Now With More Internet Exploder!

Hopefully, all you Internet Explorer users will now be able to access the Green Kitchen blog. Stats were down about fifty percent over the last week, but I just figured everyone was using Google Reader or out and about for Spring Break. The weather here has been absolutely wonderful.

The vague technical difficulties stuff:

Apparently I was having script issues, but not noticing because I use Firefox, which doesn't seem as sensitive to not-so-perfect scripts. I recently made several little changes to my blog template: added my tweets, as well as a widget that suggests other posts you might enjoy (I love seeing the photos from the old posts). But it turns out that the problem was my over enthusiastic tweaking of my email subscription code. It took me a couple hours to figure that one out. This article helped. I still need to fix the email subscription thingy and the RSS feed thingy and the tweets. Phew!

So, if your blog starts to load in IE and then a window pops up that says, "Internet Exporer cannot open the Internet site: Operation Aborted" you'll sort of know what it might be — script related. If you are a blog reader and not the blogger, you can always download an alternate browser, like Firefox, as a workaround. I know this is a bit vague? I'm running on the fumes of Springtime insomnia. Hopefully you can just ignore this post and move onto the rainbows and fabric and such.

Thanks to Kristin at Sew, Mama, Sew! for the heads up, and Rose for her sweet note.

Technical Difficulties (Part II): Hell and Your Bad Neighbors

I guess Site Meter and IE worked things out, so I added SM back to my neurotic stat-checking world.

Poking around in my blog template, and thinking about stats, somehow led me to some tutorials about adding site maps to Yahoo and Google, in order to help the bots find your site, thus increasing your ranking in the search engines. I used some of this guy's suggestions, which led me to these specific instructions for blogger users.

Next, I did a test to see if I'm in "supplemental index hell," which I am (no surprise there). Only 25% of my blog's pages are indexed, the rest just hang out with the red devil himself, I guess. Some of the offenses that can get you in this limbo-land are: redundant content, obvious spam-type content, other spammy stuff, and what they call, "bad neighbors."

I went ahead and checked to see what my cyber neighborhood looked like, 'cause you got to be from the right side of the tracks to get in good standing. Well, guess who turned up as a bad neighbor? My old friend, Gwendomama, from my link below. Not because she's actually a bad neighbor — I'd know, she lives in my town — but, because she had a link to her friend's blog: a certain friend who likes to walk around and take naked pictures of herself (all tastefully done, I assure you). So, in order to redeem myself, I only had to take away the link to G's specific Site Meter post. Apparently, I get to keep the link in my "friends and family" side bar list. Whew! Sure wouldn't want friendship to get in the way of my ascension into search engine heaven.

So, I guess the moral of the story is: If you, as a middle-aged-woman, walk around naked and post about it on your blog, you end up in search engine hell, and/or bringing others down with you. I'm all confused. I thought search engines liked that kind of stuff. At least that's what my keyword search stats tell me.

Technical Difficulties, That You Might Be Having With Your Blog, Too

I read over at Gwendomama that Site Meter and Internet Explorer and Blogger weren't really working together. So, I switched over to IE and, yep, my blog was unavailable — it was fine in Firefox, which is why I hadn't noticed. Since I was having problems retrieving my password from the Site Meter people anyway, I deleted their bit of code from my template and everything was back up in IE. I've been using StatCounter all along and have had no problems.

Speaking of statistics: I noticed that I'm down about 25 to 30 percent this quarter on readership. Is it the summer time blues? Am I experiencing blog suckage again? Are you all on holiday? I know that I haven't been up to writing anything of much depth lately. Maybe I don't leave enough comments with others? Maybe I should answer more comments? Do you all want more tutorials? Freebies? Human interest? Etsy updates?

Just wondering.
What makes you come back for seconds?
Constructive criticism welcome.

Thank you,
Michelle