2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 5,100 times in 2010. That’s about 12 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 31 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 167 posts. There were 9 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 5mb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was December 20th with 112 views. The most popular post that day was In no particular order, here they are: D….

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were sequenza21.com, facebook.com, blognoggle.com, homepage.mac.com, and twitter.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for mac laptop, 20th century piano music, david toub, music tone, and minimalist rap.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

In no particular order, here they are: D… December 2010

2

favorite 20th-century solo piano music March 2010
4 comments

3

sermo.com: physicians becoming unhinged September 2010
5 comments

4

echofon: my new desktop twitter app December 2009

5

avoid portable hard drives by LaCie. seriously. December 2008
7 comments

living without a computer

I’m spending the week on vacation with the family down at Bethany Beach, DE. We’ve been coming here for years, and I always have a laptop with me. Until now. I decided to go without my MacBook Pro and get by with an iPhone alone. That’s how I’m typing this blog post.

To be sure, it is much faster and more accurate to type on a computer than on an iPhone. Going without a computer takes some adjusting. While our apt has wifi, it’s very patchy and speed is variable. AT&T’s coverage is terrible down here. Surfing the Web takes patience, and not all sites work as well with Safari on the iPhone as they do on a “real” computer. The iPhone also lacks a keychain, so having to remember and type in a lot of passwords is a pain. Some things will simply have to wait until I’m home.

I’m using the WordPress app to write this. The Web tool doesn’t work except in HTML view, so this is definitely nice. But limited. There’s no way to embed links with the app itself (for that, I have to tweak the code using WordPress on the Web). Image placement is also more limited.

Still, with some patience and creative approaches, one can have almost decent functionality this way. But I can’t wait to be back to normal.

WordPress on the iPhone

My RSS feed for new iPhone applications refreshed this morning with something I’d been waiting for: WordPress. I’m using it as I write this, and aside from my frequent mistakes when using the iPhone’s narrow keyboard in portrait mode (wouldn’t it be great if all iPhone apps would go into landscape mode with a wider keyboard, just like Safari does?), it’s pretty much like using WordPress ok the Web. I’ve tried blogging from my iPhone using the Web version, and the text field only accepted input in HTML mode, which is fine if you don’t need to add images.

WordPress is free on iTunes and so far I’m liking it. Other than the iPhone-related typos (I can’t tell you how many times I mispelled WordPress in this post).

same old blog—better tools

It’s been an interesting 24 hours, but I’ve managed to transition from my previous iBlog-based blog to this one, using WordPress.com. Granted, I would have had much more flexibility had I gone with WordPress.org, set up PHP, etc. on my computer. And perhaps I’ll get to that one of these days. But for now, this is on balance, far better than what I was using before. As mentioned on the old site, iBlog 1.x hasn’t been updated in ages, and the prospects of a 2.0 release were pretty dim. So it was a good time to switch over. The old blog will still be on my .mac server, since it continues to get a lot of hits (why this is the case, continues to elude me). But this will be the site moving forward. Please feel free to link to it in your blogroll, and let me know what you think in the comments!