Alice’s comment (on her blog) that she had recently reached her 1,000th blog post got me curious about mine. So I looked in my Dashboard, and discovered that I had just passed 1,500! But then, I have been blogging nearly eight years, since October 8, 2002. On that fateful day, I left home and started my 6-month trek through Southeast Asia, blogging as I went.
Then I took a look at Google Analytics, which I set up around the same time I migrated my website. To my surprise, in just 11 months, I’ve had 34,485 visitors from 164 countries, and served up over 134,707 pages. At this rate, I should have nearly 150,000 “hits” this year! That was a huge surprise.
Anyway, I did some fiddling and added the NeoCounter widget that Sandra Rude has on her blog, so now you, too, can see where people are coming from.
Creatively speaking, I’ve been booked in the evenings, so not much has happened except a little bit of fiddling with the peacock-feather draft. I lengthened the end of the feather so there’s not as much overlap, and I think it looks much nicer now:
In the old version there was a blobby bit, a solid green area that ran between the feathers and obscured the feathery bits at the top of each feather. So I lengthened the shaft of the feather and made it narrower, to the point where the shaft blended neatly with the top of the next feather.
Today I plan to test-weave the revised version of the feather pattern. Saturday the actual threads I’m using should arrive, and then I’ll do one more test-weave (to see if I like the colors), and then launch into the actual shawl.
