15 Years Old

Notes from Underground blog is 15 years old today. 

When it started, this platform was easy to use, and provided a quick and easy way to link to web sites with interesting ideas and to comment on them.  It also had a useful search facility, so that one could find blog posts on interesting topics by searching on tags. As my academic field was missiology, I searched on that, and found that quite a lot of bloggers who wrote about missiology also wrote about "emerging church". I followed that up, and found quite an interesting phenomenon, which seems to have died out now, but was quite strong 15 years ago. You can see some of my blog posts on  the emerging church here.

However the host of these blogs at Blogspot decided to make improvements -- they never could learn the truth of the slogan "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". They made everything harder to use, and broke the beautiful tool for searching for blog posts on a topic, replacing it with the clunky Google+ (which they subsequently abandoned) and eventually it became so hard to use that I moved this blog to Wordpress, a different blogging platform that was then easier to use. So most of the posts between 2010 and 2020 will be found there. 

But then the people at Wordpress, also neglecting the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" adage, messed up their user interface, making it more difficult to use than the Blogspot one, so, I moved this blog back here. You can still see my blog posts on the WordPress site, only there haven't been any new ones since February 2020, because all I can see when I try to post a new one is "A Script on this Page is Busy".

The current favourite posts, which people have been reading recently are these:

• The gills of the dolphin and Hemingway's reputation
• The Moaning Meme and the Freelance Cynic
• Children's science fiction and more
• Elidor: children's fantasy
• Psychedelic Christian Worship
• Anthropology - individualism, collectivism or communitarianism
• Zemblanity and education
• Rulers and authorities, territorial spirits, spiritual warfare
• Tolerance
• The One Ring

Blogging is not as popular as it used to be. 

The best years for blogging were probably 2007-2012, when the Web was really a web that connected people. There were sites like Tumblr, which aggregated blogs, so you could give people one Tuimblr address and they could see a kind of index of all your blog posts  on various platforms. But Tumblr lost most of its functionality years ago. There was Posterous, where you could post on the fly and on the move to various blogs and blog platforms, but that disappeared as well. There were tools to help you find blog posts, like Technorati, MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog, but these were gradually taken over by big conglomerates like Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Amazon, who didn't like the connectivity of the web, and preferred to break the strands and keep you in silos instead. So blogs tend to become isolated -- one blogger, one silo. GoodReads is breaking its link with Twitter, so the web is becoming less of a web as one strand after another is broken. 

But I still keep blogging, and as I say at the top of the page:

The main aim of this blog is to interpret the Christian Order in the light of current affairs, philosophy, literature and the arts -- and vice versa. So it's about ideas. Social, political and religious comment. Links, notes on people, places, events, books, movies etc. And mainly a place where I can post half-baked ideas in the hope that other people, or the passing of time, will help me to bake them.

And for those who would like to say more about such things, and more interactively than is possible in blog comments, please consider joining the Christianity and Society forum. 

Blogiversary of Khanya blog

Today is the blogiversary of my Khanya blog, which I started 13 years ago today.

Unfortunately I can't post this, or anything else, there any more, since the WordPress user interface is broken. It has been broken for about a week now, so I've reverted to blogging here,

Probably the most significant posts in those 13 years have been the series of Tales from Dystopia | Khanya, which are some memories of the apartheid era in South Africa. As it recedes further into the past fewer and fewer people will remember what the apartheid period was like -- no one under 30 can have much memory of it, and those who experienced the whole period will soon no longer be with us. So I hope others will be moved to blog about it, or record their experience in some other way.

I've written about many other things on the Khanya blog in the last 13 years -- theology, literature, history and politics. Just today someone commented that they had enjoyed reading a book I had reviewed: Another man’s war | Khanya. Fortunately the comment function still works, at least for those who have previously commented on it. Unfortunately comments from people who have not previously commented are put on moderation (to prevent comment spam), and approving of comments is one of the things that no longer works in WordPress.

Nevertheless, I post these stories and ideas in the hope that people will respond to them, and we can have a conversation. There are tag and category "clouds" in the right-hand margin of Khanya blog to find topics you are interested in, and a search function where you can enter a few key words to see what comes up. If you can't comment on the blog posts you can email me at shayes@dunelm.org.uk

I hope the people at WordPress will soon fix their broken user interface, but until they do, I'll continue blogging here.

Reviving an old blog because WordPress is broken

It looks as though I may have to revive this old blog on Blogger.

I moved it to WordPress when the editor here at Blogger became increasingly clunky and difficult to use, but even a clunky editor is better than none at all.

I seem to have been locked out of my WordPress blogs Khanya, Notes from Underground (that last a replacement for this one) and Hayes and Greene Family History. Though I can still read them, I can't write to them, edit them, or approve new comments. Whenever I try to access them for those purposes, I get this message:

And after finding it broken for several days, with no apparent attempt being made to fix it, there is little alternative but to return to Blogger.

I'll still post links to the WordPress blogs from time to time if they answer questions that people ask and so on, but won't be able to post any new stuff there until WordPress fix their user interface, which they've showed no sign of doing so far.

Reminder: this blog has moved

Just a reminder that this blog has moved to here.

I only post stuff here when for some reason the Wordpress site is inaccessible.

I moved the blog to Wordpress when the Blogger editor was downgraded and made more difficult to use, though the people at Wordpress seem to be doing their best to make their editor more difficult to use too.

You can see the latest posts on all my blogs in the Blogroll sidebar on the right, and those in some of the blogs I like reading too.

Reviving this blog

When Blogger introduced a new user-hostile blog editor, I moved this blog to a WordPress site here: Notes from Underground.

But now WordPress has introduced an even more user-hostile editor (which they call "an improved user expeience"). But it is very difficult to compose blog posts on that experience, and the only thing I experience is frustration, so I'm moving it back here, at least until Wordpress provides a proper editor instead of an unpleasant experiece.

One of the worst things about the Blogger editor is the loss of functionality, especially in posting pictures. It used to be possible to position pictures left, right or centre, but now one has to fiddle with the HTML code to do it, but even that is better that trying to edit stuff on the new WordPress experience.

Blogger's new user-hostile interface and other atrocities

I din't think I would post again on this blog at this site, since I moved it to here.The main reason for moving was the new user-hostile user interface and reduced graphics functionality.

But now something else has cropped up. I still have a family history blog on Blogger, which I still use occasionally. And they invited me to link the blog to Google+. To do so, however, I would have to merge my Blogger profile with my Google+ one. And, like most of the other changes, there would be a corresponding loss of functionality.

You see, on the existing Blogger profile, there is a field for entering things you are interested in. On the Google+ profile there isn't.

Why is that important?

One of the things I am interested in is missiology. So if I go to my profile and click on any of my interests, say missiology, it will show me other bloggers who are interested in missiology. And in that case, I might also find their blogs interesting. It is a good way of finding blogs to follow.

But now they want me to abandon that took by substituting my Google+ profile for my blogger one. Thanks, but no thanks.

So if you want to read this blog in future, click here Notes from underground

And since moving it to there, I've disabled comments on this blog. That's because abandoned blogs are a spammers' paradise, and they think they can leave spam comments to their heart's content. 
 
But the main reason for changing was the new user-hostile interface.

A few months ago Blogger switched me to the new user-hostile interface, which I struggled with for a while, but then found a way of getting the old user-friendly one back.

Now they've gone and switched me again, and hidden or removed all the things that made Blogger easy to use.

Let's see if the new new one is better than the old new one.

No, it isn't. I didn't want Jolly John's ugly mug in the middle of the page, I wanted it on the left, with the text wrapping around it to the right. But it seems that that functionality has been lost.

Yes, it is possible to do it with a lot more time-consuming finicky editing of the HTML code, but why should that be necessary? Why did they take away the simple and easy-to-use interface that got me to sign up for Blogger in the first place, and replace it with a slow and clumsy one? 
.

Reviving an old family history blog

I recently decided to revive a family history blog that I had abandoned a couple of years ago. Google were busy revamping their Blogger software, and were taking a long time about it. Every week some or other feature didn't work because they had decided to replace it, but the old one stopped working before the replacement was ready, and after a few months of this flocks of bloggers migrated from Blogger to Wordpress.

I joined the flock, moved my family history blog to WordPress, and put the old Blogger one on ice, with a note saying where it had been moved to.

But eventually the improvements were made, the missing features returned, well sort of, and Blogger grew more stable. So I decided to revive my family history blog on Blogger. But there wouldn't be much point in having two blogs to do the same things, so I'm giving them a different emphasis. The WordPress one will concentrate on our own family history, and family news. That's because WordPress handles things like photos better.

The Blogger one I will use for more general things -- discussion of research techniques, general history, links to resources, discussion of the use of computers for genealogy, discussion of software and the like. Historiography, method, technique and theory will go in there.

That's because of the things that Blogger is good at -- grabbing things off the web, making links, displaying widgets and the like.

One of the things you can see is the widgets that display recent visitors from MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog. Blogger displays them OK, but half the time WordPress displays the wrong pictures.

Some people might wonder what the point of such a thing is, and that was the subject of my very first post :Hayes & Greene family history: Why a family history journal?.

So if you're interested in family and local history, and related topics, have a look.

Thoughts on blogging on a blogiversary

Today is the fourth anniversary of the starting of this blog, which prompts thoughts about blogging generally.

This wasn't my first blog. I started an online diary back at the beginning of the millennium, but it seemed a bit clunky, so don't write much there any more.

Then I was invited to LiveJournal by Bishop Seraphim Sigrist, and it was a combination of an online journal and a social networking site. I still use it for personal things. But there were two problems with it: first, while it was fairly easy to network with other people on LiveJournal, it wasn't so easy to link to people outside that circle -- one can't use widgets like MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog for social blogrolling, and while it is possible to have a blogroll of sorts, it has to be created laboriously by hand. The second problem is that unless one pays extra for a subscription, photos and graphics have to be hosted on a third-party site. I still have my LiveJournal, but my posts there often link to posts on my other blogs.

Then, four years ago, we got a broadband connection, which made web surfing more affordable, and also something that one could do at any time of the day or night, without waiting for times when phone rates were cheaper. So I discovered Blogger, and that it was useful for quick and easy blog posts. It seemed like a good tool for bouncing ideas off other people and things like that. So I started this blog.

About six months later, Google, having taken over Blogger, began messing with it and lots of features that I had liked stopped working. I liked the "Blog this" feature, where one could grab a bit of text from a web site or another blog, and make some quick comments on it. It stopped working for about a year. The problems of that period caused a mass migration of bloggers from Blogger to WordPress and other blog platforms.

At one point, when many Blogger features had not worked for six months or more, I too started a WordPress blog, to be ready to jump ship if necessary. I still have it, and it's called Khanya, and I still use it. For some reason that I've never been able to fathom, it seems to attract twice as many readers as this one.

I use the two interchangeably, sometimes writing a post on one, sometimes on the other. Which one I choose depends mainly on which features of the blogging platform seem easier for the purpose at the time. WordPress makes it easier to enter pictures with captions, for example, so if I want to post more than one or two pictures linked to a narrative, I post them there rather than here. But widgets like the MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog ones seem to work much better in Blogger than in WordPress. I like to know who has visited my blogs, because that is a reminder to me to go and look at theirs.

Blogger seems to have settled down now, and most of the features are working again, so perhaps I'll carry on blogging here for another four years, if it's still around then. And thanks to everyone who has commented over the last four years, and linked to posts, and helped in the sharing of thoughts and ideas.

Firefox crashing on clicking Image Uploader in WordPress

Firefox crashing on clicking Image Uploader: WordPress.com Forums:

Is anyone reporting problems with Firefox crashing when trying to upload images? I have not installed anything new on my desktop, just clicking on the square box to upload images would crash Firefox.

I've been having that problem too, so I thought I would try it in Blogger.

The last couple of days I've been at the Amahoro Conference, and wanted to blog about it on my Khanya blog, and every time I tried to upload a picture, Firefox crashed. But it seemed to work OK in Internet Exsplorer.



But it seems to work OK here, so it must be a Wordpress problem rather than a Firefox one, though the latest information is that Google Gears is the culprit, so it looks like it's time to uninstal that.

Oh yes, the Amahoro conference has been pretty good, and I've blogged about it here and here, among other places.

Crushed by Blogger!

Crushed by Ingsoc is one of the blogs I like to read, but for the last couple of weeks has been inaccessible, and every time I go there I see:

This blog is under review due to possible Blogger Terms of Service violations and is open to authors only

http://crushedbyingsoc.blogspot.com/

Apparently the problem was caused by a bot, and all that is needed is for some human to take notice and fix the problem, but there seems to be a shortage of humans at Google who can do this.

But you can still see the blog's community page on MyBlogLog, and you can go to Crushed's page on MyBlogLog and leave a message of support.

It's been quite long enough now -- perhaps it's time to make the move to Wordpress.

Moving back to Blogger?

A couple of years ago half the Blogger blogs I knew were announcing that they were moving to WordPress. Here's one going the other way.

On blogger now � Rock_Angel_Grass:

To all readers who want to read more of my blogs, please visit me at http://blogophobicgracia.blogspot.com for more updated posts.. Thank you.. :-)

Back then, of course, Blogger was being "upgraded", and many features stopped working and the "full-featured" Beta version was missing many of the features that had made people like Blogger in the first place.

Now the Blogger software has stabilised, and some people, it seems, are beginning to move the other way.

For myself, I continue to keep a foot in both camps. One platform is good for some things, and the other for others.

WordPress versus Blogger

I have three general blogs on three different blogging platforms, and occasionally I compare them to see which is most popular.

The blogs are Notes from Underground on Blogger (this one), Khanya on WordPress, and my LiveJournal. The graph from Amatomu below shows that the oldest, the LiveJournal one, has the fewest readers, while the newest one, the WordPress one, seems to have the most readers. Is this because readers prefer WordPress to blogger?





Actually the comparison is not quite fair to LiveJournal. Most liveJournal posts are read by friends on feeds, and very few people read the actual blogs themselves. Nevertheless, it does seem to indicate a preference for WordPress on the part of blog readers, though as a blog writer I find it has several limitations, notably that it does not support Javascript, so all sorts of widgets and things just don't work.

But knowing which one readers prefer also affects the way I write. I now tend to be more careful about what I wrote on the Khanya blog, knowing that more people will probably read it. Notes from underground tends to get used for quick 'n dirty posts, and the LiveJournal even more so, or even just for pointers to posts on one of the others, if I think some of my LiveJournal friends might be interested, and I hope that some of them may comment.

Blogger working again

Blogger started working again on Sunday afternoon, after having stopped working on Saturday afternoon. I assume that Google fixed the bug, because I didn't make any changes at this end that could either have caused it or fixed it.

By the time it was working again I had already moved my family history blog over to WordPress, where a lot of people migrated about a year ago. That migration was caused when Google introduced a Beta version of Blogger, where lots of things that had previously worked stopped working, and it took 6-12 months before some of them started working again, and it appeared that Google was in no hurry to fix them. So when it stopped working yesterday, I wasn't sure when it would start working again, if ever.

I'll leave this blog where it is for now, and see what happens. But if I start getting any more "403 forbidden" errors, I'll think about moving it again.

Blogspot problems

Blogger problems persist, even though I have tried it with two different browsers and three different computers, I still get a "403 forbidden" message when I try to read any of my Blogger blogs of Blogspot.

I get the same message when I try to read any other blogs on Blogspot too.

I have already moved my family history blog to http://hayesgreene.wordpress.com/, and will move this one too if the problem persists.

In the mean time, I'm still blogging at Khanya blog.

End of the road for Blogger?

For more than a year now I’ve had a blog on Blogger and one on WordPress, and have posted about equally on both. I found it hard to decide which platform I preferred, but this just about clinches it.

Tried to log in to my Blogger blog a few minutes ago, and got this charming message:

We’re sorry…

… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

If you’re continually receiving this error, you may be able to resolve the problem by deleting your Google cookie and revisiting Google. For browser-specific instructions, please consult your browser’s online support center.

If your entire network is affected, more information is available in the Google Web Search Help Center.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.

It seems that I can post, but the moment I try to read my posts, I get that message.

If that’s lasts any longer, you certainly won’t be seeing me much longer on Blogger.

And obviously, if I can't read my blog, I can't read or respond to comments, so if you would like to comment on this, please do so on my WordPress blog.

Interpreting Amatomu

Today this blog reappeared on the Amatomu radar for the first time in more than a month -- it was ranked 200, and my other blog, Khanya was ranked 150 -- nice round figures, so I thought it worth remarking on them.

For more than a month now this blog has been ranked somewhere in the 230-240 range, so why did it suddenly shoot up to 200, and reappear in the top 30 in the News and Politics section? Not because there were any more readers, apparently. The number of readers has remained fairly constant for the last few days. So it must be because there was a drop in the number of readers of the other blogs on Amatomu, no doubt caused by the long weekend, and blog readers going away to where there are more interesting things to do than read blogs.

So where have all the blog readers gone?

I somehow can't imagine that most of them have gone to Moria, even though a very large number of South Africans do go there on the Western Easter weekend -- the top bloggers on Amatomu somehow don't seem to be the type. No doubt from today until the end of the week we will be able to read on their blogs what they have done, and this blog can sink back into obscurity again.

The other question raised by this is why the number of readers of this blog, even though it did not rise, apparently did not drop off as much as some other blogs. And perhaps that is answered by the Amatomu stats as well. Nobody seems to have read much that I have posted in the last week, and there haven't been many comments on recent posts. The most popular post, by far, remains one I wrote several months ago, commenting on a list of books to read before you die. It's still top with 232 reads over the last 30 days. The second one, Easter - Christian or pagan, which was posted even longer ago, has shot up, with 111 reads. Perhaps that explains why there hasn't been such a drop off.

The other thing that needs some explanation is why my Khanya blog, which I started a year ago, is more popular than this one -- it is ranked 150 on Amatomu, whereas this one is at 200.

The only reason I can think of is that WordPress blogs are more popular than Blogger blogs. I started the Khanya blog on WordPress at a time when many of the blogs I read were switching from Blogger to WordPress, because of the "new and improved" Blogger, in which many of the features no longer worked, and there seemed to be a mass migration to WordPress as dissatisfaction with the reduced functionality of Blogger increased.

But that doesn't explain why readers seem to prefer WordPress blogs to Blogger ones, and the Amatomu statistics don't give much of a clue about that. They reveal the phenomenon, but they don't explain it.

Any ideas?

Blogger, WordPress and LiveJournal

Today my Khanya blog on WordPress caught up with my Blogger one (this one) on Technorati. They are now running neck and neck with "authority" of 100, and a "rank" of 66360.

It's nearly five years since I started blogging on LiveJournal, with a post on Arthur Shearly Cripps and St Herman of Alaska.

I found LiveJournal interesting, with its "friends" system making it possible to share blogs with people of overlapping fields of interest. Actually it was more a journal than a blog, so the name LiveJournal was accurate.

Two years ago I discovered Blogger, almost by accident. It seemed more like a true blog, a web log, and what persuaded me to start using it was the "Blog this" feature, which made it easy to record and comment on memorable blog posts.

But quite soon after I started using it, a new and "improved" version of Blogger was introduced, in which most of the features that attracted me to Blogger in the first place no longer worked, including the "Blog this". And as functionality was reduced, more and more Blogger users migrated to WordPress.

Eventually in February this year I started a WordPress blog, called Khanya, as an experiment. It didn't seem to have many of the features I missed in the "new" Blogger, but it did have a "trackback" system for linking to other blogs, which worked (sometimes).

I found that if I wanted to blog on something in WordPress blogs, I used the WordPress one, and when I wanted to comment on Blogger blogs, I used the Blogger one, at least for the ones where the "Link to this post" feature was enabled. That was for more than straightforward comments, but rather a spin-off post inspired by an idea in another blog.

Now Blogger has improved, and most of the missing functionality is back. The "Blog this" feature has been improved, and now works with any web page, and not just Blogger blogs. The only thing missing, at least that I notice, is the "Search all blogs" link at the top of the Blogger page. But there is a workaround if one goes to Technorati.

But just at the point where Blogger has regained most of its missing features, my WordPress blog has overtaken my Blogger one, not only in Technorati links, but in page reads as well. The WordPress blog, Khanya, has caught up to this one in just eight months, in terms of "authority", and surpassed it in number of visitors. Has Google left it too late?

Khanya							33	113	1,879
Notes from underground							26	91	1,425

Those are visitor figures for today (so far), yesterday, and for the month so far.

It's also interesting to see where visitors come from:

Khanya

	Num	Perc.	Country Name
	216	53.07%	United States
	47	11.55%	United Kingdom
	41	10.07%	South Africa
	19	4.67%	Canada

Notes from underground:

	Num	Perc.	Country Name
	200	45.15%	United States
	90	20.32%	South Africa
	38	8.58%	United Kingdom
	23	5.19%	Canada
	9	2.03%	Korea, Republic Of

Notes from underground (this blog) gets twice as many South African visitors than Khanya.

As for LiveJournal, responses in the form of comments have dwindled to almost nothing. I now use it mainly for personal stuff and family news and pictures.

What kind of liberal am I? Blogger pulls ahead

My Liberal Identity:

You are a Peace Patroller, also known as an anti-war liberal or neo-hippie. You believe in putting an end to American imperial conquest, stopping wars that have already been lost, and supporting our troops by bringing them home.

Take the quiz at www.FightConservatives.com

I posted this on my WordPress blog, and somehow it just didn't work out. It seems that there are some things that Blogger still does better than WordPress, and graphics is one of them.

The MyBlogLog widget, which used to work OK in WordPress no longer does so, and there's a stats counter that seems to display a whole lot of code. So I'm not going to move this blog to WordPress yet, though I'll continue to play with the WordPress one.

Concerning the test itself, I noted over on the WordPress blog that it was very much American centred.

Consider, for example, the last question:

If you could pile any three people into a naked pyramid, who would you choose?

1. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld
2. The CEOs of Exxon, Chevron, and Shell
3. Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito
4. Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling, Andrew Fastow,and the ghost of Ken Lay
5. Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh
6. Revs. Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and Ted Haggard

As a non-American, I can tell who the people in the first question are, and I know that the second one refers to oil companies. I've never heard of any of the people in questions 3 or 4. I've heard of one of the people in question 5, but I'm not really aware of their significance. I've heard of the people in question 6, but I'm not sure what the difference is between Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan. I know Dobson has written books about families, but I haven't read them.

So faced with those questions, I chose question 1, because those are the peo[ple I've heard of.

That's how the test is skewed by its ethnocentrism and chauvinism.

WordPress versus Blogger

A few months ago it seemed that half the blogs in my blogroll were switching from Blogger to WordPress.

I could understand why, because when I switched to the much-hyped Blogger Beta, lots of features no longer worked. Nine months after it was announced that the "new" Blogger was introduced, and that it was now "fully-featured", most of the features that didn't work in the Beta version still don't work, and a few more have got broken along the way.

As a result of that, I started an experimental WordPress blog, called Khanya, back in February, and now for the first time, it has passed this blog in the number of people reading it in a day.

Yesterday Khanya had 64 readers, and Notes from Underground had 47. Khanya was ranked 145 on Amatomu, while Notes from Underground was 167. That may just be a temporary thing, of course -- Notes from Underground still has far more links to it from other blogs (according to Technorati), and so perhaps it wouldn't be a good idea to move this blog to WordPress because it would break those links.

They also seem to have different sets of readers, according to StatCounter:

Khanya readers:

	Num	Perc.	Country Name
	197	43.20%	United States
	144	31.58%	South Africa
	33	7.24%	United Kingdom
	18	3.95%	Australia
	14	3.07%	Netherlands
	12	2.63%	Canada
	7	1.54%	Philippines
	6	1.32%	New Zealand
	5	1.10%	Mauritius
	3	0.66%	Greece
	2	0.44%	Cyprus
	2	0.44%	Unknown	-
	2	0.44%	Malaysia
	2	0.44%	France
	1	0.22%	Finland
	1	0.22%	Iceland
	1	0.22%	Namibia
	1	0.22%	Spain
	1	0.22%	Albania
	1	0.22%	Romania
	1	0.22%	Suriname
	1	0.22%	Chile
	1	0.22%	Turkey

Notes from Underground readers:

	Num	Perc.	Country Name
	157	33.76%	South Africa
	150	32.26%	United States
	39	8.39%	Canada
	26	5.59%	United Kingdom
	12	2.58%	Thailand
	11	2.37%	Germany
	9	1.94%	Australia
	7	1.51%	France
	7	1.51%	India
	5	1.08%	Netherlands
	4	0.86%	Philippines
	4	0.86%	Mauritius
	3	0.65%	Barbados
	3	0.65%	Malaysia
	3	0.65%	Unknown	-
	3	0.65%	Greece
	2	0.43%	Switzerland
	2	0.43%	Austria
	2	0.43%	Russian Federation
	1	0.22%	Suriname
	1	0.22%	Puerto Rico
	1	0.22%	Togo
	1	0.22%	Poland
	1	0.22%	Slovenia
	1	0.22%	Lebanon
	1	0.22%	Algeria
	1	0.22%	Hungary
	1	0.22%	Mexico
	1	0.22%	Chile
	1	0.22%	United Arab Emirates
	1	0.22%	Argentina
	1	0.22%	Malta
	1	0.22%	New Zealand
	1	0.22%	Nigeria
	1	0.22%	Ireland

So perhaps the time has come to move this blog to WordPress, as so many others have done.

I'm still not sure though. Most of the features of Blogger that no longer work were never part of WordPress anyway. And the Blogger template is still easier to edit than WordPress.

Blogger features I miss most:

1. Blog this!
2. Search all blogs
3. Click on interests, books, movies in user profile to find those with similar interests

Annoyances:

When you're at the Dashboard, you can click "Dashboard" to get there when you're already there, but when yuou're at the blog, you have to click "Customise" to get a place where you can click to get to the Dashboard. This not only wastes time, it wastes bandwidth, having to load another page unnecessarily.

When you click "Link to this post", the "Edit HTML" no longer works -- you have to save the page and then edit it, loading two more pages in the process -- wasing more time and bandwidth.

So I'm still in two minds about whether to switch. Perhaps when the next thing breaks in Blogger.