Today is Funny about Money’s first anniversary. I started this blog one year ago today. It wasn’t great at the outset, but I think it’s improved over time.
Because I started itas an idle lark in Apple’s iWeb, it suffered from that program’s weaknesses, one of which is that iWeb doesn’t have an effective way to track traffic and its code is too arcane and inaccessible to allow amateurs to install web-based traffic counters. So by the time I switched to WordPress last August, I had no idea how many people had visited the site and what pages they had seen; all I knew was that the home page had over 9,000 hits. Where visitors went before or after that is anyone’s guess. Since August 7, when the site went live at WordPress, Funny has had 37,800 discrete hits. That’s over 10,600 hits a month, which just amazes me.
Hands down, the most popular post was the one that described how to use olive oil as a hair conditioner. Posted on August 19, it still gets 30 to 40 hits a day! Who knew?
Olive oil is hot. As it were. The runner-up is usually Olive Oil: The Miracle Skin Cleanser. The one on using lemon juice or vinegar to bring out the highlights in your hair also gets several hits every day. Ah, blogger: thy name is vanity.
I don’t know that I could say which were my favorite posts.
Single in a Couples Culture got a lot of good feedback.
So did Is Frugality un-American?
I think Consumer Headaches: 15 Ways to Get Help was one of the site’s most useful posts. Well…except for the olive oil business, of course!
And I like the piece that explains how to make biweekly pay “fit” the realities of a bimonthly world by setting up a “pool” account and using it to fund piggy-banks that cover monthly expenses.
Home Inspections: Hire Your Own Craftsmen also went over well with readers.
Stealing from the Students is one of the best of many rants I published during the year. Later experience—episodes of plagiarism and plumb laziness—demonstrated that students recognize the administration’s cynicism toward them and take the understaffed and often pointless required courses about as seriously as the university seems to take them.
One of my favorite topics seems to be the cost of owning a pet…especially after I figured out that I’d spent over $48,000 on the German shepherd and the greyhound!
That notwithstanding, what did I do shortly after the shepherd’s demise? Oh yes.
Well, speaking of that expensive little friend, it’s after 10 a.m. and I haven’t fed her, nor have I started to get ready for tomorrow’s festivities.
- Adoration of the Wise Men, by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo
Merry Christmas to all of you who observe it. And happy holidays to everyone!
Merry Christmas funny! I hope you have a wonderful 2009.
I hadn’t read about your adventures in online courses at GDU. That was my one bright spot as a TA there; I got my teaching professor (an overworked, underpaid adjunct who had only slightly higher status because he agreed to more work as an undergrad adviser) set up to teach online. If there isn’t any writing to be graded it’s a huge time saver for professor and TA, but ultimately just a nifty rubber stamping machine. We had one upper level class with roughly 500 students enrolled and it actually saved us time.
The one thing I liked is the huge amount of support for the administration we got (shocking, I know) for our efforts. If you were willing to play ball, you could get meetings with the coolest tech guys. And ultimately it did make the prof a bit more money because he was able to take on a larger teaching load without actually living in his office.
Happy Anniversary!
Happy Anniversary!! Wow, you are doing so fantastic! Did you know your page has a Google PageRank of *4*! Whooot!!
Lordie! So it does. Who’d’ve thunk it?
Not only that, but the crazy olive-oil hair conditioner piece has a PageRank of 2!!!!
Astonishing.
Wonder what else we can do with olive oil….
I just looked at your RSS feed and it gave me an error. Can you post your RSS feed url when you have a chance? I don’t check email very often.
@ Marco: Go to the home page and click on link in the upper right. It lets you subscribe thru Feedburner. One of my students said he’d subscribed to the site through that link in just the past day or two.