WIST

At least I hope not.

After being on vacation for most of a week, I was back a couple of days, then promptly fell sick. Fell sick as in “I didn’t restart my computer until five days later.

But I’m back! And so are the quotations!

Back from vacation. Let the quoting begin!

Another good year of WIST since I last ran these (back last March). Let’s look at the historical count:

Another good, steady increase, including topping the 10K milestone. Very pleased with that.

Broken out into a graph (and normalizing the timeframe):

A slow, steady increase in authors over time (which is not surprising — the most popular authors would already be in the database, though I still come up with a remarkable number of folks who I don’t yet have on the list).

The number of quotes shows how I’ve, for the last five years, been trying to do my five-quotes-a-weekday regimen, and managing to do so successfully.  This is one of the longest sustained projects of mine, and I’m pretty darned proud of it.

This table shows the top ten most prolifically quoted authors here, with trending notes showing where folks have risen and dropped in rank.  Eric Hoffer is new to the list, and former top 10ers who have fallen off from last year include luminaries such as Ben Franklin, Robert Green Ingersoll, Albert Einstein, and Abe Lincoln. (Last year there were actually 14 people on the list, due to ties — I remain amazed by how close some of the numbers are.)

You can always see the current Top 10 in the sidebar.

As for the most popular quotes on the site (and showing where they went up or down in the ranking):

1. - Robert Frost, “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942)  (2,209)
2. ↑ Aeschylus, Agamemnon, l. 179 (1,351)
3. ↓ Michel de Montaigne, “That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die,” Essays (1588) [tr. D. Frame (1958)] (1,087)
4. - Seneca the Younger, Moral Essays, “On Tranquility of Mind [De Tranquillitate Animi]“, 17.10 [tr. W. Langsdorf (1900)] (1,054)
5. ↓ John Steinbeck, Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) (1,018)
6. ↓ Bertrand Russell, “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933) (1,005)
7. ♥ Thomas Campbell, “Hallowed Ground” (1825) (865)
8. - Albert Einstein, “Science, Philosophy and Religion: a Symposium” (1941) (845)
9. ↓ Theodore Roosevelt, “The New Nationalism,” speech, Osawatomie, Kansas (31 Aug 1910)(754)
10. ↓ Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, “Introduction: The Custom-House” (1850) (553)

The addition of the Campbell quote pushed from the Top Ten list Lord Chesterfield’s Letter to his son (9 Oct 1746). Why these numbers are as they are surpasseth understanding.

Finally, Google Analytics tells me over the last year I’m getting about 83 visitors a day, and 116 pageviews.  That’s up from the previous year’s 73 and 103, which is kind of nice.

In keeping with global trends, IE usage is down (from 40% to 36%), Firefox usage is down (from 31% to 26%), and Chrome usage is up (from 12% to 20%). About 84% of people come here from a search, and 12% come here directly (bless you).

And … that’s enough numbers for today.

Sometime over the last week, WIST gained its 10,000th quotation. There’s a count kept in the sidebar, but it’s a bit deceptive because it includes Administrative posts (such as this), of which (prior to this one) there have ben 81. It appears that this Samuel Pepys quote was the official 10,000th.

It’s remarkable how quickly the numbers grow when you plug in five quotes every weekday, 25 a week. Though the numbers don’t always go just upward — I do periodic reviews through the collection, and occasionally come upon duplicates that need to be cleaned up.

It’s taken 24 years (!) to get to this point. At the current load rate, though, it will only take about 15 years further to get to 20,000. Best get a move on, then!

The blogging software underlying WIST, WordPress, has now been updated to the latest-greatest version. Let me know if you spot any problems.

I am quite possibly going to be changing the theme (screen appearance) over the next week or so (hurrah for holiday vacations), so if you pop in here and things look really weird … hopefully that’s why.

I now have Google Plus, Facebook, and Twitter buttons after each quotation in the individual quotation pages, so that you can easily share your favorite quotes with your social circles. Enjoy!

I’m headed off on holiday, so WIST will likely be much more sporadic for the next few weeks.  I didn’t have time to queue up daily quotes, but I will have a laptop with me and so may get the opportunity to do some quotational goodness.

Or perhaps I’ll simply feel fulfilled sipping prosecco and watching the sun drop down into the Mediterranean.  Either way, we will resume our normal posting schedule around 6 June.

We last updated the numbers back in April 2010, but since I’m thinking about it, here’s where we are now.

I moved a few other things from “Miscellaneous” into authored categories, but the overall quotations made a very nice increase over the last year (if I’d waited until the end of April, I’d be a full thousand more quotes). I’ve also added a good number of new authors.

Speaking of authors, here’s the current Top 10 (expanded a bit, due to ties).  The ones in italics have jumped into the list since last year.

There’s now a listing in the sidebar (“Prolific Authors”) to show this info dynamically.

The current Top Quotes (by views) are always shown in the sidebar, too (“Popular Quotables”).  As a snapshot, and with author:

1. ↑ Robert Frost: “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942) (888)
2. ↑ Michel de Montaigne: “That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die,” Essays (1588) [tr. D. Frame (1958)] (760)
3. ↑ John Steinbeck: Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) (728)
4. ↓ Seneca the Younger: Moral Essays, “On Tranquility of Mind De Tranquillitate Animi“, 17.10 [tr. W. Langsdorf (1900)] (702)
5. ♥ Bertrand Russell:  “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933) (667)
6. ↓ Theodore Roosevelt: “The New Nationalism,” speech, Osawatomie, Kansas (31 Aug 1910) (655)
7. ♥ Aeschylus: Agamemnon, l. 179 (597)
8. ♥ Albert Einstein: “Science, Philosophy and Religion: a Symposium” (1941) (505)
9. ↓ Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, “Introduction: The Custom-House” (1850) (463)
10. ↓ Lord Chesterfield: Letter to his son (9 Oct 1746) (415)

I’ve noted where each quote has risen or fallen in the rankings, or is new in the Top 10 from last time (♥). Quotes that fell off were Robert Louis Stevenson (“Aes Triplex” (1878)), William Henley (“Invictus” (1875)), and Patrick Henry (Speech, Virginia Ratifying Convention (5 Jun 1788)).

As far as traffic goes, according to Google Analytics I averaged about 107 visits a day in the last month, which looks to be up from the previous period, averaging around a thousand page views a week.  Not too shabby — hardly fortune and glory, but a nice validation for my hobby.

I realized yesterday that WIST has been “dark” for a week and a half.  My apologies — I’ve been on business in Australia and South America, which has been both fascinating and exhausting and otherwise disorienting enough to have broken my daily WIST-posting habit.

We will resume our normal quotational broadcasts on Monday.

WIST has been upgraded to the latest version of WordPress.  This is probably the most difficult off the blogs I have to do this with, as I’ve actually tinkered with the source code (RSS2 and Atom feeds), and have to recreate that each time.  Things look good at the moment, though.

If you spot something wrong on the blog — bad formatting, errors — please let me know as soon as possible.

Howdy. WIST will be taking a brief vacation break, returning next Tuesday. Thanks for all your support.

It’s been a bit over a year since I last ran the numbers on WIST. In that time, I’ve continued my daily updates, plus shifted things over to WordPress. Let’s see how things have changed.

The Miscellaneous Quotes number is down a bit due mostly to my moving Bible quotes into the “Authored” category.  But I’m very pleased by how the overall total has gone up — amazing what 5 quotes entered nearly every workday can do  for those counts.

As to the top authors cited, taking 50 as a threshold …

Teddy, Abe and Albert have all gotten back into the Top 10 (which only required 44 quotes last time).  Ben and Bill have dropped out, and Ambrose Bierce has completely disappeared (heh).

Note that the changes can be somewhat skewed by how I select quotes for entry — some is randomized from various sources, but I’m also slowly going through the existing WIST database by author (at three points around the alphabet), and, as I get to each, trying to research any “Attributed” quotes as well as come up with more quotes for that author, which then go into a weekly rotation.

Still, a bunch of old white guys all of whom are either dead or retired.  Not sure if that’s a good or bad thing, but there it is.

The current Top Quotes (by views) are always shown in the sidebar at WIST.  As a snapshot:

• Teddy Roosevelt: “The New Nationalism,” speech, Osawatomie, Kansas (31 Aug 1910) (497)
• Seneca the Younger: De Tranquillitate Animi [On Tranquility of Mind] [tr. W. Langsdorf (1900)] (329)
• Michel de Montaigne: “That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die,” Essays (1588) [tr. D. Frame (1958)] (327)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, “Introduction: The Custom-House” (1850) (319)
• John Steinbeck: Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) (295)
• Robert Frost: “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942) (287)
• Lord Chesterfield: Letter to his son (9 Oct 1746) (284)
• Robert Louis Stevenson: “Aes Triplex” (1878) (265)
• William Henley: “Invictus” (1875) (243)
• Patrick Henry: Speech, Virginia Ratifying Convention (5 Jun 1788) (202)

Now, why those particular quotes, I have no idea.  Most of them are not particularly famous.

Finally, as far as all the Google Analytics numbers, I’m doing about about 560 visitors (470 unique) hitting around 750 pages per week.  That appears to be down from the last time, substantially — but still enough to make me feel like someone’s appreciating the effort.

The vast majority of hits are from the US, but other English-speaking countries (UK, Canada, Australia, India) round out the top 5.  82% of visitors are new, the rest are returning customers. Three-quarters of the traffic is via search engines; 10% are referred from other sites, and over 15% enter in the address directly.

And those are the numbers, to go with the words.

I’ve made a change in how Bible verses are quoted in WIST.  Whereas before I had Bible quotes falling underneath “Other Authors and Sources,” I’ve now designated “Bible” as an “author” in the database, allowing easier grouping and finding of quotations from there. (One could arguably assert various “authors” within the Bible, especially in the New Testament, but I’m not going to take it to that detail; the authorship is associated with the book cited and is subject to whatever scholarship the reader cares to accept.)

I’m also trying to be more diligent about citing the translation in use, since that can have a lot of influence on how the ideas are presented (or even whether folks consider them “valid”).  I’m generally not citing source links, as the reader may have their preference.  The three I use, for different reasons:

• Bible Gateway (the most robust site out there)
• NetBible (includes some translations not in Bible Gateway, like NRSV, as well as some linguistic resources)
• Olive Tree (includes one of my favorite translations, Today’s English Version)

There are other Holy Books / Scripture out there which I still have lumped under “Other,” mostly because the number of quote I have from them is relatively small.  As I see a need, I’ll break them out into their own “author” categories.

WIST is now echoed out to Twitter at @WISTquotes.  Each quotation I add will be excerpted to that site as they’re done each day.  Of course, with only 140 characters, all folks there will get will be the name, the first 60 characters of the quote, a link back to the WIST entry.  E.g.,

Lincoln, Abraham: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith…” http://bit.ly/dBh9EQ #quotes

My hope is that this will provide folks over in the Twitterverse with something useful, as well as driving a bit more traffic over to this site.

Let me know what you think, or if you have any other ideas for how to improve WIST.

I’ve added a search plug-in for WIST to the Mycroft Project, which hosts search engine plug-ins for Firefox and for IE.

The plug-in does a quotation text search. That means it won’t search for author info — a side effect of the way I’ve implemented the authors as categories in WordPress.

You can find the plug-in here.  Enjoy!

This week has been a bit spotty with WIST, as I’ve been in a flurry of holiday/vacation travel and activities.  I’m going to be taking a week off from WIST until after the New Year, since the coming week will be even more harried (and likely less connected).

Thank you all for your support and reading of this little hobby of mine.  I’ll be doing a more official tally in the New Year,  but I’ve added probably a good thousand quotes to the list, and had a great time doing so.

Here’s hoping you and yours have a wonderful holiday season, and that the new year brings you both joy and illuminating words to ponder.

Apologies for the silence this week — the H1N1 flu grabbed me and threw me down on the couch the past few days. I’m feeling much better, and so will be resuming with the regular WIST posts, starting … about … now.

I’ve fixed the feed problems I introduced with the WordPress upgrade. All feeds — including the quotes-by-email from FeedBurner — should be working properly now. It not, please let me know.

For more info on the feeds here, you can choose the “Subscribe” link at the top of the page.

Apologies to WIST followers via RSS or Atom feeds (or “Quotes of the Day” email people). During a recent upgrade to WordPress (10 July), I failed to reinstall / recreate the feed code that juggles includes the person who actually gave the quote, so that info has been missing.

I’m going to work on getting that back running today, so you may see some additional quotes passing through as I test it.

I made a couple of changes to the site setup today worth noting:

First, Author collections (category archives) will now be sorted by the citation, not by the date the quote was entered in here. That should be helpful both in looking things up and in spotting potential duplicates (or inconsistent citations).

Second, I’ve added (see the top of any WIST page) an “Authors” page, which lists all the authors currently cited in WIST (along with how many quotations they have recorded here). Clicking any of the names will bring you to their quotation page. And if you hover over the names, you’ll get the more detailed biographical info about them that shows up in each quote’s citation.

This Authors page needs some further work — I wanted to have the full description as the text here, not the shorter name (which can also be seen in the Authors list in every sidebar). But it’s a step forward.

If there are other features you’d like to see in WIST, please let me know. Future plans for the site are always listed in the “To Do” page, linked at the top.

After leaving off for the (US) Memorial Day holiday, I’m on vacation the rest of the week. I have, however, queued up the standard complement of quotations for Tuesday – Friday. The only difference my being away makes is that if there are any egregious formatting or spelling errors, I won’t see them until I return next week, and any comments left will (probably) stay unanswered until then.

I’m aware the folks who are reading this via Feedburner (directly or via email), feeds are still goofed up (presently the formatting is better, but the author name is missing — and that’s now causing a problem with other direct feeds). I know what needs fixing, but haven’t confirmed the latest approach to how is working. Apologies, and feel free to come visit the site in order to see the latest-greatest until I can get this corrected.

UPDATE (mere minutes later, of course):  Problem fixed, huzzah.  I will be spreading this out to other feed templates later today.

Well, irritatingly enough, though the Atom/RSS feed for the site looks fine in Google Reader, and in the viewer in FeedBurner, too, the email version that FeedBurner sends out looks … less than … good.

Apologies to WIST readers who use that feature. I’ll try to figure out what the heck is going on.

A combination of factors — a fractious PC that was causing me difficulty updating the old Movable Type site, a new mania for WordPress, and a touch of obsession — has led to my converting over WIST to a WordPress blog. I think it will provide, in the long run, some serious advantages in performance and ease of use, both for me and for my readers.

There’s still a lot to do here — my inability to update the old version caused me to rush this to production. Part of the needed changes are cosmetic — getting the WIST logo back in place. Others more more substantial — getting the feeds working properly, dealing with some odd formatting glitches, etc.

But I’m pleased to be able to roll this out. I hope you continue to enjoy reading and using WIST as much as I enjoy keeping it updated. And, at a rather appropriate cracking-the-7000-quote mark, it’s a perfect time for a brand new era.

UPDATE:  I was unable to make a final post in the old MT installation to let folks kno this, but … as part of the conversion, the RSS feed addresses for WIST have changed.  If you were using FeedBurner, then you’ll see a difference, but you don’t have to do anything.  If you had a direct subscription to the feed from the site, though, it no longer works.  Go to the RSS link at the top of the page to make a new choice over how you want to subcribe here.

Apologies for the lack of WIST entries yesterday. Technical difficulties on my PC (still ongoing) caused the problem, but I’m going to work around them today.

Meantime, I’ll catch up on the gap, and, hopefully, have some Big News for you later this weekend.

Again, thanks for your patience.

I’ve gotten the performance problems here cleared up by shifting my main blog (which was the spam traffic target) over to WordPress from Movable Type. I will probably eventually do the same to WIST, but that’s a ways off — I’ve done some serious tweaking to how I get MT to support WIST, and the migration of the data (the normal MT-WP export/import routine doesn’t include a good chunk of the data I store here), getting WP to behave the same (again, using categories for authors and such), and retaining all the permalinks to the current site (for the sake of Google and folks who have linked back) is going to be a non-trivial task.

In the meantime, though, things seem to be on an even keel here, and no more glitches in posting (knocks wood). Thanks for your continued reading and support.

I’m having serious performance problems at my WIST site, largely due to spammers bringing the server to its knees trying to work their evil ways. Nothing’s getting through, but whilst they’re crowded around the building, posting of new material is highly problematic, and some that does get posted is lacking authors by the time the system processes. I correct these problems as soon as I spot them — but sometimes it can take many, many retries for the correction to actually get through.

So apologies for quotations being posted (esp. through the RSS feed / e-mail distribution) without authors associated. I am working on the problem, though there is no trivial solution as this point.

It’s been a while (since February 2007), but for everyone’s edification, here are the current WIST stats:

The “Total Quotations” number doesn’t quite sync up with the number at the top of the main page due to the latter including Adminstrivia posts (such as this one).

The number is still not as huge as other sites — but all of those quotes have been looked at, examined, and an attempt made to source them. I think that’s worthwhile.

As to the currently most represented here …

Dave Barry and Abe Lincoln fell off the Top 10; Russell and Franklin are the adds this time.

I’m running Google Analytics on this page currently, as far as tracking visitors. I’m getting about 910 hits here per week, most of which come from Google. Not huger numbers, but respectable.

Of the visitors, 57% are from the US ; other countries are all below 10% each, with the UK ,Canda ,Ireland ,India , and Germany having the most visitors. About 50% are on IE (down from 61% last time); Firefox shows as 40%, with smaller blips for Safari and Opera.

Not sure what it all means, but there it is. For myself, I’ve been pleased with my regimen to post five quotations daily here. I hope my loyal readers enjoy what they’re seeing; I thank you one and all.

A copule of things:

1. Yahoo has discontinued its site Search Builder program, in exchange allowing folks to do much more powerful (and complicated) customized search bits. As a result, the old Yahoo search box stopped working, and I’ve removed it until I figure out how to make Yahoo searches work from here again.
2. The FastSearch box is also acting persnickety, for reasons I cannot diagnose as yet. I’ve labeled it as “NOT WORKING,” and re-enabled the normal slower-but-more-thorough MT search functionality in the sidebar.

Apologies for any inconvenience.

It’s Election Day here in the US. On my “regular” blog, I’ve pulled some WIST quotations from some past US Presidents about the future before us.