www.denimandtweed.com

So, here I am filling in yet another professional-ish document of the self-promoting job application/grant application/progress report type, and I want to mention that I write on this blog, and the thought of typing out www.denimandtweed.blogspot.com feels suddenly a little unwieldy and amateurish. And it turns out that Google just wants $10 for a custom domain. So www.denimandtweed.com it is. I’m given to understand that the old URL will redirect, so current bookmarks and whatnot should be unaffected.

State of the blog, 2009

I really started taking this blogging thing seriously about mid-way through 2008, when I became a member of Research Blogging. But 2009 is the first entire year I’ve spent actually thinking about what I’d like to write about on here, what place blogging occupies in the hierarchy of my to-do list, and what the point of the whole operation might be. So the end of the year (or really, till I finish this post, the beginning of 2010) seems like a good moment to pause and take inventory. Plus, it’ll give me a page to link to for some vital stats I’d like to read into the record.


Weekly visitors to D&T, tabulated by Google Analytics. Blue line: total visitors. Orange line: visitors referred via links from other sites.
  • In 2009, I wrote 229 posts (averaging just over 19/month), which drew 14,045 unique visitors (averaging 1,170/month) as tabulated by Google Analytics.
  • Most visitors who didn’t come directly to D&T linked here via Research Blogging or its widget on ScienceBlogs.com. I wrote 62 posts on peer-reviewed research for the Research Blogging aggregator, and these received 1,989 visitors via RB or SB. Other major referral sources include the Evolution 2009 blog coverage page (1,081 visitors) and the blogroll over at The EEB & Flow (1,027 visitors).
  • I also joined the Nature Blog Network this year. NBN has been less a source of traffic, and more useful for its reminders about upcoming blog carnivals and suggestions for casual bloggers.
  • I covered the Darwin 200 festivities leading up to, and throughout, the week of 12 February.
  • I also blogged about the Evolution 2009 meetings, which were hosted by my department at the University of Idaho. I ran the conference website, and attempted to coordinate online activities to coincide with the meatspace meeting, with mixed success.
  • This was also a year of political furor, in the States if not elsewhere, and I wrote 34 posts tagged “politics”. I did not apply that label to my brief note on Barack Obama’s inauguration as President.
  • I’ve continued to write about Christianity on D&T, but only composed 13 posts with that tag, and only 2 posts about Mennonites specifically. This reflects, I think, my present relationship to the tradition in which I was raised. I don’t subscribe to the supernatural elements of orthodox Christian doctrine, and the Mennonite Church as an institution doesn’t seem interested in my company for, um, other reasons (although there are hopeful signs). Time for a change to the masthead? We’ll have to see.
  • I made $35.40 in commissions on those nerdy t-shirts of my own design advertised in the sidebar. I will not be quitting my day job any time soon.
  • As an extremely pleasant end-of-year surprise, I was also awarded a travel grant for the Science Online 2010 conference, in recognition of a particularly involved post I wrote back in August about the evolution of milk drinking by adult humans. I’m looking forward to the conference and shall, naturally, cover it here.

Which observation brings this post to a tidy narrative end. I remain, I think, a scientist who has a blog rather than a science blogger, though the line between the two is blurry. Like any single-author publication, D&T is a horribly narcissistic enterprise – to me it’s serving a useful function if it provides regular writing practice, structure for my extracurricular science reading, and a place to blow off steam. I’ve been very fortunate this year to garner the occasional comment, some very kind in-person remarks from readers I’ve happened to meet in person, and an opportunity to start 2010 with a conference full of smart people who are way better at this sort of thing than I am ever likely to be. Not too bad, as hobbies go.

It has come to my attention

… that some readers are attempting to post comments, but experiencing some sort of glitch with the commenting system, in at least one case having to do with the “word verification” anti-spam device. I’m not sure what’s going on – I’ve successfully posted a nonsense comment myself (logged out of Blogger, to approximate the experience of a reader). I’m going to try and dig a bit more, and see what I can do to fix it. I’m reluctant to disable the word verification, but I also want readers to be able to comment!

Update 2008.09.14 – There’s a known issue for Blogger in Beta that sounds like what’s been described to me, though it’s supposed to have been fixed as of 2006. I’ve posted a note in Blogger’s support forum. Until I have an answer I’m switching comment submission back to the old Blogger system, where you’ll be taken to a separate page to post a comment. It’s clunky, but it used to work.

How I spent my Summer Vacation

I’m back from time with the family in Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park, plus an afternoon at the New England Aquarium and a weekend visiting an old high school buddy in Chicago. It was good, at least until the flight home, which was canceled. (I got home only a day late, but my luggage still hasn’t caught up.) Highlights: climbing Dorr Mountain, whale (and bird) watching, visiting the Field Museum and the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. Much bio-geeking, but nothing work-related. Although it turns out that the Field Museum has a fishbowl genetics lab in the middle of one exhibit, where you can watch actual scientists do basically what I do all day. Kinda creepy. Anyway, time for photos:


Photo by Jeremy B. Yoder.


Photo by Jeremy B. Yoder.


Photo by Jeremy B. Yoder.


Photo by Jeremy B. Yoder.


Photo by Jeremy B. Yoder.


Photo by Jeremy B. Yoder.

Gone out. Back soon?

Getting up early tomorrow to fly east for a week of vacation with family: Bar Harbor, Maine, Acadia National Park, some whale watching, maybe Boston, maybe a jaunt north of the border. No idea what my Internet access will be like, and I’m inclined to think it wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t have it. I’ve earned it; I got a manuscript submitted Thursday that I’ve been futzing around with for way too long.

I fully expect to take lots of photos like this:


Photo by Pear Biter.
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