Tenser, said the Tensor

Technorati Abducted?

At this moment, when I try to search on Technorati for other blogs that link here, I get a page with the following error message, to which I've added a few explanatory hyperlinks.  (The first sentence isn't actually visible in my browser, but it is present in the page's source.)

Sorry, we are experiencing a bit of a spiritual conflict:

The Flying Spaghetti Monster has arrived and we have all been taken to planet Zeus 94 to kneel before Zod. All this is a little much for us to handle at the moment so come back later please. And leave a quarter in the collection tray on your way out.

WTF?  Have they been hacked, or is somebody just being clever?  And what's "planet Zeus 94"?

Blog Updates

First, a heads-up: I've switched this blog's RSS feed over to FeedBurner, so please point your RSS reader to the new URL, http://feeds.feedburner.com/TenserSaidTheTensor.  To encourage you to do so, I've changed the old RSS feeds to contain only an excerpt of each post, but don't worry, the new feed contains the full text as before.

'lanches

To grow, blogs depend on links from other sites.  If nobody else ever adds you to their blogroll or links to you posts, it's very hard to increase your readership—there's always a steady trickle of search-engine hits, but recommendations and links from other bloggers seem to result in more visitors, more of whom eventually become regular readers.  Over the last month, I've been fortunate to receive links from four big bloggers, and I thought it might be interesting to analyze the traffic that resulted from each link.

[Fair warning: this post will be mostly inside baseball—bug out now if you're not interested in the gory details of blog stats.]

To Ad or Not To Ad?

I've recently been mulling over a significant change to this blog, and I figured I'd write a bit about it and see if anyone had any thoughts or advice.  The short version is, I've been thinking of adding Google ads.  Now don't panic yet—they're not going to be in your face and all over the place.  In fact, if you're a regular reader of this blog, you'll almost certainly never see them.

Looking Backward: 2006

As I mentioned around this time last year, I'm not exactly sure of this blog's date of birth because I posted for a week or two before opening it to the public.  However, it was definitely before February 16th, 2004, because that's the date on the first comment and the first trackback.  That makes two years and counting, which I find hard to believe but gratifying.

...And Why Wouldn't You Be?

It's navel-gazing time.  On two separate occasions, I've opened posts with:

If you're like me (and why wouldn't you be?)...

When I realized I'd accidentally come up with the same (briliant!) line twice, I began to wonder if someone else had ever used it.  Fortunately, we live in the Age of Google, so I didn't have to wonder for long.

The Paper of Record

Holy cats!  I just discovered by browsing through my referrer logs that a page on the New York Times web site contains a link to this blog.  Have I hit the big time, or is that page automatically generated?  I suspect the latter.

Product Placement

The most important stage of my (as yet non-existent) master plan for turning this blog into a media powerhouse is figuring out exactly what sort of products my audience of literally dozens of faithful readers tends to buy.  I recently discovered that Amazon's search engine Alexa provides exactly that information, and I thought I'd share it with you.  Can you stand the excitement?

Top Secret Plans

For months now, Chiara has been dropping hints about Top Secret Plans over at Ampersand (where it's all her, all the time).  A few days ago, she surprised us all with the Big Reveal: she wants to relocate to London, to work there and to use it as a base for travel around Europe.  However, as always with such things, it's complicated.  Citizenship, passports, professional societies, and other bureaucratic obstacles have loomed, inconveniently, so she needs advice about the mechanics of living and working in another country.  Well, I know for a fact that some of you are expats and exchange students—why not head on over to her journal, read about her situation, and then offer her the benefit of your expertise?  You know you want to...

Resolution Anomaly

Site Meter is one of a number of web sites that provides stat counters for web pages, including blogs.  This allows the owner of a site to find out how many visits the site receives, what days of the week have the most visitors, and so forth.  What's more, it can provide some interesting information about the software and hardware of the site's visitors: their country, time zone, default language, operating system, and so forth.  Earlier I was looking at one of these statistics for visitors to this site, namely the monitor resolution, when I noticed something odd.