I will be coming up on my one year anniversary of this blog on April 5th. Honestly, I didn't think I would be going this long. I did all this on a lark after a couple of my “friends” pressured me to put my thoughts into a blog. So, I did just that. It started slowly at first. But, it appears that Alexa (which is a highly controversial way of determining rankings) and Google seem to like it. But, I have made mistakes in this blog.

One of those mistakes I feel is that chat box. I thought this would be a way for people to comment about this blog since it appeared I wasn't getting many comments after posts. Instead, that chat box has become a source of frustration to me. I don't mind people dropping by to let me know they were visiting or “smiling” at all. I appreciate my visitors. What I don't like are people advertising their product or site at my expense. I have deleted quite a few as a result. But, I have X amount of hours in the day to contribute to this blog. I have begun to give serious thought to just deleting the chat box once and for all. I just have not made up my mind as yet.

People asking to exchange links. I still believe this is overrated insofar as SEO. In fact, Google will punish you if you have too many links as they will think you are a link farm. If I exchanged links with everyone that has requested, I would have about 1000 links on both sidebars. Of course, I'm not going to do that. What people can do is leave a comment on a post linking their site if they want a permanent link here. I don't delete my posts. So, the link will always be there. I can understand people who are just starting out or are trying to improve their Alexa ranking or Google ranking (although I just have a PR3). But, I simply cannot exchange links with everyone. I do have about four of my favorite sites listed on the left sidebar. But, those are mostly for my benefit in that I enjoy reading their blogs. And now that I have posted this, it will be totally ignored, I know.

Problems. If anyone notices a problem...like a popup, something that is causing the site to load up slowly, please let me know about it. My email address is in the upper left sidebar. Or you can simply leave a comment after a post, if you prefer. I have been working to get this thing loading faster since there are still quite a few people who still have dialup access. But, there is just so much I can do. Blogger has some issues that simply can't be fixed just by me.

Also, this blog will undergo a much needed face lift in the weeks ahead. I have already changed the template on my other blog, “Diary: Alone on Earth.” Now, it is time, past time actually, to change the format on this one. If you have any ideas on what you think would be a good template, I would appreciate your input. It has to be 3 columns. I will not deal with 2 columns again.

Again, I appreciate all visitors here...especially, my repeat visitors.