allude expressly to Rule 20 in the post because it could disturb the person asking the pastoral question (not disturbing them unnecessarily being the goal of Rule 20), so tell you what: For posts subject to Rule 20, I’ll simply put a "20" at the bottom of the post and regular blog readers will know what I mean. How’s that? (Rule 20 has now been modified to mention this so new readers can get up to speed on it.)

Another reader writes:

I think rule 1 should also be amended so that it is consistent with rule 20: "1. People are welcome to disagree with me in the comments boxes as long as they are polite. I don’t mind disagreement. I do mind rudeness."

DONE.

Just made an addition to DA RULZ:

20. When Jimmy is answering a pastoral question (i.e., for a person asking about an actual rather than a hypothetical situation) that can be phrased  in the form "Is it morally licit to do X?", do not contradict Jimmy in the comments box. People asking pastoral questions on moral subjects often feel very disoriented and confused if they get a debate rather than an answer on a sensitive question about a situation they, a friend, or a family member is involved in. For the peace of mind of the person who asked the question, challenges to such answers need to be handled a different way. Instead of using the comments box to pose your challenge, e-mail Jimmy. If you win him over, he’ll make a correction and notify the person who asked the question. Comments violating this policy will be deleted. Widespread violation of this policy will result in the comments box being turned off for such questions.

 

The blog’s average number of hits per day has finally been drug up to 1000.

As you can see, its total hits per day are considerably higher, but the early days of the blog drag down the average. I think yesterday we got between 6000-7000 hits, but it’s hard to tell since "Today" reckons hits in a really weird way.

Those are hit, though, not distinct visitors. (I.e., they include all repeat visits and clicking into comment boxes.)

Maybe we’ll get to that level some day, though.

We’re also closing in on 300,000 total hits (in less than a year of operation).

I just want to give a big holler to all who voted for JimmyAkin.Org in the CyberCatholics 2005 Blog Awards! As you can see from the award up top of the page, we won the best apologetics category. Thanks, y’all!

Some folks remarked that they were surprised that I was only nominated in the one category of Best Apologetics Blog. To tell you the truth, I thought there were a number of additional categories in which I could have been a contender ("I couldda been a contender!"–Marlon Brando), but I wasn’t aware of it this year during the nominating process, and so I’m just thankful for whoever nominated me for this category or I wouldn’t have even been eligible to win.

(By contrast, some blogs seemed to show up in an anomalously large number of categories, including one blog that I’d never even heard of and whose hit counter says it has had less than 6,000 hits in the ten months it has existed, so I’m wondering what’s up with that.)

I’m also grateful for having won something. I put in an awful lot of work on the blog, and it’s meaningful to me to see that others value the work enough for it to win an award. So thanks again to all y’all!

Thanks also to the folks at CyberCatholics for putting on the awards and all their hard work.

I’ve put the award in the top margin for the moment because, well, for the moment that’s the best place for it. It’s too wide to fit in my margins without shrinking it. I need to do that and see if the result is acceptable. That’s not the main problem, though: My templates require an extraordinary amount of effort to change. (You have no idea.) It’s much more cumbersome changing them around than it was when I was self-designing the blog, but then that’s the price you pay for automation, I guess. So I parked the image up top until I get sick of it being there, at which point I’ll be motivated to plunge in and edit the templates.

God bless, folks!

CHECK OUT THE OTHER WINNERS!