60,000/18,000

Sometime in the last half-hour, this blog passed 60,000 all-time views.  I usually get between 35 and 100 hits in a day, so sometime in the next 24 hours, I’ll also hit 18,000 views this year — a new record for me, and one which makes it very likely that I’ll break 20,000 views for the whole year. Which means that a third-ish of my readership has shown up in the last nine months.

None of this necessarily means much of anything, but now is as good a time to make a shout-out as any.  Thank you to you, the readers.  If you’ve thought about introducing yourself, or saying hi, or just wanted to say thanks, or even “Andrew, stop writing now,”… now’s your chance:  I’ve turned off the Like and share buttons for this entry, and you’ll have to show appreciation or criticism some other way, by actually writing something.

Reorganizing

I’m taking some time over my vacation to reorganize this blog.  Accordingly, you’ll find the links along the right-hand side to be re-organized into “poets”, “magicians”, “teachers”, “webcomics” and other categories.  I’m also trying to rearrange the posts into a smaller number of categories, and a larger number of relevant tags.  With almost 3000 entries, though, this will be a much longer-term project.  In the meantime, enjoy the re-arranged links, which now more closely reflect the kind of reading I try to do on the Internet on a regular basis.

Update, 2/23/12: I’ve re-categorized about 600 entries so that they’re now something other than “General/Early“, and it’s a real improvement.  For one thing, about 150 entries were “poetry” and “magic and druidry” stuff, and now you can FIND them. Where possible, I’ve also been tagging entries, so now one can find the full moon and new moon sonnets and the odes for the various pagan days.

Is Blogging Dead?

I’ve noticed a long-range trend in my blog statistics which I think is worth noticing. There’s been a gradual downward trend in the number of readers, which seems to parallel the rise of Twitter. If I’m not writing and commenting on Twitter or Facebook, the number of readers here declines pretty rapidly according to the rules of Zeno’s Paradox — a 50% drop in the number of viewers today, a 50% drop tomorrow, and so on.

Have other bloggers noticed a similar trend? Do you find that people are bothering to read your blog posts? Or is blogging dead or dying, as the New York Times suggested?

Setting Boundaries

My new boss took me for coffee this morning, and we continued a conversation we began this summer about blogging.  Specifically, about this blog.  A few of my new colleagues took me at my word, and visited this site over the summer.  They expressed their interests, and their concerns, to my head of school.  Most were positive about what I was doing, but they had some concerns. They reminded him that this is a much smaller community, with a much more technologically-savvy group of teachers, and a much more technically-aware-and-engaged student body. And more savvy parents when it comes to Internet searches.

My head made two decisions.  The first was that he wasn’t going to visit the blog, so he didn’t have to comment on it officially to me.  The second was, that he would take me aside, and let me know that I should think about developing some guidelines about what was fair game to talk about here, and what wasn’t, in the context of joining a new community.

I think he’s right on both counts. When he needs to visit and comment officially, it’s probably a sign that something has gone wrong.  On the other hand, I do need to think carefully about what I write publicly as I join a new community.  Over time, I can widen these initial guidelines, but I do need some specific strategies for handling a new school’s concerns and plans.

Accordingly, I’m setting the following guidelines. Here are the DON’Ts.

1. No specific conversations with parents, students, or colleagues/administrators (often the same thing here).
2. No issues with my school’s policies.
3. No photographs of my school, students or colleagues.

What does that leave?  The DOs:

1. Specific teaching, learning, projects and programs in my classroom;
2. My real or perceived insights into teaching;
3. Perceived differences/similarities between independent and public schools;
4. Perceived differences between boarding and day schools;
5. Commentary on regional or national education news;
6. Commentary on technology in the classroom;
7. Success & failure of left brain / right brain training in class
8. Personal professional successes and failures

What do you think I’m leaving out?  Should I alter this list further?  What DON’Ts and DOs did I miss that you think are important?

NECC ’09: Data Analysis

Over the last few days, I’ve watched a gratifyingly large spike build on my Blog Stats page.  Since I switched from LiveJournal to WordPRess, I’ve usually received no more than 10 visitors to my blog on any given day.  During NECC 2009, though, that numbers welled upwards to over two hundred a day.

Cool, I thought.  I have new readers! But sadly, it doesn’t always work that way.  WordPress’s statistics tools show me that most of my posts are being read by one-time visitors.  The people who have subscribed using the RSS feed feature, while loyal, are still minimal.

How many of them are there?  Probably nine.  I’ve checked about a dozen of my most popular blog entries, and  I can easily see that the total number of visitors to any given entry varies widely when I look at one-off visits.

But the number of subscriber visits always equals nine.  Sometimes they all visit on the same day; at other times they visit spread out over two or three days. But there are always nine visitors from RSS feeds, and that suggests that I have nine readers loyal enough to sign up for RSS.

So who are you? And what are you nterested in me writing about?  And for anyone else out there, why AREN’t you subscribing? Let me know.

NECC ’09: Beyond Blogging

WordPress can be used as a Content Management System (CMS), because it’s a highly rich environment. It’s particularly useful for single-user or small-group CMS systems.

All the links that are part of this session are listed at: http://www.assorted stuff.com/necc2009

Examples of other CMS systems: Drupal, Moodle, Joomla, and Blackboard

Blogger!

So, it turns out that I’m a blogger.

I hadn’t realized. There’s no easy way to track how long you’ve been using various software, but it turns out that I’ve been using Diaryland, then LiveJournal, Blogspot, and Blogger, at various points, for…

EIGHT YEARS.

How did that happen? And when?

No matter.  I’m resolving to get more professional about it.  I’ve been going back through all of my old posts (mostly from LiveJournal) and deleting a lot of them, though I’ll leave them up at LJ so that they’re not double-placed on the Internet. But I do want to leave a broad selection of the stuff I’ve written on this journal, now that I’ve imported it.  I want people to see where I started, and how.

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How Blogging Saved Me

I keep another blog, at school, which is only accessible through the school’s internal website. None of you can read it, and it’s pretty boring, anyway. Mostly it’s brief summaries of what happens in each class I teach during the day, and what we’re working on.

Yesterday, I got an e-mail from one of my supervisors. She was upset that I hadn’t come to her about student X, who I tutor for forty minutes every day. She asked to meet with me today, first thing. I e-mailed her back, and said, “Let’s meet, but please read this,” and sent her the link.

To my astonishment, she read my blog. When I came in this morning, instead of having a conversation about WHAT this student was doing, we had a conversation about how to fix it. Prescriptive, instead of diagnostic. And it turned out that she’d sent part of my log to the parents of Student X, so that instead of being combative they were helpful.

At lunch, I told this story to our IT director, who almost had a heart attack on his way up the stairs when another teacher said, “Oh, yes, Student Y claimed you gave no homework tonight. But I checked your website (she’s a little unclear on the differences between websites and blogs), and we printed it out, and he’s doing it tonight.”

In this way, my ass is covered. And good things happen. W00t! (notice the use of the word of 2007).