Titles

One of my goals in writing this blog is simplicity. Like any (aspiring) writer, I desire to have a large base of readers, but in any given month roughly 25-30% of my readership reads my musings outside of North America. After the United States, the next ten countries where I have readers are (in order of gross blog views per country):

• Russia                               
• Japan
• Germany
• United Kingdom
• Ukraine
• the Netherlands
• France
• Indonesia
• China
• Canada

What's interesting to me is that Canada and the United Kingdom combined equal about 2% of the total readership; these are the only countries (in my Top Ten outside of the United States) which recognize English as at least one of their official languages. Of the remainder, nearly all who are able to read English most likely are more comfortable with the version they learned in school, namely the Queen's English, or British English. This poses some interesting challenges to me as a writer, because while some words are distinctly American or British English (truck or lorry, [rail]car or wagon, wrench or spanner [yes, I know all of those and more being both a history and railroad buff]), many other words are homophones- which differ only in spelling (and even homophone may not properly describe these words). I am well-versed in these as well, but choose to stick to the American spelling for the sake of consistency and familiarity. For weights and measures, though, I present English and metric whenever possible.

So, given that the title of today's post is "Titles", what does any of this have to do with anything?

Well, the titles of my blogs are important to me; I strive to make them attention-getting, in tune with the text I'm presenting, and fun. In the context of today's blog, I had an idea for the title, and then came up with another, but in the end rejected both- and in that process, a new subject was born.  My original title for this blog was going to be "Willpower", and then "Sturm und Drang" came to mind, along with a few other variants on "struggle" and "will". In the end, though, "Titles" won out, simply because it best articulated what had become the theme of the blog.

The whole "will" theme actually came about from my recent burst of writing activity. The main reason I've been writing more is that I've had more time for writing, and I've had more time for writing primarily because I have not played a single game on Facebook for SEVEN days. I have not even played my VERY favorite online game, TrainStation, for seven days. This is a fairly good indication of just how much time I spend online, and how much of that is, in many ways, wasted.

In the end, I have no way of quantifying any of this, so I'll just let it go. I just got done putting updated counts into my spreadsheet, and there's not enough of a change to post numbers, but one of my current targets is Music Recordings, and that has increased by four in three days. That may not seem like much, but that table has relationships with five other tables; the only data that I manually enter is the Last_Played field, which is a date field. This means that every time I enter a new piece of music into the Music Recordings table, I first have to make sure that the name of the group, the name of the album, and the names of each of the songs is already listed in the corresponding table; if not, I need to do that first. Its a bit tedious doing it in this manner, but in the end I am assured of having no data duplication- and that is the goal of this database design.

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.