Back of the Envelope

Okay, I just noticed this, but Jeff Darlington, the webcartoonist behind GPF, has had a blog since February. And unlike Maritza Campos and Howard Tayler, who both use Livejournal, Jeff uses Movable Type, also known as real blogging software. (Okay, that's not fair, as I've never used either, and although they're better known as webcartoonists than bloggers, I'm certain that Maritza and Howard get more blog traffic than quite a few well-known bloggers. Certainly more than me.) Anyway, Jeff wants to use his blog for actual content, including a couple of essays on Christianity. See, I told you he was a Christian.

Sitemeter now has a nifty new feature. It's always been able to tell you the IP address of people visiting your blog, but now it's even easier for me to stalk my readers, as it tells me what physical location they're visiting from. For example, check out this map.

I captured that from Sitemeter around 10:30 pm last night, and it shows me the locations of my last fifty visitors. Of course, I'm not sure where Sitemeter gets this information--it could just be the location of the ISP who owns the IP address. It's certainly not completely accurate, as it lists my location as Auburndale, Massachusetts, while I live in Waltham, Massachusetts. (Hey, I tried to get Sitemeter to ignore my visits, but my ISP uses dynamic addressing.) But it's still pretty cool, huh? This feature's been in development for the past month, and you can have a look at the Sitemeter blog where they discuss the details of adding country, state or region, city (it's only 50% accurate), coordinates, and finally, the map. You can check my Sitemeter page if you want to see the cities of my fifty most recent visitors.

Speaking of Sitemeter, I've noticed that over the last week my traffic's taken a bit of a dip. Before my Instalanche, I was averaging around 120-130 visitors a day, and now I'm barely breaking 100. I thought it unlikely that my traffic would significantly increase after the Instalanche, but I wasn't expecting it to decrease. Did I suddenly become less interesting to read? Or maybe people figured that with the Instalanche, I'd become part of the blogging bourgeois, and all my countercultural readers decided they needed to look elsewhere. Trust me, I'm just as edgy as ever! [Meaning not very. -ed You stay out of this! -DSC]

Since I don't have any good blogging ideas of my own today, I'll just borrow a page from Doc Rampage's book and talk about what other people are writing. In this case I'll specifically point out what Doc Rampage is writing:

• Doc Rampage demonstrates how not to write an interesting blog post in what turns out to be, in its own way, an interesting post.
• He also makes an argument that Christians and Muslims believe in the same God. This is an argument I've made myself, although I can't recall doing it on this blog. The gist is that you can believe very different things about something and yet still be talking about the same thing.

Okay, I'm tapped for now. Maybe I'll come up with something interesting to write about later tonight. At the least, I need to post the next chapter of Fire sooner or later.

If you're interested in what a Christian environmental scientist has to say, there's a blog called The Evangelical Ecologist. Check it out.

I don't usually delete comments. I don't get enough as it is, and letting people say what they want, especially when they disagree with me, improves the discussion on this blog. I did delete one recently, though. It was added to an old post, back from March, highlighting Nick Queen's Out of the Wilderness showcase.

I could tell it was trouble since it started with "I would just like to say a prayer to our Lord Jesus, for our troops in Iraq." First of all, the post had nothing to do with Iraq, so it was irrelevant. Second, posting a prayer on someone else's blog is a sure sign you're not directing it towards God, but towards the blogger and his readers. Whatever happened to going into one's closet to pray? And, as might be expected, it quickly turned vicious: "Let us remember what the true mercy of your teaching brings, when we identify the spirit of anti-christ that is in George Bush, and the rest of his minions who serve the corruption in our current government. Lord Jesus, in your infinite mercy, please bring down a punishment upon these evildoers, who abuse your name for evil purposes." Okay, then. Now, I might disagree with this person, but it's hard to imagine trying to engage her in discussion when she's asking God to rain judgement on my head. Or maybe I don't qualify as one of Bush's minions, but I do believe we're doing the right thing in Iraq, and even if I disagreed, it'd be quite a leap to jump from believing George Bush is wrong, to believing he's evil. Part of being a Christian means loving your fellow believers, even when they're wrong, even when they're sinning. If you can just casually label anyone you disagree with as a non-believer, indeed as a wolf in sheep's clothing, as possessed of the spirit of the anti-christ himself, then you're missing the point. We're not called to love one another because it's easy--it's not!--but because it's right. We're even called to love, and pray for, those who persecute us. If you want to do otherwise, then please don't use my blog to ask God to destroy them.

Glenn Reynolds took note of my post on Mauritania yesterday and I received an Instalanche, with over 1,600 visits over the last twelve hours of yesterday. If you're curious, I do intend to continue to follow developments in Mauritania. I'll also link to other blogs that are doing the same. It's something that we need to keep an eye on.

I won't have much else to post today, as Friday is always a slow blogging day since I don't have time to prepare anything the night before and I have to work during the day. I may have something this evening, though.

The latest Christian Carnival, the eighty-third, is up at All Times of Kind. I meant to submit my review of Aitken's biography of Chuck Colson, but I made the mistake of letting Gmail automatically complete the e-mail, and I ended up sending my submission to the wrong place. Hopefully the next carnival will accept it, even though the carnival usually only accepts entries that have been posted since the last Carnival's submission deadline.

Formatting a webpage is never easy. Between the various browsers and resolutions that people use, with their corresponding fonts and colors, anything more complex than simple ASCII text can look different for different readers. One discrepancy I noticed with my own site is that my sidebar and my header, while lining up perfectly on the browser I use (Netscape 8.0), are often misaligned in other browsers, such as Firefox and Internet Explorer. It's a small enough discrepancy that I ignored it for quite a while, but yesterday I decided it bothered me, so I played around with the CSS page to see if I could get it right. Now, if I did get it right, the black line at the bottom of my header, and the corresponding black line at the top of my sidebar, should overlap and you should see only one line. If you see two lines, then it's still messed up on your browser, and I'd like you to let me know. Please contact me and also tell me what browser and resolution you're using. If it's still broken, then this information should help me fix it. Thanks!

Congratulations to Devin Ganger and Rick King, who won first and second place in my little contest to see who would be closest to visitor #50,000. According to his Sitemeter stats, the actual 50,000th visitor went to this post after a Google search on military nanotechnology and apparently never saw my post about the contest. Instead, the folks who e-mailed me were Rick, visitor number 49,998, and Devin, visitor 50,002. Since the rules stated that preference would be given to the person who was over 50,000, that means Devin got first place and Rick got second. They've already been given their prizes, gift certificates for Amazon. Congratulations, guys. I may hold another contest at 100,000 visitors, but a lot depends on how much traffic I'm getting at the time. If my Sitemeter logs roll over too quickly, I won't be able to verify the winners.

The timestamp on this post has been artificially fast-forwarded to keep it at the top of this page all day. At least I'm honest about my Laphamization.

Today I will pass the 50,000 visitors mark. As usual when I get excited about these things, I'm reminded that the bigger bloggers get 50,000 visitors a day. By that measure, I'm pretty insignificant. Still, 50,000 visitors to a website in one and a half years (almost exactly, Sunday will be the next half-year mark) is nothing to sneeze at. My old personal website, which is still up at Rochester, still hasn't passed 5,000, and it's been up five and a half years.

When I passed the 25,000 mark in March, I noted that my traffic was growing. Indeed, whereas it took over a year to get to 25,000, it's taken less than six months to get the next 25,000. Unfortunately, my traffic isn't quite as high as it was in March, due partly to the fact that the politics has died down a bit since the election and the immediate aftermath, which gave all bloggers quite a spike, and due also to the fact that I've been blogging less recently, as my new job has been keeping me busy.

Still, I want to celebrate reaching the 50,000 mark, and if you are visitor #50,000 I'd like to send you a personal thank you. Check the sitemeter counter at the bottom of the screen, and if it says 50,000, drop me a line through my contact page--be sure to get your e-mail address right. If you use that mechanism, I should be able to tell if you really are visitor 50,000. For that matter, go ahead and send me a note even if you're just close. If I can't find visitor #50,000 (he may be reading my post on fundamentalists and evangelicals after following his Google search here, and so won't see this post), I'll take the closest, giving preference to the one above rather than the one below the 50,000 mark (sort of the opposite of The Price is Right).

I'm not yet done with the Chuck Colson biography--I'm about three-quarters of the way through, and I expect I'll be finished by the end of this week. It's very good, and I'll get a review up once I'm done. Meanwhile, I'll post another anecdote from the book tonight, so you can see why I like it.

Update: It looks like I won't get that anecdote up tonight. It'll be up tomorrow, I promise.

I received a review copy of Jonathan Aitken's Charles W. Colson: A Life Redeemed in the mail today. "Wait a second," you ask, "a review copy?" Well, yes. Last week someone from Doubleday's marketing department contacted me and asked whether I'd like a review copy of the book. I guess my reputation as a conservative blogger preceded me. [Reputation? -ed. Well, okay, maybe he had me confused with some other Donald. -DSC] In any case, I said yes, so I'll read the book this weekend and share my thoughts next week.

The latest Christian Carnival is online at Dunmoose the Ageless. As I've been writing so many posts about Christianity lately, I submitted one--the post on Islamic and Christian attitudes towards other religions.