At the time, I never posted friends-only to my LiveJournal, because I was “blogging”, not “journaling”, and because my parents and coworkers weren’t the type to find either, and because I didn’t feel like I had a whole lot personal to say. But these days I’m finding more and more that there’s stuff I’d like to write about to people who are close to me, and not necessarily the whole Internet.

So I’ve turned off crossposting, and both my LJ and blog posts will have comments turned on in each place.

And I want you to keep reading! Here’s how:

If you’re reading this on LiveJournal, please add richtext to your friends list, so you can see both my Rich Text blog posts and my mendel posts. (You might also like my LiveJournal too. But you won’t see my protected posts that way, so you might want to read me on a LiveJournal friends list instead.

(And I’m looking forward to diving back in to LiveJournal-style LiveJournaling, too — I’m sorry I’ve been so quiet on the comments for the last little while, but reading LiveJournal friends via RSS did lose something in translantion, and I’m back to reading on a friends list again for my LJ peepz.)

But doing so reminded me that for ages I’ve had things set up so that posts to Flickr show up in the FeedBurner RSS feed for this blog. That… doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when I think about it. Anyone reading this thing over RSS or at LiveJournal is perfectly capable of subscribing to my Flickr and delicious RSS feeds (below) if they’re interested in those too.

So as of right now, my Flickr photos and del.icio.us links won’t show up in the Feedburner RSS feed for this blog.

I hope you still want to see my photos, though! I’ll post blog entries about particularly interesting ones, and some of my phone photo posts will show up here. But if you want to see them all, or if you want to watch my del.icio.us bookmarks, hyar ’tis:

• My Flickr photos (and on LiveJournal)
• my del.icio.us links (and on LiveJournal)

Lemme know if this seems inconvenient or otherwise dumb. I figure it’s no different than having to watch twitter separately.

So, yeah: is there anything you’d like me to write about? Stuff I should keep writing about? Stuff I should shut up about already?

I’ve been interested in Buddhism — specifically Zen — for a while, and have had a couple of abortive attempts at beginning practice. Even our wedding vows were inspired by those from a Western Buddhist ceremony. And now that I’m starting my overhaul, I’ve been thinking more about that. Beginning practice again is on my list of 101, and I know it will be an important balancing principle to the changes that I will be experiencing when I go back to school.

So I suppose this is your advance warning that I’m going to be writing a bit about Zen in the next little while. I’ll try not to get all religious on you, although I think that’d be hard with Zen anyhow, and I’ll try not to put you to sleep, too. But I’ll try to tell you the basics of this whole thing and what attracts me to it, highlight some readings I’ve enjoyed, and basically share my whole rediscovery of Zen. I hope you find it interesting.

Having said all that, is there anything you’ve wondered about Buddhism, Zen, North American Zen, or anything specific you’d like to read about? Let me know in the comments if you do, and I’ll try to address it in a later post.

After years of being the #1 hit for “Rich Lafferty” on Google, I noticed last night that I’ve pretty much completely disappeared from Google (while maintaining top links in Yahoo and MSN Search). At first I thought that I’d been caught by really bad timing, because I had accidentally turned on search engine blocking in WordPress for about five minutes, but checking my logs, Google didn’t come by during that time. I also noticed that my site was no longer cached by Google.

Digging around on SEO forums (I feel dirty!), I found a post about how Google handles duplicate content in an official Google blog. It seems that Google tries to only list one copy of duplicate sites, and it’s not just PageRank that makes it decide which to do. So when your content appears on two sites, Google guesses which site people will want to see and the other one disappears.

I’m pretty sure that’s what happened to me; see, for instance, this search for a unique sentence that should appear both on richtext and on my LiveJournal mirror. And note that all of my content is still in Google, so it’s not like I was banned. Lastly, note that a search for Rich Lafferty turns up my LiveJournal pretty high in the results considering that my name only shows up once on that page.

Anyhow, I’ve turned on search engine blocking on my LiveJournal, which will hopefully suffice to inform the Googlebot that my own website is the best copy to point people to, not my LiveJournal copy. If you’ve done the same thing I have, copying your website content from WordPress to LiveJournal with LJXP, you probably want to do the same.

(Incidentally, while looking into this I discovered Google Webmaster Tools, which offers a lot of useful insight as to what Google is doing with your website, lets you tweak how they list and spider your site, and tells you what people are searching for that’s leading them there.)

The extra attention seems to have died down now, though, so I figured I’d talk a bit about how things looked from this end. First of all, here’s the eye candy from Webalizer (which I only started using on the 15th, which was serendipitous):

To the moon, Alice! As you can see things have pretty much gone back to their earlier state at this point, but when they were busy, they were busy. On a typical day I get around 15,000 hits (4000 pages/1500 visitors). On the 23rd, that jumped to 85,000 hits (19,000 pages/5100 visitors), then to 180,000 hits on the 24th (37,000 pages, 9300 visitors). The next couple of days saw around 130,000 hits (30,000 pages, 6500 visitors). Yesterday I was back down to 31,000 hits (8500 pages, 2200 visitors) so the rush has clearly ended.

So what happened when? Someone on Reddit linked to one of the Amazon items I listed and mentioned my post’s URL in the Reddit comments. Then around 6 PM last Friday (March 23), the post was linked on The Consumerist. An hour or so later, Cory linked it on BoingBoing, and ten minutes after that it was on Metafilter. Early Saturday morning it was linked from Instapundit. Saturday night, Patrick Lagacé from La Presse linked to it (in French), and then a day after that Dutch linkdump site Geenredactie linked in.

What I find most interesting is which sites brought in the most traffic. Given that list of sites, which would you guess would be the big ones, and which the minor ones? Here’s how things turned out:

1. Instapundit (7739 referrals). I don’t read Instapundit so I guess I underestimated how widely-read it is. It probably helped that Glenn didn’t excerpt much of my post.
2. Patrick Lagacé (7301). Big surprise, especially given a relatively limited audience and being late to post. I guess Patrick is popular!
3. Consumerist (3907). I’m surprised at the 3000-referral jump there. Consumerist gave a brief excerpt, too, which I think depressed the number of people clicking through.
4. Geenredactie (3346). Since I’ve never heard of them before now I wasn’t really capable of being surprised one way or another.
5. Metafilter (2185). Sure, ok.
6. Reddit (2020). A particularly impressive showing considering I just showed up in a comment there!
7. BoingBoing (1649). Way, way lower than I expected, which I attribute to a very long excerpt with links to Amazon.

Other interesting referrers included lots of Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail, 130 referrals and 5 diggs from Digg, lots of LiveJournal users I’ve never seen before, and plenty of individual blogs, a few of which did pingbacks. A few people linked it on delicious, too. I’m glad OMightyManII appreciated my Bond comment.

One last amusing factoid: When I first posted, I didn’t have Amazon referral links. When BoingBoing linked me, Cory added his referrals; Metafilter automatically added Matt’s, and I think Instapundit’s example links had referral codes in them too. Someone from Gelf Magazine emailed me asking about the referral links specifically for an article, but I think he was hoping that substituting referral links would bother me. No-one bought anything through my referral links.

I’m glad to see that the amount of traffic is dropping back down. I had feared that I was going to be left with a big pile of viewers expecting a typical public aggregating blog, while I wanted to keep things more personal and about me as much as anything else. But it looks like it’ll all be back to normal shortly. I still can’t quite explain what made that post so interesting in the first place, though.

By the way, are any of you Reddit’s afscott or Consumerist’s tipster?

Feel free to comment if you’ve got any questions about them or if you think I’m missing a plugin I’d find useful.

List below the cut, for they are legion.
I’ve tried to divide them up into categories, but there’s still a lot of overlap.

Usability and appearance

• Breadcrumb: Provides the breadcrumb navigation links at the top of my static pages (example).
• Get Comments Count Image: Provides the (3 comments) image you see at the bottom of my posts when you read them on LiveJournal. Since the image is loaded from here, it’s always up-to-date without having to edit the content of the LiveJournal post.
• Gravatars2: The little avatar/userpic/icon thingies beside people’s names on the comments. (You can set up your own here, by the way.) This gravatar plugin caches them locally and generally does the Right Thing.
• Subscribe to Comments: Lets readers get comments on individual posts by email.
• PXS Mail Form: The mail form I’m using on my “contact me” page.
• Unsleepable theme: Not really a plugin, but might as well give credit. I’ve modified the theme a bit here and there.

Sidebar Widgets

• Sidebar Widgets: This plugin lets me configure the contents of the sidebar in a drag-and-drop admin panel and provides some basic components to include. Everything else in this section requires Widgets.
• Category Replacement: Provides the drop-down categories box instead of a giant list of links.
• Drop-Down Archives: Same deal but for the archives.
• Drop-Down Links: Same deal for links. I don’t use this one, but I figured I’d link to it here for completeness.
• Feeds Widget: Sidebar links to relevant RSS feeds.
• JAW Duplicate Widgets: Lets me use one widget in more than one sidebar. I’ve changed the theme to use different sidebars on all of the different page types (front page, single post, archive, and static page), so if I want to put, say, categories or archives on all of them, I need this.
• Subpages Widget: In the static pages section, provides a list of pages below the current page in my page hierarchy, and a list of pages at the same level as the current page. Visible here.

Admin/Internals

• Admin Drop Menus: Turns the menu-ish links in the admin panel to actual menus, saving one click for every admin page I need to go to. Such a little thing, such a big difference it makes.
• LJXP: Crossposts my posts to LiveJournal, and updates posts there when I make changes here.
• LiveJournal Importer: I used this to import all of my old LiveJournal posts and comments as archived by ljarchive. I recall having to make some changes to this to make it work with WordPress 2.1, so be careful if you plan on doing the same thing I did. The default LiveJournal importer doesn’t import comments.
• Rodney’s 404 Handler: Since WordPress’s permalinks feature requires that it handle all requests that don’t map to specific files, Apache can’t handle 404s itself. WordPress’s own handling doesn’t provide any feedback, so this takes care of writing to the webserver’s error log instead.
• WP-Cache: Improved page caching for WordPress. Since WordPress generates pages on the fly, caching them means a lot less load on the server and database, especially when a search engine robot swings by.
• Replacement dashboard: Not a plugin but a replacement php file, this gets rid of the WordPress News “feature” on the default WordPress admin dashboard and instead provides a list of drafts and other information more useful to the blog owner.

Integration with other sites

• Delicious Cached++: Shows my recent del.icio.us links at the bottom of the front page, and caches a copy so as not to hit del.icio.us on every page load. (You’re welcome, Joshua.)
• FlickrRSS: Shows my recent pictures on flickr at the bottom of the front page.
• last.fm Recent Tracks: Shows my latest tracks on last.fm. This is fed from our Squeezebox mp3 player, so it also shows what Candice is listening to when I’m not home. I’m really not as big a Christina Aguilera fan as that might indicate.
• Feedburner Feed Replacement: Redirects any requests for the standard WordPress feed URLs to my FeedBurner feed, which has a few more features (specifically, comment numbers and del.icio.us links, plus some nice subscription statistics) than the stock feeds.
• Google Sitemap: Generates a Google sitemap of the whole site and pings Google when updates happen.

Antispam Plugins

• Bad Behavior: Blocks comment spammers by analyzing the way their HTTP client interacts with the site. Very effective so far, with zero false positives.
• Akismet: Blocks comment spammers by testing the content of their comments against a remotely-maintained database. Also very effective, but a surprising handful of false positives.
• SpamKarma2: Currently not activated yet, but this one blocks comment spammers by testing their comments against built-in rules and heuristics. So far I don’t think I need it, and I don’t want to have to tweak the weight of all the rules if I don’t have to.

There were also a handful of plugins that I tried but didn’t end up using. Of those, here are the ones that are worth mentioning:

• Tiger Dashboard: A complete reskinning of the admin panel, influenced by OS X. The usability advantage of the drop-down menus plugin trumped the aesthetic improvement this provided.
• Brian’s Threaded Comments: At first I wanted threaded comments because LiveJournal had them, but it turned out to be a bit tricky to integrate with this theme. When the LiveJournal importer imported all of my old LiveJournal comments without any threading, though, I decided this wasn’t worth using right now.
• Extended Live Archives: Promising advanced archives plugin that I haven’t yet had time to play around with.
• Live: Lets you view live hits, like diggspy. Doesn’t work with wp-cache, because it doesn’t see the hits against cached pages.
• Live+Press: Provides a bunch of LiveJournal features, including currents and lj-user tags. Decided I just didn’t need it.
• Ultimate Tag Warrior: The tags plugin of tags plugins. Had a bit of a learning curve and I decided to investigate it later.

Whew, that’s a lot of plugins.

(Incidentally, Akismet’s catching about 30 spam comments a day, and Bad Behavior another 20 or so so far.)

(Still testing.)