Blogging and Flogging

In April, as an experiment, I started a new blog on WordPress.com and imported all my Blogger posts into it. It was surprisingly easy (the same ease of entry got me started on Blogger), and I much prefer WordPress.com to Blogger.com, but I hesitate to abandon my old Blogger archives, which are linked from Wikipedia, Omniglot, Topix.net, and other reference sites, and Google seems to do an especially thorough job of indexing posts on blogspot.com.

One of things that WordPress.com's post-oriented blog stats has confirmed for me is the reason for my all-time hit leader among my blogposts on both blogs: The German Pacific "Gutpela Taim Bipo"! It's not because very many people are fascinated by the German colonies in the Pacific. Hardly anyone is interested in anything except the following sentence in the post.

This was in marked contrast to the later Australian administration, under whom flogging, the pillory (“Field Punishment No. 1”), and public executions became not only far more common, but far more arbitrarily applied.

I've italicized the depressingly popular search terms that bring so many creeps to that blogpost, a disproportionate number of whom seem to come from European IP domains. I had originally linked to two illustrative images for two of those terms on the Universität Bayreuth website, and most of my Blogger hits seemed to come via images.google.com. (The university later removed the images, for understandable reasons, and I have now removed the links.) My links out to images, especially maps, seem to bring me a good chunk of my traffic via images.google.com.

Over the past month or so, I have gone back through all my 1500+ blogposts on WordPress.com and assigned each to at least one category. I still haven't tagged all of the same posts on Blogger, because I already had passed 750 or so blogposts by the time the tag feature became available.