Along with a record number of blogposts – at least for me – and a record number of words this month I’ve just noticed another record. When I checked my site-statistics just now I found I’ve had 505 “unique visitors” this month. With “unique visitor” defined as any IP address listed as making at least one visit.

Going over 500, with nearly a week still to go, means I’ve broken the previous record by some 70 visitors. All other stats are similarly up. True I won’t be competing for traffic with Google and Wikipedia for just a while longer, but still, it’s always nice to see the number go up.

While talking about importing from Blogger to Wordpress with a friend I decided to go ahead and take the plunge myself (I’d been thinking about it for a while). So I’ve imported my old Blogger Writing Blog into this one. It’s going to take some time got get all 65 posts properly recategorised, but I’m making progress on that, and at least it means all my blogging is now in the same place.

Update: I’ve finished shoving everything I just imported into the “Old Writing Blog” category. I’ll probably go through later to add some more category details, but it’ll do for now. I’ve deleted exactly one old post, to be precise the “blog moved” post when I closed up that one and moved everything over here.

I’ve just found a use for Comment Spam. No, I never expected it to happen either, but it’s happened. As should be clear to anyone looking at the history of this blog, I’ve been more active recently than I have been for quite a while.

One unexpected result for this is that the amount of spam being caught by Akismet has jumped spectacularly. So from now on, when I want to know if I’m posting enough, I’m just going to check the amount of spam I’m attracting.

Update: I’ve tweaked my theme again, this time to illustrate the activity on the blog. With July 2008 only half gone there’s only one month with more posts in the archives. And my first post for this month wasn’t made until the 8th.

Update July 18th: My spam queue now holds 600 messages, the oldest of them just one week old. That’s over a fifth of the total number of spam comments Akismet has intercepted so far (just under 2900). Of course there’s no way to be sure that’s just down to the recent activity, but I really can’t see anything else that could logically cause the two to coincide so clearly.

In my second bit of work on the blog itself for the day I’ve managed to enable Gravatars on all comments. I’ll probably end up tweaking that a little in the near future – unless I end up following my other impulse and redesigning the whole site, rather than just tweaking things – but they’re here anyway.

After a little thought I’ve decided to reshuffle my categories, moving most of them to be subcategories of others. I’m not sure they’re all going to stay quite the way they are now – Reading may well move to be a main category again – but on the whole I like this sort of rationalisation.

I’ve finally updated wordpress to the latest version (2.2.1). So now all the security holes there might have been should be plugged again. Fortunately it was another painless upgrade, which so far has been true for all my wordpress upgrades.

I’ve decided to get rid of my “Miscellaneous” category. Or rather I’ve renamed it. Miscellaneous is now officially Category42, dealing with Life, the Universe, and Everything. Yes, I’m definitely a geek!

As part of some work updating the site I’ve made a new custom theme for the blog. It’s not perfect yet, but the blog now ties in with the rest of the site (except for Cosmic Duct Tape which has its own theme).

Now if I can just figure out what the hell to do with the main page this site could really turn into something. Ah well, one thing at a time.

I woke up this morning to four rather unusual spam e-mails. This time the e-mails weren’t spam, the blog comments they told me about were. Having deleted the offending comments I’ve now activated the Akismet anti-spam plugin. Hopefully that will keep the spam out without the work (and the waiting time for the poster) involved in manual comment moderation.

I’ve just upgraded wordpress and the process seems to have gone smoothly. In fact if you’re seeing this, and the rest of the blog, the process has almost certainly gone exactly as it should have.