Spelling

Happy Birthday, Grant!

I track visits to my website via Site Meter and I’ve talked about it again and again. Lately I’m up to 200-300 visits per day. And still almost all of the visitors go to the Dejumbler or to the iPod battery pack page where I put AdSense ads. Because so few people visit the other pages I didn’t see any point in putting ads there. My pages about my trip to the Gulf of California rank very high at Yahoo (10th if you search for the words Gulf of California) for whatever reason resulting in a visit or so a day, and some people visit all of the pages. (I think my page rankings are helped because I link to those pages from this blog which is also indexed pretty well.)

But I also have hundreds of movie reviews that rarely, if ever, get visits. In fact, about the only time I get visits is when I have misspelled someone’s name and someone searches for that misspelt name. There was news today that Renee Zellweger got married and about 5 people visited my review of “Nurse Betty” which included me misspelling her name Zellwiger no less than 3 times.

So when I see a visit to a movie review, I look at the search terms the visitor used and then look up the correct spelling. Then I correct the spelling and post the updated page. By improving the page in this way, the result is no one will ever visit that page again. It makes me think that you could generate a lot of traffic by knowing how people will misspell search terms and count on them not seeing that Google or whatever other search engine is asking them if they used the correct spelling (a great feature that saves me all the time).

First Hatching

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On Saturday (or so) the first robin hatched (May 7). I saw the mother come back with some kind of worm or bug in her mouth. She didn’t seem sure what to do with it. When she left again I got out the ladder and climbed up to take a look and could see why. There was a tiny fuzzy blob in there that seemed barely able to keep breathing, let alone ingest a worm. Three of the eggs were still unhatched so I thought this one must have just come a little early or been the first egg laid.

On Monday (May 9) I took another look and the baby had gotten a lot bigger with an obvious bird shape and prominent beak. But the other eggs were still unhatched so those may not make it. Even if they do, their older sibling may just eat them or kick them out. So I don’t have my hopes up.

As I was up there I looked around to see if I could see the mother and I did see a robin on a branch not far away. I went back down, but she didn’t come back right away. A few minutes later I took another look and she was back standing on the edge of the nest. There was a beak sticking straight up from the nest to greet her.



Taken on May 15 a few days before flying away. The feathers are all in place. I don’t see how this bird could grow that fast because by the 19th the bird was gone. It could be that it was born earlier than I thought.

Robin’s Nest

A robin built a nest outside my back door about a week ago. At first she wasn’t there much but then she started spending almost all of her time there.

While I was mowing the lawn I noticed she was gone. So I got the ladder out and I could barely make out the very tops of two beautiful blue eggs in the nest. Nests are amazing pieces of construction and there isn’t just pinestraw but a lot of mud in there holding it all together on top of a light fixture on the corner of the house near the drainpipe.

I wondered how many eggs she really had in there, but I couldn’t get my head under the eave and above the nest since there were only a couple of inches between the two. I needed a mirror. Fortunately Susan gave me a small and very expensive mirror that worked perfectly. 4 eggs!

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