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The use of it all

I have had a website online for about 9 years. Since the beginning I have published music reviews and articles, later also book- and filmreviews. Much has changed in those years, especially with music and film. The music scene that I am mostly involved in was tiny in these days. A normal pressing of a cd was 2000 copies or so and the best way to learn about new music was to read (online) magazines. Nothing like that anymore. Nowadays, when you hear a bandname, you go to their Myspace to listen to their music, you have Last.fm to find similar bands and most of all, all kinds of places on the world wide web to listen to music legally or get it illegally. Is there still a need for a music reviews website? Personally I have never really known a website where I could read about music that I am interested in (after Funprox stopped that is) and I have moved along a bit with my time. When some distributor has a band that I do not know, I check their Myspace or try to listen to their music in some other way before I buy an album. Safer, sure. Would my music reviews section give people ideas for music (to download) or do people get their information in another way, such as fellow P2P user lists? When I check my statistics I see that my music reviews section is the most popular after the articles section, on average 60 unique visitors a day last week (997 hits). That is not so bad.
Similar thoughts apply to the film reviews section, my least popular section (26/524). When you learn about a title, you can watch the trailer on Youtube or whereever, but with films I do prefer myself to read a review before I watch it, but also here I do not really know a place to read reviews of films of my interest.
The close the line, the book reviews section comes at 41/246 in the last week and articles at 91/676, pretty high thinking of it that nothing really happens there, but I have a few popular articles that Wikipedia links to and that helps a lot.
There is no doubt in my mind about the articles and book reviews sections, but these are the slowest going and they require most effort and therefor these other two make that in most cases at least once a week something new can be read at Gangleri.nl and that can be a reason too to keep maintaining these two sections.

Tidying up

I just deleted 123 posts just saying “new book review” or “new film review”. I noticed that I have a variety of posts in the ‘general blog’ (where I hardly write anything…) which may get a bit more of attention again. Besides, a notificitation for a new post in another section does not need to stay here until kingdom come.

Subscribe to comments

Well that subscribe to comments function proves to be another extra job. My anti-spam measures might block spam comments, but not the spam subscriptions to comments. Not that these are of any use, but an automatic spam bot doesn’t care about that of course. Since I don’t expect ongoing discussions about music or filmreviews or newsitems, I disabled the plugin in these parts. If in the bookreviews and articles sections things remain silent, I might just as well get rid of it there as well.

Spam’n’eggs

A while ago I was notified about the fact that people had problems commenting, the problem was the antispam plugin that I used used some kind of Java that did not work for everyone. I replaced the plugin only to find out that I receive several spam comments every day. So I looked for yet another antispam plugin, hopefully it works better. Should you have any problems commenting, please to go the ‘intro and contact’ section and send me as many details as possible by email.

Anti spam measures

It seems that things like this have to happen from time to time. In a few days time I got two notifications of problems with commenting. One visitor was kind enough to contact me and tell me the error he got. It was a white screen with at the bottom giving not only the file which gave the error (hmmm, that is not a good thing), but also the line: “In order to prevent spam, you must manually copy the given number if you do not have JavaScript enabled. Please go back and try again.” I use two anti spam plugins, apparently both use some JavaScript, but the error quickly showed me which one gave the problems. I could not reproduce the error, but I hate the fact that some people do have problems. So I got rid of the plugin (that apparently is no longer maintained anyway) and replaced it by another. All works fine here, should you now or at any given time have problems with commenting, please go to the “website intro & contact” and see there how to email me. Please provide as much information as possible, what section (articles, book reviews, etc.) what browser you use, what error you get (a print screen might help), etc. I hope I have solved the problem for now, but like I said, it seems like this has to happen from time to time.

Stats and other news

I do not often look at my statistics, but today I did. I do not think there are many changes since the previous time, but I noticed a few things. When I make a daily average for August, I come to the following numbers:
Articles: 72 unique visitors per day; book reviews: 64; film reviews: 76; music reviews: 126.
Hits are of course much higher and also feed-hits even when I don’t advertise feeds on the other sections than the news section. The film and music review archives have much entries at category archives with in music a high ranking for the “tag” Haus Arafna! Book reviews get more direct hits. Popular are Flowers’ Galdrabók, Mead’s Mysteries Of Mithra.
What I find interesting myself is how the articles go. Here’s an overview:
Battlenoise: 2321 hits in the last week
Christian Cabala: 1919
index: 1440
Rune Calendars: 1170
Nine Words In Nordic Mythology: 911
Occult Renaissance: 847
Angel Magic: 803
Johannes Bureus: 670
Rune Cross Of Johannes Bureus: 655
Papyri Graecae Magicae: 522

The Battlenoise book is awfully popular. Probably because the larger part of the print was destroyed and people still want to know about it, but 2321 hits in a week?!? How many potential readers would the book have in the first place? I find position 3 for the index surprising, perhaps there are still people who come there to see if there is anything new, while there rarely is. The “Christian Cabala” and “Rune Calendar” articles always come up high. The subjects have become popular shortly after I wrote the articles and the English wikipedia has links to my articles in both their articles (no I didn’t put them there myself). The same popularity has been there for the medieval/Renaissance magic articles and Bureus is a newly rising star. The “Nine Worlds” and “Papyri Graecae Magicae” are surprising, especially the first one.
Since my articles section is quite wide in subject, it shows a bit where the people’s interests go, which I find nice to see some time.

The last thing that I noticed is that there is apparently a new and rapidly becoming popular search engine bing.com. It is a beta, I find it way below the level of Google myself, but I get more hits from Bing than from Google recently.

To close off something completely different: apparently someone has found a way to avoid my anti spam measures. 3 Out of 5 sections get quite a lot of spam for some paid gamesite. The comments themselves are complimentary but the text doesn’t fit the posts they reply to, but the username is linked to all kinds of Wow Power Leveling websites, so they get an extraordinary high ranking from Google. I suppose this is exactly the point. I hope I have this spam flood under control soon, otherwise I may have to take some more drastic matters, such as no automatically publishing of comments.

Some new features

Recently it bothered me that when I reply to someone’s comment even myself couldn’t let the commenter know that (s)he got a reaction to the original comment. I looked around for a “plugin” that allows people to have their comment send per email to the person they respond to, but I couldn’t find one that worked properly. Then I thought that it would be better to have the potential receiver of such emails decide if they want to get them, so now I installed a plugin allowing people to subscribe to the comments of a certain post.
Looking around for the plugin I ran into a comment preview plugin. I used to have one, but it stopped working after some upgrade of WP. I prefer to be able to preview myself, so I want to offer the possibility here too. These features are added to all sections but this one (news).
Last thing is something that you shouldn’t notice, but I have tried to stop search engines from indexing search results, author and date archives, etc. since I noticed that search results a bit too often contains way of entering posts that I do not prefer.

Of course I did some testing, but should you run into anything strange or something that does not (or no longer) work, let me know by commenting on this post or if commenting is the thing that stopped working, go to “website intro and contact” for other contact information.

Symbols and symbolism

When you follow these pages, it will be no surprise that I am of the opinion that in your time and society people have lost every feeling for symbolism. People no longer understand ornamentation in architecture or symbolism from older times in general. Logos, that is the kind of symbolism that people understand and traffic signs, these are part of everyday life. Symbols that people are no longer familiar with, are often regarded skew eyes. This is not strange, because strong symbols are often used in politics and the worst example is of course the misuse of symbols during WWII. This sometimes (often?) leads to situations in which people do not understand a symbol, so they link it to ‘these other dangerous symbols’. More often it happens that people see a symbol, figure that it might mean something, so they will not ask about it, fearing that they will get a story that they are not interested in or worse, that they do not understand. I vastly enjoy symbolism and find it usefull too. I have several tattoos that are not often visible, but when they are, 99 out of 100 people do not dare to ask what they mean (which is for the better, since I would not know to explain them to most people). With tshirts (and jewlery) I do something similar. I also like playing with this. I like to wear a shirt with some logo on it that almost nobody will recognise and that also look like a symbol; or a text or a text-logo that makes a shirt look like these cheesy shirts that you buy in cheesy clothing shops, but they are not… Just a few examples above.

9/11

So it has been seven years since I was in Seattle visiting my sister and her husband?

One day we would go with my brother-in-law’s sister somewhere and when she didn’t show up we called her and she said: “You didn’t hear? Go and find a television somewhere!” (my sister didn’t have a television). So we went to the neighbours, who were Japanese, and sat on the floor watching the news; quite an unreal sight. Read More »9/11

Koenraad Logghe leaves Traditie

I have known about this for about two weeks, but last night the extras newsletter was sent around, so now it is ‘official’: Koenraad Logghe has left the Flemish Asatru group that he founded. There are several reasons that can be mentioned, but the main reason is that Koenraad’s ideas drifted away from the ideas of other people in the movement, under whom the current chairman Stefaan van den Eynde. Not that they parted with arguments, not at all, but Koenraad concluded that Traditie would be better off without him and that he had to explore other horizons.
Unfortunately my ideas are much closer to the Traditionalistic ideas of Koenraad than to those of Stefaan, so time will tell if Traditie will get a new direction and if I can find myself in it. I will miss the walking encyclopedia and genuine esotericist and hope that his new horizon will not be too far away.
People who can read Dutch, can read the newsletter anouncing the depart here.