General 'Blog Maintenance Rambling...

So this post isn't about the Village, it's just some notes about the ongoing process of maintaining this 'blog. "Administrivia", a friend of mine calls it. I've gotten a couple nice comments in the last few days from regular readers, which I really appreciate. It's pretty cool to have started something up that's become part of the resource pool of the Internet, albiet for a small group of people. That was one of my goals in starting this site - to offer a resource where one didn't exist before.

I'm fascinated by the search terms people use to get to this site. Being a data nerd, I love to sift through my sitemeter stats and see where the hits are coming from, etc. All I have to say there is "Thanks, Google." I get about 98% of my traffic from Google, and no, I haven't done any Search Engine Optimization (or advertising) other than including well-constructed META keyword, description and geographi location tags.

I got a question last night about my "Neighborhood Association Meeting Widget" at the top of the page. This only applies if you read this 'blog at the site - those of you on RSS aggregators aren't going to see this. Bad news: It's not a widget. I just hand-code it into the template. I have to remember to change the date every month. Regular readers will realize that I don't always do that.

And yes, this layout is a template - fooled with in only the most minimum of ways, and the site is still hosted by Blogger. I registered http://www.multnomahvillager.com some time ago, but it's just a pointer page to this site. If I wasn't so darn lazy I'd figure out how to properly install WordPress or MovableType on my web host and port this site over. I'll do it at some point, but this is pretty easy to maintain, and since this is certainly not my day job, that's not going to happen real soon.

But I'm having fun doing this and I enjoy that fact that people read it and comment, so thanks! Feel free to link me from your own sites, or tell a friend.