A Million Page-Views in Ten Months

Three weeks ago, while I wasn't paying attention, my blog (this blog) surpassed the one-million-page-views-YTD mark. I can't be 100% sure where the traffic is coming from, since I refuse to click the "Don't track your own page-views" link in Google Analytics. It could still be mostly me hitting Refresh. Or someone with Anonymous perfecting a really, really slow denial-of-service attack. Or maybe my (deceased) mother discovered a time machine 50 years ago, only she didn't tell me about it and she traveled to the future just to pay some dweeb in Milwaukee to unleash a Reddit clickbot that messes with me, then headed back to 1963 to cook dinner. It almost has to be one of those things.

Here are the top posts of the year, so far:

Post	Views
How I Fell in Love with a Schizophrenic Jan 1, 2013, 136 comments	73035
How to Write an Opening Sentence Jan 15, 2013, 19 comments	55708
Are Placebos Really Sugar Pills? Jan 30, 2013, 40 comments	38440
The Serif Readability Myth Jan 18, 2013, 32 comments	31109
Information Theory in Three Minutes May 18, 2013, 2 comments	28134

Now for some really interesting (to me) summary info, looking back at this year's posts:

• Five posts accounted for 23% of the year's traffic.
• Four out of the top five posts were written in January.
• The top two most-trafficked posts had titles that begin with "How," but beyond that there's no thematic pattern whatsoever to the top posts. (Nor could I have predicted the popularity of any of them in advance.)
• This year's posts account for only 60% of total YTD traffic; the other 40% of visits went to prior-years' posts. But note well, prior-year posts were never as popular as they are this year. The 60-40 split is new, in other words. It used to be more like 90-10.

My blog got a certain amount of extra traction after April 2013, when I signed on as a regular blogger at BigThink.com (thank you, Dan!), but honestly, the crossover traffic from BigThink has been quite modest.

My traffic really started to pick up in January, when I began blogging almost daily. Prior to that, when I was blogging only a few times a month, 200 to 300 hits a day was pretty typical. It slowly built, over a period of four months or so, to a couple thousand visitors a day, peaking at 3K hits/day in early summer. It's eased off a bit since then. I now count 2200 page-views a day as typical. (But I should stress, that's total site visits, spread across 600+ posts.)

The other thing that's different now is that I have 200,000 followers on Twitter, up from about 140,000 a year ago. The numbers are deceptive, though. It wasn't until this year that I began devoting an hour or more a day to interacting with my Tweeps (rather than just dumping curated links in their laps all the time). But Twitter is another story, worth its own discussion. I'll save that for a future post.

What have I learned? Not a whole lot, actually. The main thing I've learned is that if you want traffic to increase, blog more often. And don't be afraid to write some fairly long posts, if the subject matter warrants it. (My No. 1 most-visited post this year weighed in at 2618 words.)

I hardly touch Facebook, I hate Google Circles, I don't do Instagram, I ignore StumbleUpon. I have a PInterest account that's growing mold somewhere. Oh, and I pay no heed whatsoever to SEO. (I operate on the assumption that good content is its own SEO.)

I never spend money, by the way, promoting anything I do. No Google ad campaigns, no paid slots anywhere.

In short, if someone came to me with a bunch of money and said "Tell me your best secrets for getting more blog traffic," I'd say: Go write the very best content you know how to write, and do it every day if possible; otherwise, several times  week. Try to achieve synergy by contributing in more than one space. (I blog here and at BigThink.com, plus I tweet a lot; I post updates at LinkedIn every week even though it feels like hollering into a cardboard box; and I spend an hour a week commenting on other people's stuff around the Web.) Beyond that, there ain't any magic. Just blow a lot of smoke and keep the mirrors shiny.

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Constantly feel anxious? Try these tips! (wendy aguiza)

You were required to make an important call, but have been too afraid to pick up the phone? You've wanted to take steps to improve their lives, but it has retained its own anxiety? This article is here to help. Read tips that will help you take control of your anxiety and live a better life.

When you are suffering from an anxiety attack, you might be tempted to self-medicate yourself with alcohol or drugs. This is the last thing you should do. It may seem to work well for a while, but it can cause problems in the long run with drug addiction and alcoholism.

When people are struggling against anxiety, depression or panic attacks, often have problems with their stomach or intestines, from the stress. A good way to help your digestive system when you have anxiety is to add some probiotics to your diet or a digestive enzyme supplement. This will help keep healthy their internal pipes and eliminate problems.

It's to keep you as busy as when it comes to anxiety. While meditation and deep breathing exercises are a good idea, other things that you keep inactive are not good for you. Staying active will keep your mind of all the things that are creating feelings of anxiety.

Investigate the amino acids, that may be a solution for the anxiety and potential treatment. Many people lack adequate nutrition and it has low serotonin production. A lot of good books, as the mood cure, discuss plans that you could do to eliminate or reduce their anxiety.

Control your anxiety by being constantly busy. If your mind is not busy because you have nothing to do, it's easy to focus on feelings of anxiety. Things that are simple, such as cleaning your home or wash the car can help a lot.

If you're feeling too anxious, get out and get some exercise. Exercise has many benefits for the body, and a good workout can really clear your mind and help improve your mood. You don't have to the gym or in the pool, if you do not want. Just taking a walk can help.

When you feel that your anxiety coming to the head, which can help the feelings of concern under control through the control of breathing. When you are anxious, your breathing rate, which itself, increases can cause a great sensation of fear. Breathe and go slowly, counting to four in each inhalation and exhalation. In addition to slowing down your breathing, it also offers something to focus on besides the source of their anxiety.

When you are having an anxiety attack, it is a good idea to splash your face with cold water. Many people have heard this, but they cannot do it because they think it will help them to really. In fact, it causes what is known as a reflection of immersion, and sends a message to your brain that tells your body slowly.

Social anxiety

Many introverts have a hard time with social anxiety. A way of dealing with this problem is to find something you enjoy doing alone and with others, so when you want people around others, you can at least enjoy the activity.

To help you overcome social anxiety, it is important to not be too harsh with yourself. Everyone has insecurities and curious things about them. Everyone has problems. You don't have to run a perfect social performance, in order to be accepted by the majority of the people. In fact, some people are turned off completely by this behavior.

Social anxiety can be difficult to overcome. It is a way to make it less painful to begin with his hobbies. Find out what you like to do and find others who like to do it, also. If you like hiking you can join a rock climbing or hiking group. If knitting much, there are plenty of other weavers outside! All you have to do is to look for them.

Sometimes, social anxiety can force to inertia. Don't want to do something bad and on the blacklist for the group that you want to be a part of. If you feel eager to join a group or approaching new people, do your research. Watch them before joining them. Read about the club. Be as prepared as you can and do it!

When you stop anxiety control your life, you are not able to achieve the things you want to do. That is why it is so important to fight and not to allow anxiety to stop you. Thanks to this article, now you know a number of ways to deal with anxiety.

For more information about help for social anxiety, please make sure to navigate our Web site at SocialAnxietySupportTips.com, which is the home of this information.

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Meetings Are Bullshit

Jason Fried explains very nicely, in his TED talk, why the modern office is a singularly poor place in which to get work done. Bottom line: It's an atmosphere specifically tailored to facilitate interruptions—what one might call a high-interruptivity environment (by design).

Fried implies, but does not go so far as to elaborate, a theory that productivity—like sleep—occurs in sequential stages. The stages of sleep proceed one to the other, each one dependent on the previous one's successful conclusion. When sleep is interrupted, you have to start over and proceed through the various stages before you can arrive at REM sleep. For this reason, eight one-hour naps interspersed with five minutes of wakefulness do not add up to a full night's sleep. Similarly, a succession of 15- and 20-minute periods of work (in an office environment where you've constantly interrupted by texts, phone calls, e-mails, IM, meetings, coworkers coming in to see you, bosses checking on you, and so forth) seldom adds up to a day's work. To get serious work done requires long periods of no interruptions. This is why so many people say that their favorite place to get serious work done is the back porch, the basement, the attic, the shower, the library, Starbucks, etc., or (if it's indeed the office) the office after everyone leaves to go home, or before everyone arrives in the morning. No one counts as their most productive environment the office during working hours!

Fried is rightfully critical of meetings as the number one source of lost productivity in a modern office setting. Through technologies like Webex and Go-to-Meeting, we're able to introduce productivity losses even to people working from home.

If I were to criticize Fried's presentation, I would only say that he has not gone far enough in his views, particularly his condemnation of meetings. Toward the end of his talk, he suggests, as an exercise, that any manager who has a meeting planned for Monday simply cancel (and not reschedule) the meeting and see what happens. Does the world come to an end? Do sales drop? Do people stop getting work done? Or, to the contrary, does the cancellation of a one-hour meeting involving ten people result in ten additional person-hours of productivity, reclaimed for free?

I wish Fried would have taken his own logic to the ultimate conclusion, which is that all meetings should simply be outlawed. Which they certainly should be, in my opinion.

I have worked for small, medium, and large-size companies, mostly in software development, both as an individual contributor and as a manager. In my seven years at Novell (two as a line employee, five as a manager), I estimate I attended three meetings a week, or about 1000 meetings total. At Adobe, I attended a weekly status meeting (which was often cancelled, to no ill effect whatever) plus one or two division-level all-hands meetings per quarter, and one to two company-level all-hands meetings per quarter. I can say without reservation that all meetings I attended at Novell and Adobe, except for one-on-one meetings, were utterly without effect aside from the undeniable effect of resetting everyone's productivity to zero on the occasion of the meeting.

You might ask yourself, if you're the habit of setting up meetings, what it says about the fragility of your company and/or the ineffectuality of your organization (or your management style) if the success of the enterprise is somehow compromised by not holding that weekly status meeting or that monthly planning meeting or that quarterly all-hands meeting that you think (stupidly) is so necessary to inspiring team spirit and getting everyone "on the same page." In all my time at big companies (and smaller ones too) I can't remember a single meeting being indispensible, or in fact doing anything except distract me from getting real work done. Invariably, when I missed a meeting, I found out later that I either missed nothing substantive whatsoever, or I could easily (and in a few minutes' time) catch up on whatever I'd missed simply by reading a transcript, a key memo, or a followup note somewhere on the intranet.

Are there exceptions? Sure. I count as meaningful one-on-one meetings with a clear agenda, and scrum-style meetings in which participants stand the whole time (for ten minutes or so). The rest, you can e-mail me. I have no tolerance for larger meetings (especially those at which "minutes" are taken). Mail me the freakin' minutes. I'll decide if they're useful. On my schedule.

Meetings are a classic example of a non-optional push technology that should be replaced by an opt-in/pull technology. Post what I need to know somewhere. I'll look at it when it's time for me to look at it. When it's time for me to be nonproductive.

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An Introduction to Depression Psychotherapist

If you are suffering from a depression or anxiety you can realize how it can make your life a hell. While everyone in your family will be happy and you will have no idea what to do when you don't even know what are the reasons behind your depression. In such type of cases it is best to consult a Depression Psychotherapist who can determine the main source of depression. There are various factors that lead your life towards depression. It can be their hectic schedule, some kind of anxiety or stress, poor nutrition, poor hygiene, abnormal sleep patterns etc.

The psychologists are experienced professionals who will ask you a series of questions and according to your answers; they will determine your problem. The common symptoms of depression are inability to concentrate, self talking, insomnia, loss of appetite to name a few. It is also advisable that if your loved one is suffering from depression make sure that he is not left alone. This is because it is a very sensitive stage when a person can easily get addicted to drugs.

There are several types of depression which range from mild to serious type of depressions like bipolar disorder. The length and treatment of depression depends on the severity of a distress from which a particular person is suffering from.

Therefore, if you are suffering from any type of depression, it is better to get an appointment at a Depression Help Clinic as soon as possible. The psychologist will ask you the most effective questions which will be engaging for you in order to recall what you are not able to remember in normal circumstances. These psychologists will help you solve your problem in your own way.

Moreover, they will not ask you questions one after another to make the patient insecure and confused. Based on the situation as well as the daily lifestyle of the patient they will suggest you some techniques which can be easily followed by you but will have strong effects. They will also suggest you some strategies for dealing various situations. They might ask you to join any local support group as it is extremely beneficial when you have suffered from a huge loss of love or money and if that is the reason of your depression.

Most of the times, it has also been observed that patients tell psychotherapists things which they do not even tell their closest friends.

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An Introduction to Depression Psychotherapist (Gregor Kowal)

If you are suffering from a depression or anxiety you can realize how it can make your life a hell. While everyone in your family will be happy and you will have no idea what to do when you don't even know what are the reasons behind your depression. In such type of cases it is best to consult a Depression Psychotherapist who can determine the main source of depression. There are various factors that lead your life towards depression. It can be their hectic schedule, some kind of anxiety or stress, poor nutrition, poor hygiene, abnormal sleep patterns etc.

The psychologists are experienced professionals who will ask you a series of questions and according to your answers; they will determine your problem. The common symptoms of depression are inability to concentrate, self talking, insomnia, loss of appetite to name a few. It is also advisable that if your loved one is suffering from depression make sure that he is not left alone. This is because it is a very sensitive stage when a person can easily get addicted to drugs.

There are several types of depression which range from mild to serious type of depressions like bipolar disorder. The length and treatment of depression depends on the severity of a depression from which a particular person is suffering from.

Therefore, if you are suffering from any type of depression, it is better to get an appointment at a Depression Help Clinic as soon as possible. The psychologist will ask you the most effective questions which will be engaging for you in order to recall what you are not able to remember in normal circumstances. These psychologists will help you solve your problem in your own way.

Moreover, they will not ask you questions one after another to make the patient insecure and confused. Based on the situation as well as the daily lifestyle of the patient they will suggest you some techniques which can be easily followed by you but will have strong effects. They will also suggest you some strategies for dealing various situations. They might ask you to join any local support group as it is extremely beneficial when you have suffered from a huge loss of love or money and if that is the reason of your depression.

Most of the times, it has also been observed that patients tell psychotherapists things which they do not even tell their closest friends.

Processing ...

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Ayurvedic Herbal And Natural Treatment For Type 2 Diabetes (jhon peterj)

Diabetes refers to a body condition under which an individual contains high blood sugar. It is really a metabolic diseases caused due to the pancreas producing insufficient insulin or because cells not responding to the insulin produced. The diabetes has been categorized as Type 1, Type 2, gestational, and a few other types. While Type 1 diabetes is the outcome of body's inability to produce insulin, and the person afflicted has to get injected insulin in his body. A woman getting affected with high blood sugar during pregnancy is gestational diabetes while Type 2 diabetes is the result of body becoming insulin resistant, and cells are unable to use the insulin produced. The condition is generally accompanied with insufficient production of insulin in the body.

Thus, Type 2 diabetes is characterized by two adverse conditions, one insufficient production of insulin and two cells failing to use the insulin produced. The early signs are frequent urination, and increased hunger and thirst, while chronic Type 2 diabetes can produce serious complications like renal failure, heart attack, and retinal damage. Hence, it is necessary that the blood sugar level under this type of diabetes is kept within the prescribed range.

There are numerous medication avenues available to treat this type of disease. Injecting insulin is a way of treating diabetes while there are also various pills and tablets for that available in the market. However, all these medications including insulin do not cure the disease, but they only manage the symptoms. Moreover, there are definite side effects of these medications. Hence, one can safely go for Ayurvedic treatment of this type of disease. Ayurvedic system is based on natural herbs, plants, and roots with immense medicinal properties that effectively take care of root causes of the problem.

Diabkil capsule is relevant in this connection as it is an Ayurvedic herbal preparation containing natural herbs as its constituents. Those herbs are highly effective in lowering the blood sugar level under Type 2 diabetes. The herbs include Karela, Methi, Jaiphal, Kesar, and Haldi to name a few. These herbs take care of insulin production by enhancing production of Beta cells in the pancreas. They also energize and propel cells to utilize the insulin produced. Thus, the capsule is highly effective not only in lowering blood sugar level but also in controlling cholesterol and blood pressure. It propels production of good cholesterol and helps reduce bad ones. Hence, two Diabkil capsules twice daily is recommended to be taken for four months to get the best of results in this type of diabetes. Processing ...

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Fixing a Mediocre Movie

If ever it were possible (which it seldom is) for sublime acting to elevate an otherwise unremarkable film to the status of a minor classic, it surely would have happened in the case of The Last Station, the well-intentioned 2009 Tolstoy biopic that brought Oscar and Golden Globe nominations (but no wins) to Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren for their commanding portrayals of Leo and Sofya Tolstoy. The performances were genuinely excellent. Alas, the movie was not. It's fair to ask why not, because on the surface, you'd think any movie about the life of the greatest international celebrity of the 19th century (which Tolstoy surely was) couldn't fail to be a compelling tale. But sadly, like Tolstoy's own final journey by rail, The Last Station falls far short of its ultimate destination, leaving the passenger (the moviegoer) stranded and wanting for a place to hang his or her shapka, so to speak.

The ingredients are there: strong characters, conflict, intrigue, deception, drama. Leo Tolstoy, at age 81, was trying desperately to simplify his increasingly complex professional and family life. He had long since signed over his worldly possessions (including the family estate, Yasnaya Polyana) to the care of his wife. But he also secretly conspired, with the aid of his devoted disciple, Vladimir Grigoryevich Chertkov, to concoct a secret will that would have his literary properties go to the public domain. Of course, Sofya was no fool and saw through her husband's multiple attempts to write her out of the literary inheritance. The Last Station is the story of Sonya's descent into near-madness (and Leo's final, abortive attempt to escape the madness) as Chertkov wrests control of the Tolstoy literary legacy from Sonya. Leo boards a train, at the end, seeking to put physical distance (as much of it as possible) between himself and his wife. By the time he reaches Astapovo, the last station on the rail line, he is deathly ill with pneumonia. His wife arrives at Astapovo just in time to see him die.

The problem with The Last Station, as a movie, is that writer-director Michael Hoffman (working from Jay Parini's novel) chose to give us an extremely narrow snapshot of an enormous subject, more or less like trying to capture the Grand Canyon with a 1952 Brownie camera. The movie not only doesn't try to give us a significant slice of Tolstoy's life, it's actually happy to focus in on just a few weeks (the final weeks) of the great man's story. What's worse, the story is told through the eyes of a rather insignificant character, Tolstoy's replacement secretary (replacing N. N. Gusev, who was for a short time imprisoned), the young Valentin Bulgakov. Along the way, we're made to suffer through Bulgakov's own irrelevant romance with a young woman who's in no way related to Tolstoy (nor any other real-world character).

The movie thus fails on several levels. It fails, first, in not giving us a significant slice of Tolstoy's life. It merely presents the 81-year-old master to us as a world celebrity, ready-made, and expects us to bring significant knowledge of Tolstoy's backstory with us. The movie also distracts us from the main story by (as I said) forcing us to watch an utterly forgettable romantic side-plot that never intersects the main plot. But the movie also fails to show off the true main character of any movie (of whatever scope) about any great Russian writer: namely, Mother Russia herself.

It may be unfair to compare a movie of The Last Station's modest aspirations (and equally modest budget: $17 million) with David Lean's unforgettable cinematic rendition of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (which cost $11 million in 1965 dollars), but the fact is, no one who has seen Doctor Zhivago will fail, consciously or unconsciously, to make the comparison in his or her mind between the Lean movie and any subsequent movie involving an iconic Russian figure. The striking thing (one of many) about Doctor Zhivago is that at no time in the movie can the viewer be unaware of the looming presence of that "other main character," bigger than life, Russia herself. Unfortunately, and crucially, we lose that essential character in The Last Station, and without it, the story of Tolstoy's final weeks seems like little more than thin domestic farce.

It's easy to spew out criticism. How to fix it? What could the writer-director have done to rescue The Last Station from the clutches of mediocrity (aside from rewriting it as a stage play)? In particular, how could it have been improved without expanding the story into a Zhivago-like epic spanning the whole of Tolstoy's life?

I think first of all it's necessary (and sufficient, for this limited-budget film) to tell the story of Tolstoy's last ten years, rather than his final year. By dispensing with the trivial Bulgakov character (and his meaningless romance) we save many feet of film that could be better put to use telling the story through the eyes of Tolstoy's personal physician, Dushan Makovitsky, a decidedly pivotal figure in the drama.

The (rewritten) story opens 24 February 1901, at a train station in St. Petersburg, where nameless nobodies come and go, among them a young nobody who, while waiting for his train, carefully (which is to say, first looking to see that no one is watching him) slides a book out of his coat and begins to read it. The book: a copy of Tolstoy's banned The Kingdom of God Is Within You.

A nearby church bell tolls. We cut to the interior of the Cathedral of Our Lady (St. Petersburg) where a grave-looking Metropolitan Anthony ascends the pulpit to read the document officially excommunicating Count Lev Nickolayevich Tolstoy from the Orthodox Church.

Cut to a villa at Gaspra, on the Black Sea. It's September 1901. At the insistence of his physician, Tolstoy has come to Crimea to recuperate from malaria. He's joined at the seaside villa not only by his family but by Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky. (All of this is true, by the way.)

Chekhov, shaking his head, looks up from his newspaper. "It's been seven months, Lev Nickolayevich, and they're still writing about the excommunication!"

At the time of his death in 1910, Tolstoy was arguably the
best-known celebrity in the world.

At this point, there is ample room to discuss the reasons for the excommunication. Tolstoy has been writing books and tracts (most famously, The Kingdom of God Is Within You) blasting the church's version of Christianity, putting forth his own no-nonsense, no-miracles, no-hocus-pocus version of the Gospels, emphasizing the Sermon on the Mount and its call for turning the other cheek and repudiating violence. Tolstoy has turned Jesus's teachings against the church, by pointing out that no one who advocates violence (even in a just cause) is adhering to Jesus's teachings.

Tolstoy's own fundamentalism has not only gotten him in hot water with the Church (and the Tsar), it has spawned a Christian anarchism movement that has, by 1901, circled the globe. In Russia, believers in Tolstoy's version of Christianity are refusing military service in significant numbers. In England and elsewhere, acolytes have formed "Tolstoyan colonies." One of Tolstoy's most ardent followers, at home, is (of course) Vladimir Chertkov, who will remain a lifelong disciple, creating the first English-language editions of Tolstoy's works and publishing inexpensive editions of his books both in England and in Russia (resulting in ten years of exile for Chertkov).

Tolstoy's religious fervor, seen by his wife as incomprehensible, is ultimately what powers the bond with Chertkov, the rift with Sofya, and Tolstoy's own mad quest to shed worldly belongings before he dies. By making this aspect of Tolstoy's life clear, The Last Station (properly remade) could give life to the motivations of its characters and make clear why so many Russians considered Tolstoy a living saint.

As part of his creed, Tolstoy advocated celibacy, vegetarianism, and repudiation of worldly goods. He strongly agreed with Proudhon that "property is theft." Once this fact is known, it becomes possible, in a remake of The Last Station, to put Tolstoy's philosophy in historical context. Thus it becomes relevant to include in such a movie a scene (for example) of the 150,000 people who marched on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg in January 1905. These were not card-carrying Bolsheviks but ordinary people, many of whom had been inspired by Tolstoy's (not just Marx's) philosophy.

I can think of many powerful scenes that would make sense in a film that attempts to capture Tolstoy's final decade rather than his final six months of life. By slavishly adhering to Parini's novel, screenwriter-director Hoffman reinquished any opportunity he might have had to do the Tolstoy story justice in The Last Station. We end up with melodrama instead of drama, narrow provinciality instead of sweeping grandeur, and poor Mother Russia herself reduced to a forgotten stepsister, when in fact the stage—like the characters—could not, in this case, have possibly been any bigger.

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