Saturday, December 17, 2005

Saturday musings....

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I have sorta made a deal with myself that I won't catch up on other people's blogs until I post something to mine. But not every day do I have scintillating knitting (or other) topics to document. And so, for today, just a few random musings, and then it's off to see how Alison is doing with her Christmas knitting. (She's first in the list, alphabetically, and is such a good blogger - posts almost every day, and with quality knitting content, no less. A nice way to kick off the blogroll...).

Anyway....

Musing #1 (On Blogging): I borrowed some java script from Johan, a Swedish blogger who won ClustrMaps' November contest. His code adds a nifty new feature to the ClustrMap up there in my left sidebar. If you hover your mouse pointer over it, the big map appears at the top of the browser. (At least it does in MSIE - haven't tested how it looks in Firefox yet. Any Firefox users who want to report the results back to me in the comments, well, I'd truly appreciate that).

You have to scroll up to the top to see it. Go ahead. I'll wait.

You can still click on the ClustrMaps button to launch the stats page for my blog, and in doing so, it seems I've been averaging between 30-40 hits a day, and I've had hits from every continent except Antartica. Which makes me wonder.... (Here's the musing part:) How many of my hits are due to perverts looking for something other than knitting content, based on the title of my blog? I'm guessing probably 10 hits a day, maybe more, are due to the pervert factor. (There's no actual science behind that -- just a gut estimate. One day I had someone, whose first language is not English, post a comment saying that he read the entire blog and found it so boring that he became depressed and suicidal. I got a good chuckle from that, before I deleted the comment -- perverted loser!)

On days when I publish a post, I'm guessing probably at least 10 of my blog hits are from me. And so, that leaves anywhere from 10-20 other hits from folks who have intentionally visited or may have stumbled on the blog by accident. I'm guessing that I get maybe 1-2 legitimate knitter visits a day, (based on my comment stats), which doesn't sound like much, but I don't mind. It's not about traffic for me, at this stage. The whole reason I started this blog was to keep track of knitting projects and progress; (I'm more likely to continue to log my knitting this way than in some paper notebook that I'll misplace or spill a drink on). Other knitters I "meet" due to this blog are just icing on the cake! But, it would be nice to get an idea of how many legitimate knitters actually stop by. I'd really appreciate your leaving a comment here, if you fit that criteria.

Musing #2 (On Knitting): Isn't it amazing how knitting can affect your mood? I have to admit that for a few days I've been avoiding several WIP's, because they were all at a stage where I needed to frog them back a few (or many) rows to fix something. That's always a little disheartening, and I just didn't want to face it. But yesterday, I swallowed hard and picked up my dad's scarf and after some frustrating moments, fixed the problem and went knitting on my merry way. About 30 minutes later I marveled at how calm and happy I felt, when I was anxious and frustrated minutes earlier. Same thing happened today -- the scarf I started for my sister somehow lost not one, but two stitches, (it's so easy to do an unintentional k2tog with this yarn, being carried with GGH's 'Apart' in teal). I ended up frogging the whole thing and starting over, which is no easy task -- it's slow-going, this scarf! But it's worth doing it right. I can feel proud of the finished product, rather than ashamed of glaring mistakes.

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Tomorrow I think I'll go sit & knit with Pat's knitting group that meets out in the Midlothian/Brandermill area at Countryside Christian Church. I had such a nice time with them last week. They typically meet from 5-7 pm on Sundays. If you're interested in attending and need more information, just leave your question in the comments.

Thanks for stopping by!

2 comments:

DustBunniesCanWait said...

I just wanted to let you know that the script is way cool with Firefox :-) I wish I could join you for the knitting group, have fun!

Johan Sundström said...

If you sign up for some more detailed visitor statistics, you will probably find that a lot of the visitors from surprising locations drop in from random other Blogger blogs via the "Next Blog" link in the Blogger top banner, which most likely accounts for many of the non-knitters who stop by.

(I haven't done any knitting myself since I finished my last knitting project in December 2003, so I'm not sure I would count as one. I dropped in via the back link from my post about ClustrMaps. ;-)