September 2000 is history, but I think I made an excellent start on accomplishing some long range goals.
First, I lost 8 pounds which was significantly above my goal of 5 pounds so I’m glad to be making progress there. Already I can tell that at this rate I’m going to have to be buying some new clothes by the middle of November.
Second, the web site is back on track. The server was solid as a rock, and I wrote more than 80,000 words. I didn’t quite keep to my goal of daily updates on each site, but I’m making progress. Page views were down to about 120,000 or so from about 163,000 last year. There are still some 404 errors that need to be corrected, but I’m not too worried. The trend over the past few weeks was definitely upward. Plus, so far I’m really not close to using Conversant to its full potential, though I am slowly bringing everything up to speed.
The irony is that the time pressures that limit what I can do are reverse from what they used to be. Take the directory-oriented label system on this page (the little icons on the right — click on them and they bring up a list of related stories). That took about 30 minutes of tinkering with page templates in Conversant to get it to work right and about 2 hours of working with clip art packages and Macromedia Fireworks to get the graphics all set. In the past, on the old static site, it was the reverse — any major change would require an hour or more of administrative work for every 30 minute of content creation.
The real test will be January-April.