Is it cheating if I use the time I would have spent listening to podcasts and spend it reading my own blog archives instead? Speaking of narcissism . . .

A fun thing I found: In one of my favorite posts from 2006, I managed to work in the phrase “Heaven forfend.” Ironically, of course. I’m not sure whether to be proud or ashamed.

And another fun thing: I’ve thought a couple times of looking through my old blog posts to see when we first got Facebook at the Claremont Colleges (remember when they rolled it out school by school?), and just now I stumbled across the smoking post. It was mid-October 2004. Back then it was called “The Facebook,” and you had to have a .edu email address to join.

In unrelated news, tonight’s taiko practice: two and half hours of awkward turtle.

GAH I CAN’T STOP. These fleeting thoughts belong other places on the internet or NOWHERE AT ALL. And yet. I post and post. You’d think the “Publish” button sent a jolt of heroin straight into my brain.

You may or may not have noticed that the RSS feed for this site was lost in the switch. I didn’t notice, actually, so thanks to reader Vee for pointing it out. In fact, the people who use RSS are the least likely to notice—they’ll just stop seeing my posts.

John and I have been working on it, and we think it’s fixed now. You should be able to access the feed at http://prepoceros.com/feed/, the same address as before. There does appear to be a lingering problem with Bloglines (and maybe other readers), which seems to have cached the broken version. Since the link is the same, we’re waiting to see if Bloglines will fix itself in the next day or two. I’ve tried unsubscribing and resubscribing, but it made no difference. Google Reader, meanwhile, picks up the correct feed just fine.

If you’re having trouble with the above link, you can also try http://prepoceros.com/wp-rss.php. We’ll keep an eye on this mess and let you know how it turns out.

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P.S. While trying to figure out the RSS stuff, we discovered that the switch had also broken all of my permalinks. They should be working now.

Today I switched hosts (Bluehost to Dreamhost) for this site. It was John’s idea; Dreamhost is better for various reasons that I’m sure he’s explained several times. I think the switch went smoothly, but if you see anything that appears to be broken, let me know. And for anyone who is about to comment that my face appears to be broken, yes, yes, you’re very funny. Run along now.

One highlight of mucking around in the blog’s innards is that I finally figured out how to remove that obnoxious “miscellany” tag from my tag cloud.

Here’s the totally boring story: I prefer tags to categories. WordPress used to have only categories. A few versions ago they added tags, but they still kept categories. Every post must be assigned to a category. If you don’t assign it to one, it goes into the default category, which I’d named “miscellany.” I stopped using categories when tags came along, so all my posts went into the “miscellany” category. I can’t delete that category.

Unfortunately, WordPress seems to have trouble keeping categories and tags separate. To every post that by default went into the *category* “miscellany,” it secretly added a *tag* “miscellany.” This ruined my tag cloud, making all the real tags tiny in comparison to the enormous, meaningless MISCELLANY.

This has been bothering me for probably a year now, but today I finally found a way to delete WordPress’s made-up “miscellany” tag. The cloud looks much better now, don’t you think?

I interrupt this hiatus in my blog posting to let you know that I’ll likely be posting even LESS often for the next two weeks. My appellate brief, worth eighty percent of my Legal Research and Writing grade, is due next Thursday*, and all I have so far is a sketch of an outline and a list of cases to read more closely.

I have a conference with my professor tomorrow afternoon, so I figure today is a fantastic time to start putting some serious effort into this thing. With only one weekend between now and the due date and 20 pages to conjure up out of this thick stack of cases, I’ll barely have time to eat, sleep, read blogs, check Facebook, keep up with my YouTube subscriptions, and update my Twitter feed.

I’ve just removed Solitaire from my computer, so who knows, maybe I’ll post MORE here for lack of a more absorbing way to procrastinate. It’s a crazy world.

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* The actual due date is the Monday after next, but that weekend I’ll be on a taiko road trip (squee!) to perform at the Nashville Cherry Blossom Festival. What better reward for finishing a brief, eh?

By which I mean November. Do you remember what November is? I almost didn’t. It’s National Blog Posting Month! Yes, again.

Not that I need a National Blog Posting Month. Somebody should make a National Fix Your Ugly Blog Template Month—then maybe we’d see some progress around here. BUT! If I do manage to post every day in November, I’ll be in the running for the NaBloPoMo prizes, one of which could be (though no one’s offered one yet this year) a free custom template. How amazing would that be? A new bloggy look with none of the tedious, frustrating work. Maybe I’ll put that on my Christmas list if I don’t win it—I hate coding more than I hate overzealous air-conditioning, which is saying a lot.

So be prepared to see posting volume shoot up in inverse proportion to quality. It’s too bad I don’t have CivPro seven days a week, or this’d be a cinch to keep up with. I imagine you’ll learn more than you ever wanted to know about the thrills of studying for law school exams, as that’s pretty much what my November will have to be dedicated to, or so I’ve heard.

Go NaBlo! Go PoMo! Na! Blo! Po! Mo! *spirit sparkles*

First, comment filtering is magic with extra sparkles. Whereas previously I was faced with a queue of a hundred or so spam comments every time I logged in, since the switch a week ago I’ve had to moderate three whole comments. THREE. And two of them were from real people. (The third was an ad for online poker in French.)

By the way, I’m not sure if “approved commenter” status carried over in the switch, so you might have to wait a while to see your first comment post-update. If you’ve posted something that’s completely disappeared, email me (prepoceros at gmail).

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How long has it been since I last posted? A month? Everybody’s stopped reading, right? Awesome. Now I can talk about you behind your backs.

The thing is, I had finals, so I took a week or two off, and after that I’d get back to blogging, but then I graduated, which was a Big Life Change (in that my employability spiked dramatically), so naturally my next post HAD to be about graduation, but that would be a LONG post, and an IMPORTANT post, and really what’s the point of starting all that today when I can eat cake and take a nap instead. You see?

But no, that’s not how blogging works. Blogging (the hacky way I do it, at least) is about jotting things down as they happen, however dull and poorly-written the results might be. Planning, gathering resources, editing…those are for chumps. And professionals.

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It probably won’t surprise you that I, a reasonably regular blogger, keep up with a considerable number of other blogs. I collect and read RSS feeds with Bloglines, which greatly simplifies that up-with-keeping. If a blog doesn’t publish a feed, I tend to write it off as being not worth the effort; I can think of only three non-feeded blogs that I remember to read at least once a week.

I generally settle in to check on everybody once a day, maybe two or three times if I have lots of work to procrastinate on, and it usually takes me about an hour to get through a day’s posts. If there are enough intriguing links to other compelling sites with large archives, the process can last all day (see above re: procrastination).

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If you think that title sounds familiar, you’re probably recalling “What if the fire alarm beeps infrequently” from last January, in which I listed some of the more amusing search terms that led people to this site.

On a whim I’ve pulled up the stats again only to be sorely disappointed. The recent search phrases are nowhere near as interesting as those of a year ago. The vast majority of the multi-word searches, in fact, revolve around the same topic:
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I’ll still do my usual Year-in-Review, so don’t get your hopes up that you won’t have to slog through those acres of text, but some sciency folks are doing a condensed bloggy version in which they repost the first sentence of the first blog post each month.

By golly, that sounds like a great way to get a new post up while exerting little to no creative effort! Just the thing for the week after finals week, when my thoughts turn from Greek and Quantum to Christmas shopping*.

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