Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

It's my 3 year anniversary of blogging on Dreamwidth. Oh, I've been blogging longer than that.... I started on LiveJournal over 12 years ago. And I do still blog on LiveJournal. I cross-post (manually 😡) to both.

Having a shorter history on Dreamwidth makes it easier to pull recent statistics from there. For example, I know from my profile I've posted 2089 blogs in 3 years and 768 in the past 12 months. That's an average of 2.1 posts per day this past year (1.9 over 3 years). I can also see which tags I've used most frequently in that time:

Most Used Tags, Past 3 Years

Rank	Tag	Uses
1	In Beauty I Walk	354
2	Planes Trains and Automobiles	241
3	Coronavirus	212
4	TV	160
5	Waterfalls	159

What does it mean that these tags are the top 5? Well, first, I'm happy that "In Beauty I Walk" remains my most used tag. It's the tag I use with all my posts about hiking. It's also my all-time top tag from 12+ years of blogging.

I'm happy, as well, to see "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles", about the trials and tribulations of travel (the name's an obvious reference to the classic 1987 Steve Martin/John Candy comedy) rise to the #2 spot. Along with that goes Coronavirus dropping to #3, and I'm happy about that, too. Good riddance!

Notice, as well, that a new tag has pushed its way into the Top 5: Waterfalls! Indeed I have written a lot about waterfalls in the past year. That shows up when I filter tag usage by the past 12 months:

Most Used Tags, Past 12 Months

Rank	Tag	Uses
1	In Beauty I Walk	129
2	Planes Trains and Automobiles	94
3	Waterfalls	78
4	No Rest for the Wicked	63
5	Weather	62
6	TV	51
7	Politics	49
8	Taking it Easy	48
9	SF Bay Area	46
10	Current Events	44

Waterfalls was my #3 tag this past year with a whopping 76 uses. Yes, we've visited a lot of waterfalls!

No Rest for the Wicked nudged up into the Top 5 this year. It even nudged out Weather to reach #4. That aligns as No Rest for the Wicked is my #4 tag over my full history of blogging.

I enumerated this table out to 10 places to show what happened to some of the other tags. You can see that while TV dropped out of the top 5 for the year, it didn't drop far. It came in 6th. My TV watching is down this year from the year before, when I watched the whole Game of Thrones series. Earlier this year I did watch a few miniseries and the current season of various shows, which is how I found 51 things to write about. Though even that seems like a long time ago as I've barely watched any TV the past 6 months.

What happened to Coronavirus? On the basis of the past 12 months it not only dropped out of the top 5, it did not make the top 10 or even top 25. It came in at 40th place, in a 3-way tie with Beer Tasting and Family, each with 20 blogs.

This month I've set a new blogging record for myself. I posted a whopping 84 entries in May, a rate of just over 2.7 per day. That eclipses my previous record tally of 81 in August '22 and edges out my old posts-per-day record of 2.67 in September '20.

A few reflections on this 84 post blitz, in the form of Five Things:

• As usual (for when I blog heavily) much of it was driven by travel. Two-thirds of my posts were related to trips I took in May... or was catching up on from April.


• Yes, May was a gonzo month for travel. I came off a big, triple-jump trip at the end of April and had four more trips this month. Yes, I'm tired from all the travel. Also yes, I want to go out again soon because the prospect of working from my desk for several weeks seems mind numbing. 😰


• Posting an average of nearly 3 times a day takes planning. On days when I posted 3 or even 4 journals I had written a lot of the material ahead of time, often the day before but sometimes more. For example, I started writing this post 5 days ago.


• Writing posts in advance is easy on LiveJournal but not on Dreamwidth because Dreamwidth doesn't support scheduled posts. I still had to click 'Post' every time. That's a nuisance. It makes it hard to spread out posts across the day. I try to avoid posting them too close together in time but sometimes it's unavoidable.


• In terms of most used tags, coronavirus still holds the #2 spot on Dreamwidth (2.5 years of history) and a distant #3 in my fuller, 10+ year history on LiveJournal. Though with this month's strong return to traveling vs. thinking about disease, Coronavirus could soon drop a notch in both rankings. We can only hope it continues to fade into the distance in the rearview mirror.

I've been keeping up my blog on LiveJournal. I moved over to Dreamwidth a few months ago because friends were here and I could crosspost to LiveJournal (to maintain a consistent history of my blog). Now crossposting to LJ is temporarily broken. Each attempt delivers the following error message to my inbox:

Crosspost to canyonwalker@LiveJournal failed.

Failed to crosspost entry to canyonwalker@LiveJournal: Client error: Your IP address is temporarily banned for exceeding the login failure rate.

While at first glance the error message may look like a problem with my password— because it refers to "Client error" and login failure— it's actually something on the DW server side (the client that tries to login to LJ) that's screwed up and gotten itself on a denyList.

I filed a help request with DW two nights ago, noting the problem had already been happening for two days. I waited two days before opening a case thinking maybe the problem would clear up as getting denyList'ed would be temporary. But it's still happening. And DW staff have not responded to my ticket yet.

...Not that I expect much from DW at this point. My last ticket was "Feature X doesn't work as listed in the FAQ, how do I use it?" and took almost six weeks to be answered... with "It's actually not implemented at all." 🙄 And when I search for other tickets related to crossposting problems I find open tickets describing them same problem from as far back as 4 years ago that were never answered. 😨

I'm having serious second thoughts about sticking with this platform. It's got a feature set similar to LJ circa 2008 and volunteer maintainers who are mostly MIA.