About the Blog, By The Way…

You may have noticed that I'm posting more lately than I used to. Our paper has been submitted, so I guess it's not soaking up all my writing energy any more, leaving more writing time for the blog. If that is the reason — and I have no reason to believe otherwise — it means I have some fixed amount of writing I want to or need to do every day, one way or another.

I wonder if the writing time I spend on other websites, on email, on paper reviews, on long-form homework and so on also counts? If so, I probably spend more time writing — in three languages no less — than I spend doing anything else at all in my life. And here I thought I'd left the liberal arts behind when I chose a science career…

2008 Top Ten

In the grand tradition of year end top-ten lists, here's the top ten most clicked-on and linked posts of this blog for 2008. That's no matter when they were posted, by the way, and of course it doesn't count all the people that read posts directly on the front page. The list is tilted towards posts suitable for linking and forwarding, in other words, and posts that are easily found via Google and other search engines.

1. Handy Box (October 2008)
   The Handy Box, an old Swedish-made box camera, with my impressions and sample pictures.
   
   
2. Stirling Engline (May 2008)
   I show off a Stirling engine model I got and give a short overview of what a Stirling engine is, how they work and why they're just insanely cool.
   
   
3. Cup Noodle Museum (March 2008)
   A visit to the Nissin Cup Noodle museum in Osaka. See the history of Cup Ramen, eat a wide variety of instant noodles and make your own, personalized Cup Noodle. Fun place.
   
   
4. Voigtländer Bessa (October 2008)
   The Voigtländer Bessa is another old camera from the 1950's I've been using lately. This one was owned by my uncle, originally, and is still perfectly usable.
   
   
5. Osaka Population (April 2008)
   A look at population trends in Osaka prefecture. With illustrations!
   
   
6. Oyakodon Recipe (June 2008)
   A simple recipe for Oyakodon, posted while we were in Sweden and Finland on holiday.
   
   
7. Learn Japanese, Get a Visa (January 2008)
   Where I described an upcoming plan to make it easier to get a work visa for applicants with demonstrated Japanese ability. It seems the plans continue apace and may be reality around 2011 or so. The JLPT language test is already changing in preparation for this.
   
   
8. Clam Miso Soup (June 2008)
   A recipe for a very simple clam miso soup. Posted while traveling. Maybe I should post more recipes here.
   
   
9. Population Decline (November 2007)
   A look at reasons for the declining population of Japan. It's part two of a three-part post; Part 1 and Part 3 here.
   
   
10. JLPT 1 (December 2008)
    where I tell about my recent attempt and failure at the Japanese Language Proficiency Test level 1. Nobody's perfect.
    

There it is: one vaguely sciency post, two posts on photography, three on Japanese society, three on food and one on language. Sounds about right for this blog.

For you Feed readers

I know a fair number of people follow this blog through feeds. I've set the feeds to give you the headline and the first paragraph of each post, making it easy to see if the post is anything you want to read. Blogger offers the feed in two formats: Atom and RSS. As it turns out, the RSS feed here has a bug so it will only give you the headline and nothing else.

So, any of you using the RSS feed should probably consider switching to the Atom feed instead. The link at the bottom of the blog front page is for the Atom feed, and you can change your RSS feed link by simply removing the "?alt=rss" bit at the very end. Most or all feed readers handle Atom just fine nowadays and it's a better publication format so for most of you there's no real reason to stay with RSS.

As an aside, a couple of people have wondered why I don't offer each entire post as a feed, not just a small excerpt. I have two reasons: first, I really dislike full post feeds myself, especially for the kind of longwinded, wordy and redundantly descriptive posts that I write, with images taking up lots of space on top of it. I follow a lot of blogs, and in my feed reader I just want to get a quick overview to select the few posts that I actually want to read. A long post published in its entirety defeats that.

The second reason is that I like to keep an eye on what posts get read and what does not. I can't collect that information on posts read through feeds, though, so making people go to the actual blog helps me get feedback on what people find interesting. It's still not perfect since visits to the home page does not count towards any individual post, but it does give me an indication. FYI, what sells here are posts about visas, the Cup Ramen museum and population statistics. I can agree with that priority order.