Welcome Australia, and other blog matters...

Update:
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This morning the blog will break 100,000 total unique visits (well, since I first put up a site visit counter, which was mid-April 2005. So technically there are more than that already, since I started blogging in earnest in the middle of February 2005.). And daily readership is more than double what it was at this time last year (also a burden--I have to keep writing interesting stuff). This doesn't include RSS readers and blogfeeds such as on DCBlogs and Cyburbia.

The URL is so long because I didn't understand the value of brevity when I first created it. Too late now.

Someone has offered to help do some template-layout work to help make this blog more readable. We'll see how that goes...

It bugs me that the Urban Paradoxes blog, now calls itself Urban Spaces/Urban Places. I don't know when he made the change, but it was more than one year after this blog got going in earnest. I have an early comment in one of his entries years ago. He writes interesting stuff, but still...

About ten days ago I added ClustrMap (at the bottom of the page in Explorer and the end of the right sidebar listings in Firefox) which maps place-trackable visits. Australia was a laggard to being on the map. It's there now. But Hawaii isn't.

There's always been visitorship to this blog from around the world, and some blogs like Balkan Cities have linked to it for some time. The other day, the Platforma Urbana blog, based in Chile highlighted this blog, which ended up boosting visits from South America. I only wish my Spanish was robust enough to work through the very interesting entries on that blog. Check it out, the images are fabulous.

There isn't a lot of commenting and I go back and forth about being concerned about it. A lot of comments on other slightly more general blogs degrade, or are pretty uninformed, ranging from suggesting that one of the most intact Victorian Mansions in the U.S. become a brew pub to baseless personal attack. On the other hand, it's partly the way I write--"This is how it is and don't you forget it" which doesn't encourage comment. Plus the entries are long ... but I don't have an editor. And I focus on speed.

I am toeing the waters of Firefox, but I find it more confusing at times to do things, because on my computer anyway, it isn't wysiwig when I am composing entries, and it's too literal for cut and paste, at times adding underlines to links which screw up entries and I bolt back to Explorer in frustration.

(And speaking of software, I need to learn more, including Adobe type stuff. I have very limited ability to manipulate images the way I would like to do for commentary purposes.)

I need to find a blogger hack that will allow for the printing of entries without the sidebar, which makes printing an entry an ordeal... Platforma Urbana is a website, or they run blog software, I have to learn about how they do it, but each entry can be printed off as a pdf. Intriguing.

And I have another blog, called Urban Agenda, which I don't update much. Urban Agenda was created to put forth the idea of running an urban-agenda candidate in the Presidential primaries, to put urban issues at the forefront of platform development. Lately, I've come to realize that this is more about building and extending the progressive urban politics and practices movement.

In any case, unlike Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space, Urban Agenda is intended to be a group blog. The people I thought would contribute ended up doing other things, so there is room for that blog to grow... This means I need more people to agree to participate on that blog!

In any case, on this anniversary day of a sort, I want to thank so many people for:

-- teaching me
-- your reading
-- those of you that have graciously shared information and photos and entries (such as Dan Malouff of BeyondDC and Miles Hochstein of Portland Ground--both Dan and Miles have taken specific photos for me/local advocacy/the blog at my request)
-- and how could I have forgotten to mention Elise Bernard, who started blogging in the neighborhood earlier than I and who turned me on to Flickr, and for friendship (and the use of all her photos!)
-- and similarly Kevin Palmer--we did great things together via H Street Main Street
-- those that write to me outside of the blog (although my email box is overflowing)
-- the people I've met in person and digitally because of being a part of the Internet, the blogosphere, e-lists (I think that I write too reactively, but working through responses helps me work through my thinking on various issues)
-- Flickr and the photo community that has developed within and around it
-- the people that have helped and inspired me
-- the people who I've in turn inspired, who are advocating for livability, beauty, and transit in their own communities and through the Web and the subset called the blogosphere.

Index Keywords: blog-management