First Year of Blogging

June 28 marked the first full year of this blog. I had hoped to mark the day with an interesting post but I was much too preoccupied with problems at work to think about my blog. So here it is, better late than never (and a less interesting posting is better than not writing at all because inspiration hasn’t struck). I took this photo after I got off the minibus this evening. There are several bulletin boards in my neighbourhood and they accumulate a fascinating assortment of layers, bits of papers, pictures, apartments for sale, camp announcements, dress sales, and so on. I never noticed before that the board underneath is wood!

My very first posting called Video 1: How to Make Boiled Kubbeh, a cooking video that I recorded in my office. Yinnon, whose pre-wedding photos were presented in my last blog posting (June 25) starred in that video. Interesting that we’re still the same basic group, me, Masha, and Yinnon, but now in a different room, on a different floor, and with a fourth officemate, Chaim.

Stats for year 1 of this blog:

• 208 postings
• 40,914 hits total
• Busiest day: Aug. 14, 2009 (3,963 hits)
• Top posts: Periodic Table Sweater (18,941), Irish Crochet Leaf (777), Miniature Bobbin Lace Tablecloth and Pattern (593), and Sunrise over Amman, 2010 (470)

I write about photography, food, crafts, and Israel, but photography seems to have taken over by a margin, according to my category totals:

• Photography (106)
• Israel (68)
• Crafts (36)
• Food (33)

I should note that some of these categories overlap, that is, a posting might be tagged with two categories.

And I’ve received 464 comments. Thank-you! I appreciate the comments and links that you’ve left on my blog and I’ve tried to comment as well. I realise that this blog is a bit quirky — not quite a photography blog or a craft blog or a food blog and not quite political enough to be included in lists of Israeli blogs. Hmmm. A bit like me…

Quick and Dirty Blog Backup

I just read Sister Diane’s Archive-Along posting about blog backup. And, yes, I don’t do it as often as I should, so I exported my blog, saved it to my hard drive and mailed it to a couple email accounts as well.

I have another method for backing up individual postings. I don’t recommend this as your only backup method because it has major limitations:

• It can’t be used for actually reconstructing your whole blog unless you are prepared to do a lot of cutting and pasting. However, it will save your text and photos. (Don’t forget to back up your Flickr account if you’re linking to photos there.)
• It saves your posts when they are published, not when they are updated.

It’s major advantage is that it is pretty brainless and, once in place, requires zero effort. The instructions that follow are for WordPress users.

1. Go to My Dashboard.
2. Click the Widgets link on the Appearance menu.



3. Drag the “Blog Subscriptions: Email Subscriptions” widget to the sidebar of your layout.



4. Go to your site and click “Sign me up!”



5. Set up a filter in your email account to save these postings automatically to their own folder (or, for Gmail users, to label and archive them).

One word of warning: this works even for postings that you delete. So if you use your blog to rant about your boss or your spouse and then delete the posting in the morning, your email subscribers will have already received it.