A little while ago, this blog passed the 5,000 hit mark.  I am seriously amazed and delighted; I’ve written blogs before, but not nearly as popular as this one has been.  That’s 5,000 visits in just a little under five months of operation, which works out to a little under 34 visits a day.  I must be doing something right!  Or, more likely, the topicality of some of my posts, especially recently, have kept people coming in, and even returning.  (With wordpress.com, I must rely on their internal counters, and can’t see what my return-visit rate is.)  What I can see are the RSS statistics as well, on individual posts, which drives the readership even higher.  Some of these articles have been monsters, with lots of syndication reading.  Others, seemingly inconsequential ones, are at the top of my all-time list; “Meet Me at Frank’s Place,” just my second article, is the most read, with 202 primary hits at last count.

For those of you who are returning regularly, I thank you for your enjoyment and faithful visits.  I shall try to keep up the quality that’s had you coming back to check on my new material, and hopefully improve as well.  (Thus getting ever more readers, of course [grin].)

=====

On to other business….  If you notice a change in the look of Around the Grid, it’s because I’ve shifted themes, wanting a different look for a time. In part it’s a response to the ever-popular new Brand Center rules; since the Brand Center says the “first or most prominent reference to a Linden Lab brand name” should bear the “registered” symbol, a single appearance of that in my blog tagline should take care of the whole mess.

I’ve also wanted simply to try other templates available on wordpress.com.  Getting stuck in one look gets boring, after all!  Right now, this particular template is the best of the rest (the dark template I had originally was the best, period), and so I turned it on.  The down side to a “light” template is that my famous “signature” image washed completely out.  It was a GIF with a transparent background, which meant that a light template background would show through.  (Think alpha channel, all you dress designers.)  Since I chose a dark template originally, the lettering thus needed to be white or light to show up.  Guess what when I use a light template…?  So I redid the image in a solid color, one of my favorite jewel tones, and I’ve assigned it to a fair number of back posts already.  If I get ambitious, I’ll work through the entire 100+ articles.  The good thing about having to rework the image is that I got rid of a single pixel of solid color that was in the old image, and which was bugging me no end.  It didn’t show up against a dark background, but the light background of this template makes it stand out.  (Another inducement to reassign all the signatures….)