It's the start of a new month, so it's time for me to do my top 10 list. I noticed that I'd completely forogotten to do it for February, so in this entry you get two for one. And while I'm at it, consider this my apology for not posting anything last week. I was just too damn busy at work.

February didn't hold any surprises. Every page that made the top 10 in that month had made it in previous months. March was a bit of a shakeup. Three of the pages hadn't made the list before, Debt Ceiling - Frustration With Politics, A Naked Ape, and Religion - Various Quotes on Free Thinking, Religion, and Science, and one of the pages had only made the list once before, Email Debunking - Tips on Pumping Gas. I've previously bemoaned that my new blog entries aren't getting much traffic, but two of those entries were from 2011. I guess it really just takes some time for the entries to gain some traction. I am a bit surprised about the Debt Ceiling entry, though, since it's no longer very topical. I do admit to being a little disappointed that my Ray Comfort entry didn't make the list in March. Considering that he motivated me to start this blog, I have a bit of a soft spot for that entry.

Overall traffic is up. March was my third highest month for this site. February was pretty close, just a bit lower on a per day basis.

Anyway, here are the lists.

Top 10 for February 2012

1. Autogyro History & Theory
2. Blog - A Skeptical Look at MBT Shoes
3. Blog - Origin of Arabic Numerals - Was It Really for Counting Angles?
4. Factoids Debunked & Verified, Part II
5. Blog - Casio EX-F1 - First Impression of the High Speed Video
6. Blog - Creation Museum/2nd Law of Thermodynamics
7. Blog - Running AutoCAD R14 in XP Pro 64
8. Blog - Ray Comfort - Still Ignorant on Evolution
9. Factoids Debunked & Verified, Part IV
10. Blog - My Favorite Airplanes

Top 10 for March 2012

1. Autogyro History & Theory
2. Blog - A Skeptical Look at MBT Shoes
3. Blog - Debt Ceiling - Frustration With Politics
4. Blog - Origin of Arabic Numerals - Was It Really for Counting Angles?
5. Blog - Running AutoCAD R14 in XP Pro 64
6. Blog - Casio EX-F1 - First Impression of the High Speed Video
7. Blog - Book Review - Voyage of the Beagle
8. Blog - A Naked Ape
9. Blog - Email Debunking - Tips on Pumping Gas
10. Religion - Various Quotes on Free Thinking, Religion, and Science

Posted by Jeff on Monday, Apr 2 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In my short post yesterday, I mentioned that there were still a couple bugs on the website. Yesterday I fixed the commenting. Today it was tackling the category archives.

If you're reading this from the Main Index page, or from the Archives page, you'll see a category listing off in the right column. Before I did the upgrade, clicking on one of those categories would pull up every single entry I'd written in that category. Even worse, if you clicked on the Skepticism, Religion category, you'd get an error message because I'd written so many entries in that category that it crashed the system.

When I upgraded the blog, I tried to implement pagination, but I didn't do it so well and it didn't work. After a bit of troubleshooting today, I've finally got it working. Click on one of those category pages, and it only pulls up 5 entries for that category. Then, at the bottom of the page, there are links to more pages for that category. That should really improve navigation. It's something I've wanted to do for a while now.

Posted by Jeff on Wednesday, Mar 14 | Permalink | Comments (31) | TrackBacks (0)

I've found a couple bugs since updating my site. One was in the commenting. My old captcha wasn't working, but after I disabled it, the site was overwhelmed with spam. So, I set the commenting options to be extremely strict - so strict that no comments were making it through. I've gotten a new captcha system set up and working, so I've backed off on the other comment filters. I'll give it a try and see how it looks tomorrow. If I'm not overwhelmed with spam, I'll know it's working.

If you left a comment in the weeks since I completed the upgrade, and it got blocked by my filters, I'm sorry, but it's getting deleted. I got over 10,000 junk comments in that time, and I'm not going to sort through all of them to try to find the few legitimate comments. So, if you feel like it, leave the comment again.

Update 2012-03-14 Well - it worked. When I checked this morning, there were 198 blocked spam comments, and only 5 that made it through. That's an amount I can live with cleaning up. I'd rather let a handful of spam slip through if it means that legitimate comments also make it through, rather than be too restrictive and start blocking legitimate comments.

Posted by Jeff on Tuesday, Mar 13 | Permalink | Comments (33) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, that was more of a pain in the neck than I was anticipating, but if you're reading this, it means my Moveable Type upgrade is done.

I started off following the instructions on this page, Upgrade Path from Older Versions of Movable Type, which recommended a path of consecutive upgrades to make instead of doing it all at once. Then, I found this page, A Safe Way to Upgrade to MT 3.3 (the first step in that upgrade path). And then I got hung up on that first upgrade to 3.3. So I said, screw it, I'm going to try to jump straight to version 5.12. And here you are reading this, so it means it worked. Finally.

Anyway, I burned up all my spare time this week just getting this to work, but now I can get back to regular blogging.

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Feb 17 | Permalink | Comments (31) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday was February 12th, the 203rd birthday of Charles Darwin, and the day designated to celebrate Darwin Day. So, happy belated Darwin Day. I didn't post anything special this year just for Darwin Day, but there's plenty of evolution related content on this blog if you just look for it.

And now for the short announcement. I've been neglecting some of the maintenance on this blog for too long. I notice that if you click on the Skepticism and Religion category, you get an error. There are also some things I'd like to do that I can't figure out how to do with Movable Type 3.2, but which seem to be standard with newer versions. So, I'm going to update the Movable Type software running this blog. Hopefully it goes smoothly and the site is never down. But just in case, this is your warning.

I'll see everybody on the other side.

Posted by Jeff on Monday, Feb 13 | Permalink | Comments (31) | TrackBacks (0)