okay, i get it now. wordpress.com statistics being necessarily generalistic, i failed to understand, back when i had the otherwhirled on wordpress.com, just how many of my visitors were really just spam-whores looking for ways to sell their wares. in fact, as i noted over on Jonestown in the comments the other day, spam-whores still visit the now-defunct otherwhirled at a rate of several hundred per day. now that the otherwhirled has been on its own domain for several months, i begin to perceive:

1. that i generally enjoy somewhere between 20-30 actual visitors per day.
2. that in part this is because i haven’t spent a lot of time getting the domain registered with all the search engines.
3. but also that i alone am not really all that funny. i draw this conclusion both from the visitation numbers and the number of comments.
4. especially when my work-load of late has forced me to not be very consistent with the quantity and frequency of my posts.

i think this is also largely because i’m being a one-hit wonder in that all i do is snark on photos. i’m not that eloquent of a writer, and i frankly spend so much of my life in PhotoShop and Adobe Camera Raw that to a large degree, the last thing I want to do in my free time is manipulate someone else’s photographs.

there are some elements of this that i cannot really change. clients and family have to come first, and so do certain other activities (i’m one of our state’s handful of soccer referee instructors, and am just a few months shy of being expected to start teaching TaeKwonDo classes on my own). the thing is, i don’t want to stop doing what i do here, especially with at least another 9 months on the contract for domain services, and i don’t want to mix it with my personal blog. as for the latter matter, i don’t really have a good reason as to “why” i don’t want to mix the two, i just feel it would be better if i didn’t. and because hardly anyone spells my name right and my personal blog is one of the ‘original’ vanity domains (i got the domain back in 1995).

so, i’m wondering something. i had this idea, for what it’s worth, a long time ago, back during the summer when Tengrain and Dr. Monkey von Monkerstein were kind enough to guest-blog for me, in fact. so at the risk of appearing to rip off an idea from Fairlane, if the 20-30 of you are aware of anyone who’d like to help the otherwhirled provide something other than snarkery on photos, please invite them to contact me at commander[dot]other[at]otherwhirled[dot]com. the types of things i’d like to do here, but lack the time to do consistently myself:

1. Onion-esque rewrites of news articles.
2. Unique snarkographic imagery.
3. Editorials of social, political, religious, and/or other pertinent topics—with the understanding that political and religious matters are generally considered snarky cannon fodder.
4. Snarkery on the entertainment industry and the public’s tendency towards materialism.
5. Pretty much anything else that fits into those modes of thinking.

ultimately, i would really like to have several good bloggers participate here—i don’t currently have an intention on limiting the number of them, provided we can all get along and support each other even when we might share idealogical differences. i am also willing to extend the offer to moderate and conservative bloggers, again, given the caveat that we treat each other respectfully.

thank you for your time and your assistance. and thank you to those few of you who have kept visiting here over the months.

…fwiw, largely because i have not been lacking in the business. my apologies to the five or six of you who check in here regularly to see what i’m not doing and how funny i am not being.

parts of what is eating my time and/or my mental energy is minimally alluded to here and certainly consumed here (because “here” is not just “there”, but it’s also my presence on two other websites), while also trying to get my fall wedding shoot finished up and out for proof. wheee!

i’ll try to get back to teh funny as soon as i can. i also turn 41 this week. commander other is not getting any younger. dammit.

You may have noticed some slight changes to this here bloggy-place I call “the otherwhirled”.

Maybe. Even though the thingy on the right says only ten of you subscribe to my RSS feed, the server metrics software claims I get over 150 pulls on the standard feed URI daily (even though feedburner is supposed to divert those requests to itself), so it’s quite possible that many of you have no idea what the site looks like at all!

At any rate, I added a Google Gadget to the bottom of the left side-bar on the right (and the left side-bar is on the right almost exclusively so that I could refer to it as the “left side-bar on the right”) because Mrs. Other was somewhat responsible for its creation. Or actually very responsible. And because I think it’s just nice to see a government initiative that is genuinely focused on finding ways to make beneficial use of old satellite data instead finding ways to use it against the citizenry.

I also finally found a decent social bookmarking plugin. I use these things a lot, when they exist on the blogs I read, and I’d like to ask you to do the same in return. More people should be aware of my ineffectual ramblings, after all. The plugin supports something like over fifty social bookmarking networks, so if you don’t see one that you prefer to use, drop me a comment and I’ll add it in.

Yeah, I still can’t bring myself to put GW’s vacant stare on my blog today, sorry. We’ll return to the regular programming later this afternoon.