Clean underwear and moving fast in the blogosphere

I had two wonderful grandmothers, both of which offered advice which can be used to help live a good life. One of Grandma Griffith's pieces of wisdom: "Always wear clean underwear, because you never know when you're going to be in an accident."

Grandma Powell offered: "If you keep moving fast, no one will notice if you've spilled something on your shirt."

I guess the take-home message from combining these is that being dirty is OK as long as you keep moving fast and stay out of accidents.

This whole blogging thing is new to our family, and it's been a lot of fun to share with people around the world. I tend to really enjoy finding gadgets to add to the blog--all the little things that tell you the temperature in Windhoek or show a map of where people come from to the blog. The latter has been especially fun to watch, and it helps us know who has been here. It is also a little scary.

One of the FEEDJIT gadgets shows what city people come from to the site, and also which web page they were on before they visited the site if they followed a link to get here. Did they follow a link from Facebook, the School of Natural Resources, another blog? If people found the blog via a Google or Yahoo (or other) search engine, it also shows that information, and it shows what they searched for.

It's most common for people to be searching for "Namibia sand dunes" or "Nebraska Sandhills" before they stumble onto our site. The photo we took of Windhoek on our first day in town regularly gets hits from Google Image searches--appearing high in the list of images of Windhoek. We're fairly certain that people mostly go away disappointed when they find us through these searches, as we don't really have information about the Sandhills or Namibia's sand dunes--except that they are both fun places to visit.

From time to time, there are other interesting searches that propel people to our site.

"Aluminum windows windhoek" got someone to the site. I'm sure they were disappointed.

"Apple" was a recent search for someone in Mexico who came to our page. I wonder how deep in the search results that person was before he found our link? Maybe it was the apple cake recipe we posted before we left Lincoln?

"Windhoek dentists" also got someone to our site. I'm really not sure that we've used the word 'dentists' before, but now we have....uh oh! I guess we will now have people find us when they are interested in how to 'clean underwear'. It's all about key words and the luck of the search engine.

I guess the message is that, if you also blog, your blog is out there on the internet for the world to see. And, according to my grandmothers, you have two options. One: you can keep it clean so that everyone in the world will find it acceptable. Or, two: you can just keep moving quickly in case you make a mistake. Those who know me know that I really try hard on the first tip, but most often have to rely on the second to save me.

According to these 'tips for blogging', I'm over my word limit for this post. Happy blogging to fellow bloggers!