Daily Dose of Excel

If any readers or authors are interested in site statistics, here are a few for you. Stats are tracked using Reinvigorate. As far as I know, there’s no facility to link to real time stats.

It looks like I should have set up Reinvigorate a little earlier in the move. I lost about a week of hits in November.

By month, browser, screen res, and timezone:

Recently, I’ve invited some fellow MVPs to author posts on this blog. Lo and behold, some of them took me up on it. I don’t know how many of the invitees will sign up or how frequently they will post, but you can expect to see some new faces soon. There will be an authors link on the menu to tell you who they are.

I have a simple goal for this site: To be the greatest Excel web site in the history of the universe. I think the addition of these new authors gets me almost there. Hyperbole aside, I expect the quality and quantity of content on this site to improve tremendously.

I’ve gone from the smartest (read: only) author of this site to the dumbest, but you can still expect to see posts from me every day.

We may have some technical difficulties as we try to figure out how this multiple authors thing works, but I’ll try to get any problems fixed promptly. As always, send me your post suggestions and thanks for reading Daily Dose of Excel.

I’m putting my caffeine addiction on hold. My cartiologist will be so happy.

Techweb announced its Blog Readers Choice winners on Monday, and DDXL finsihed a respectable 5th. Not last, but not showing off, that’s the way I like it. JWalk provided me with a nice slogan “Just Slightly Less Popular Than Slashdot…”

Don’t carve it on my tombstone yet, I’m gunning for 4th next year. Thanks to everyone who nominated and voted for this site.

If you can read this, then you know that the move is underway. I think I’ve got all the Permalinks, internal links, and images fixed. I still need to work on the category links and archive links (if there are any). Plus a little tweaking of the UI. If you have any comments about the new look, leave them here.

If you made a comment on this or the old blog this weekend, I will repost it for you. Some comments were lost in the move.

Rather than bore you with the gory details, I will just say that moving servers was about ten times harder than I expected it to be. I think it will be worth it, but time will tell.

I should be back to regular postings tomorrow.

I’ll be switching servers this weekend.  If I’m lost in the vast expanse of cyberspace, don’t worry.  If I’m not back by Tuesday, send help.

Once I get this done, I should be in a position where I can respond to your comments and emails.  Sorry about the lack of response lately.

If my last post isn’t evidence enough, I’m having some technical difficulties.  TypePad recently changed their UI and it’s wreaking havoc on my VBA html.  I’m sure they’re only trying to make things easier, but it’s having the reverse effect on me.

I will be redoubling my efforts to get this blog to its new server.  I will likely be moving it before the new site is customized the way I want, so the new site may be ugly for a bit.  I’ve prioritized my tasks for the new WordPress site and I think that getting the Permalink issue resolved is the only pre-move critical aspect.  If you know anything about WordPress, send me your ideas and help me out.

The TypePad permalinks look like this
http://www.dicks-blog.com/excel/2004/11/roll_your_own_c.html

and the WordPress ones look like this
http://www.dicks-blog.com/archives/2004/11/09/roll-your-own-csv/

I can’t have all the links out there screwed up, so I need to figure out either how to make WordPress the same, or create 500 web pages that redirect to the correct WordPress post.

Stay tuned.