2014 retrospective - Blog #323

The past 12 months have been pretty good for TPP personally. Things have gone very well although not without some aggravating episodes, e.g., getting you retirement money out of Lincolnland's clutches. The F1 had a good year, new job, higher salary, engagement, and nothing makes parents happier than to see good things happen to their offspring. The Phactors had a good year; anytime you can spend a month in Tuscany, you've had a good year. And how did our gardens grow? Pretty well actually, and a good start was made on refurbishing the front garden after having all its failing trees removed. Professionally things went very well as they do when you finally get your book published.  Yea!  Although older for certain, our health remained good in comparison to that of many other people. Always best to have health insurance and not need it. And while Affordable Care provided some relief from worry for many, circumstances and bone-headed states still keep many people left to play the health lottery. It wasn't a good year in politics, international events, diseases, human relations, and the environment. It was good to see the failed, cold-war foreign policy toward Cuba finally gave way to common sense (Hey, Marco, the 1960s called and they want their foreign policy back.) and reality. It took regular doses of margaritas (negronis during August), the Daily Show (and John Oliver), and blogging to retain one's sanity. Yes, this is a form of therapy, blowing off steam, and generally connecting with others in a rather one-sided sort of way; TPP blogs, 323 of them to be exact (as soon as he hits the publish key) - and around 250,000 page reads with few comments. And this is not much different from teaching college students, where you wonder how many in your class were really there, but there will be no exams.  The new year offers a lot of potential change too; TPP will be working on some new projects and community activities to keep himself out of trouble and amused. Surely there will be some bloggable material arising from that. Best wishes for the new year to all.

BGR #37 Addendum

The Phactor has been having a problem of late with an over active spam filter. Must have that looked after one of these days. But as a result, a very nice submission, by a very nice person (Sally) was missed until after the carnival was posted, but it's such a nice link about such a nice little cycad that everyone deserves a follow up because who doesn't love cycads. And of course wish this had surfaced out of the junk mail folder before the cycad endangered species blog was posted yesterday.
As a note to BGR participants and to give credit where credit is due, visitor traffic the past two days at the Phytophactor jumped by over 50% so hope all are seeing more visits down the line, and so far Foothills Fancies is the BGR referral leader by almost a factor of 2 to 1 over No Seeds and the Accidental Botanist combined.

Failed Experiment in Web Searches

Someone thought it would be a nifty idea to cram a bunch of "hot" keywords into a blog title (Naked truth about sex, gardening, religion, and politics in American government) and then poll people to see which word would be the hottest, get the most hits, and then compare that to the actual keyword data. Part of the rationale was to just try doing a poll. Well, like a number of the Phactor's research projects over the years, this one was an abject failure. In the opinion of 56% of the poll takers, "naked" would be the hottest keyword, but while that sounds impressive, only 9 people took the poll. But then the keyword data could not be recovered from any of the freebe stat counters in use, so the whole thing really was disappointing. Even the number of page views for the "Naked Truth" failed to deviate from the Phactor's average. But you do learn some things from even failed experiments, and some of them are pretty scary. Ever since its posting just over 2 years ago, a blog about whether an artichoke was a fruit or a vegetable has gotten on average the most page views, week after week, and keyword phrases including the term artichoke, even with misspellings, account for over 50% of the subject web searches that end up at on the Phytophactor's blog! That is pretty disturbing. Who knew so many people were so concerned, so curious, about a big old thistle? So do they want to know a cucumber is a fruit?