The New Year

It’s been about a year since I moved to this spiffy wordpress blog from my humble beginnings over at blogger. I’ve learned a lot about blogging not just through the blogging study I did, but also the technicalities as well.  By watching my stats - which I had never done much in the ten years or so I’ve had a web site - I learned something I should have known for a long time - don’t EVER change the address of things if you can possibly help it - you could loose traffic & screw up your rankings. Now, of course, my original web host from 1995 doesn’t exist and I wouldn’t want that address anyway, but changing from erickamenchen.net/wordpress to blog.erickamenchen.net was a mistake in terms of my Technorati ranking and probably Google pagerank & probably the move over from blogger had some consequences too.

Which brings me to the other big change in 2005 - my name. I’m still trying to adjust to that and I have pondered switching domains because of it, but I decided against it. Too much trouble and confusion. It’s a strange thing to change your name & it made me notice all of the bureaucratic assumptions tied into names and their format. Is Menchen now my middle name or a second last name? Well, I don’t know. Generally I’m comfortable with the ambiguity of it myself, but I’m thinking of hyphenating for publication purposes. I’ll see about that this year as I hope to have something at least “in press.”

I finally got back to Italy 6 years after I did a study abroad there as a sophomore in college. Our honeymoon was great - but I’ll go for a more relaxing type of plan next time rather than going around to 6 cities in 2 weeks. I was pleased that my Italian was good enough that I was generally able to get through most transactions (restaurants, shops, etc.) without resorting to “parla inglese?” although I’m hardly “conversational.”

Things have been good with school this year. I’ve adjusted to teaching classes as well as taking them and got going on my thesis. I’ve got my proposal defense 1/20 so things are moving along with that. Next year I’ll officially graduate in August and be back out into the working world. I like change more than most, but there is certainly a big question mark on the horizon. Hopefully I’ll make the most of it.

For this blog I basically want to keep along the same path. On the design and technical end I have some improvements in mind - an improved blogroll & a bit of a style tweak. On content I hope to write in a more engaging or personal sort of style, nothing radically different but I’ve noticed some of my posts sound too academic or monotone. I also hope to make more connections with other bloggers.