However, since I understand that many people are bored by numbers I figured that I’d just lay out some of the statistics that are available regarding JerseySmarts.com. I’m not talking about hits (though I’ll include them below), but rather other somewhat interesting statistics…

Since I merged JerseySmarts.com with Joe’s Journal in November 2009, WordPress has stopped over 140,000 spam comments from being uploaded to the blog. Some 34,000 of those spam comments have been received in the last two months.

There are over 2,100 real comments from fine readers like yourself scattered throughout JerseySmarts.com. Thanks!

As of today, there are 1,951 entries on JerseySmarts.com. A few months ago I read somewhere that some guy won an award for having written the most original blog entries or some such crap. I don’t remember how many entries he had actually written, but I do remember that his number was much lower than mine – I definitely have that guy beat!

Since the merger of JerseySmarts.com and Joe’s Journal back in November 2009, this blog has received over 156,000 hits. While that’s not bad, it’s not where I’d like it to be. Although I guess some better news is that 2010 had more hits than 2009. And, so far, 2011 is on pace to increase the total number of annual hits by over 40% year-over-year. Again, that’s not bad for a personal blog of this size.

There you go – some quick, harmless facts about JerseySmarts.com.

Some of you might be interested to know that I’ve been working on a lot of the behind the scenes elements of this website since our one year anniversary of merging back in November. Most of the stuff that I’ve been doing is boring, but some of it might be interesting to at least a few of my readers. So here is a short list of what I’ve been up to lately.

• Random HTML Updates: As always, I am obsessive about the cleanliness of the code that is used to create JerseySmarts.com. The WordPress people are great at releasing frequent updates to the blog’s core structure, but I make a great deal of changes and modifications to that structure that I am always going back to tinker with and clean up. I told you this was boring, right?
• Automatic “Strong” Links: This one is really a personal preference, but I like to have the ability to control the appearance of the links in my entries. WordPress is very flexible when it comes to this, but sometimes it is not very clear on how you manipulate the code for these options on the back end. I’ve had some success with a quick, easy workaround on some of the other WordPress-based websites that I own so I decided to institute them here and it has been working very well. Which brings me to the next point…
• Amending Older Posts & Comments: When I merged both sites last year, I brought everything from both sites over to the new system. As those of you who work with me on websites know, I’m a stickler for maintaining content – I hate deleting ANYTHING from a website! However, I do understand the need for content to be correct. To this end, I spent some time the other day amending all of my old comments on this blog to reflect the new URL of JerseySmarts.com instead of the old URL for Joe’s Journal which was based off of the now defunct thebalrogslair.com website. That took some time… And while I was at it, I also amended my buddy Eddie’s comments to reflect his new blog URL as well as my other friend Martin’s comments to reflect his new blog URL. Having the proper URL out there is cyberspace is important to generating hits and interest in your website – you can’t let that stuff fall by the wayside.

There have been a few other things that I’ve done in the last few weeks that really begin to dig into the minutiae of operating a website so I won’t bore you with them. Just know that on those days when there is not a new entry for you to read, chances are I am working on something else behind the scenes that is, in the long run, just as important as new content!

Joe's Journal - As it used to exist

If you read that link, you now know that I merged my old blog – Joe’s Journal – with the one that you’re reading – JerseySmarts.com. One year ago today, that merger was complete. I think the results have been great, but you could probably be the judge of that better than I can…

One of my favorite parts of the old Joe’s Journal was that crazy header that I put together by blending all of the different things that crossed my mind at the moment. You might be able to tell from that screenshot, but there are a whole bunch of different things on there including the Monmouth University hawk, Stewie from an early episode of Family Guy, the Arrested Development television show’s logo, a Cross, the American flag, my fraternity’s flag, a Lord of the Rings logo, a Smallville logo, a silhouette of New Jersey, a Rutgers University logo, and a bunch of other stuff. Plus, the main color of the site was yellow.

In general, I never hate on any of my old sites and Joe’s Journal is no different. I really enjoyed that blog since it was my personal blog where I let off steam and commented on a variety of issues (the entries have all been merged into this site, so go back a few years and look at some of the older posts – lots of bitching in there!). However, as I began to enterprise my web design skills and I began creating newer websites with stronger capabilities and better marketing opportunities, I realized that I had to begin eliminating duplication in those areas of my life where it was unsustainable and, really, unnecessary.

On that point, a few years ago I opened up JerseySmarts.com as a place where I could capture some of the writing skills of my friends from college and other people that I’ve met along the way. It never really panned out the way I wanted it to, but that’s okay. Since JerseySmarts.com became a viable source of revenue, I wound up keeping the domain and just uploading my Joe’s Journal entries onto both blogs. It was easy, but pretty laborious in the grand scheme of things. I never wanted to engage in larger marketing campaigns or new ways to present content because I didn’t want to have to duplicate everything. Plus, I felt like the impact of my entries was being thinned since they were available in two locations.

The logical answer was to merge the two blogs and condense my efforts to create a single website with greater impact. I think that I’ve been pretty successful in that effort considering that JerseySmarts.com is both profitable and has a wide readership. Since the merger, I’ve admittedly held back on publicizing the blog to the extent that I originally intended and part of that was because I wanted to ensure that I had the commitment to keep the thing updated. With that, I’m glad to announce that today marks one full year of this blog being updated every single day. In 365 days JerseySmarts.com has had more than 365 entries. I think that’s a pretty significant accomplishment for a one-man show. One of the ways that I accomplished this was taking advantage of the ability to “schedule” a post in WordPress. For example, I wrote all of the entries for November 1st through November 16th (that’s today) on Halloween. Hey, I had the free time while sitting around waiting for trick or treaters, so I wanted to use it productively! I can’t guarantee that I’ll be updating the blog on a daily basis for the coming year, so I might miss a day here and a day there, but I made it work in the last year so I might be able to keep the momentum going in the coming year!

If I had my way, I’d get more people to sign-up for the monthly newsletter in the next year and I’d utilize that newsletter for more than just a recap of previous entries. I think that goal is attainable, but not when the newsletter stands at 26 subscribers. Last month I started a new Google Group which replaced the old newsletter system that I’ve been using for the last year. Let’s hope that it has some staying power, huh?

Anyway, we’re one year into this merger and I think it’s going great. Let me know what you think!

As I was going home I tried to piece together more of the mystery in my mind. The car key, specifically, was in my hand because it was bigger than the other keys. “Why does that matter,” I thought. I remembered I used it as a tool – it was pressing down on a small piece of metal. “What was that piece of metal,” I thought again. Then it hit me: “Wait – it was something on my laptop keyboard!”

I remembered using the car key on my key chain to try to fix the backspace button on my laptop. A few weeks ago the backspace button came flying off of my laptop keyboard. Apparently, I was pressing down on it to hard and over the course of the last three years that I’ve owned this machine (best computer I’ve ever had, by the way) I managed to bend some piece of the metal that held the hinge of the key in place. To bend the piece of metal back, I tried to use my car key so that the two hard surfaces would press against each other.

But as I was driving home last night, I remembered that my car key was too big for this job and that I had to go into my desk drawer to get a small tool. In my desk drawer I have a plastic box where I put my stuff so I can avoid the drawer turning into your typical “junk drawer.” Some of you may know where this is heading at this point in the story…

I finally got home from work last night, went up to my desk, opened the drawer, opened the plastic box, and guess what was looking back at me? That’s right – my keys. I guess in the heat of the moment when I was fixing my backspace button (which I DID fix and which works wonderfully now), I just dropped my keys into that plastic box and thought nothing of it.

As Homer Simpson would say, “D’oh!”

Anyway, I know that some of the entries on this blog are coming up days past when they should have been uploaded. That’s my fault. Many of you know that I tend to write a lot of these entries days in advance unless something ridiculous pops up (like losing my keys), in which case I take the scheduled update and push it out to a further date. Well, lately I’ve been hitting the “Save Draft” button in WordPress instead of the “Publish” button and I couldn’t tell you why. I’m in the process of fixing that oversight on my part, so updates should run more fluently from now on. I’ve had an update on this blog everyday since I merged JerseySmarts.com and Joe’s Journal in November 2008 and I don’t plan on breaking the streak any time soon!

In any event, this will be the third time that I’ve gone down to Nashville and I really like it down there. It’s a great city with a wonderful night life and the people are all really nice and laid back down there (which is a dramatic change from the northern part of the East Coast).

I’ll be back Sunday afternoon, but don’t worry – I have entries ready to be auto-uploaded to the blog for every day that I won’t be around. So you can get your fix of Joe’s Journal on JerseySmarts.com every day!

In order to streamline my daily website updates and create (hopefully) a higher visibility site, I’ve been thinking about finally making this merge. Both sites get about the same amount of hits (given the story, time of posting, relevance of my meanderings, etc), though Joe’s Journal currently sits at 1,106 posts while JerseySmarts.com sits at 368 posts. Joe’s Journal also has some 1,011 comments while JerseySmarts.com has 111. None of this information would be lost during the merger and it is likely that both designs would be thrown away for a new, more up-to-date design.

Thoughts?

I also darkened the background of the site because I didn’t really care for the bright off-white color any more. It’s boring, you know?

Plus, you’ll notice the stagnant “JerseySmarts.com” 468×80 banner has been moved from right above the first blog entry to the bottom of the main page. That site (which is essentially this blog in a different format) is ranked higher than this blog by some rankings! What total BS! I think that Joe’s Journal is hurt by not having a specific “.com” name, but since joesjournal.com appears to be owned by a marketing company, I think purchasing that domain is out of the question. Anyway, the Google ad above is an adequate replacement and what’s better – it pays!

For those of you who are tech-heads out there, Joe’s Journal is still operated on the WordPress 2.3.3 database system. JerseySmarts.com is operating on the new 2.5.1 system and the internal Control Panel is a complete disaster. The engineers at WordPress ruined the posting page so that you have to scroll all the way to the bottom to find certain options. Garbage. I have no intention of changing the Joe’s Journal internal structure until WordPress fixes the debacle that is 2.5.1.

The only other change that I made was to make one of the stock text advertisements at the very bottom of this page a little bit smaller. Truthfully, it looks better with smaller text. I might set it off in it’s own box, too.

I hope you enjoy.