Eudamus Proteus and Blogging Insanity.

This morning I saw a Long-Tailed Skipper (Eudamus proteus a.k.a Urbanus proteus) out sampling the verbena again. It was early enough that the plants were still in the shade, being on the south side of the building, and only a single bee was interested itself in sipping. The verbena (verbena horata) beside the main door is a deeper purple than seemed to be common, almost a dark blue. It's the bees' favorite flower here. Each evening the half-dozen or so tiny flowers of the day fall off of the spike. Each morning new, nectar laden flowers emerge from another spot along the length of it. The spikes are probably four inches long and slightly curled with their own weight.

As pleasant as the beginning of the day may have been, the rest of it was busy and frustrating. During the last couple of months, I've been able to post little more than the weekly American Life in Poetry column (and that not always on time). I've otherwise spent the time trying to overcome serious fluctiuations in search engine ratings for several of my top pages. During its first four months, VGS's search engine ratings were a model of statistical consistency, but, beginning in June, the correspondence between page-traffic and search rating became a thing of the past. Several of VGS's best pages disappeared from the engines altogether. Search engine traffic, which had been climbing in leaps and bounds, suddenly and understandably plummetted.

At the same time as I was watching the aforementioned fiasco I was building two new blogs. The 300 page limit on editing Blogspot postings was clearly going to be troublesome for a blog growing at the pace of VGS and the evolution of the blog into a combined computer, arts and literature blog was presenting logistical problems. The Virtual Grub Street Front Page blog was created in order to provide a portal into politcal and news content and the Treasure Coast Review to provide an arts and literature portal. Because the search-engine problem continues to be serious, I have spent the past week creating a fourth VGS blog, the Virtual Grub Street Computer Archive, on the MyBlogSite server, and will be transfering content, that disappears or is suddenly driven deep into the pages for its respective key-words, on to it as the need arises.

While there will soon be one more blog, today I begin to see a light at the end of the tunnel. The Computer Archive now has four pages posted and has already had its first 40 hit day. I've managed to get my Friday postings up on the base blog (here) and I've added a new posting - Trelawny Burns Shelley's Body - to the Treasure Coast Review. A news and commentary piece should soon be posted on the Front Page portal. All that remains to do is to post regularly, create specialty pages and build one more category blog! A piece of cake! Aaaaaaaaah!