Four Island

First, HAPPY NEW YEAR YAYS. Ok, I've gotten that out of my system.

Because I seem to get a lot of ideas from other blogs I'm going to write a list of goals for this year. I'd also write which of my 2008 goals worked out, but I didn't actually write a list of goals last year.

• Increase RSS subscribers to at least 10. And have it stay that way for a while. It's annoying to see 8 or 9 subscribers one day and only 2 the next.
• Write some good articles/tutorials that people will find interesting and want to comment on. Currently, the most popular post is, and has been for a long time, The Related Posts Game, which is kind of strange.
• Have, on average, at least one comment on every post. Because I suspect people won't like every post I write, the "average" part comes in. Please, I like comments. And no, comments by me will not count.
• Refrain from posting poll results late.
• Refrain from creating extensively random polls.
• Refrain from doing anything enumerated in yesterday's predictions.

Ok, I hope these goals aren't too extravagant. :) Anyway, I hope that I can accomplish them, and furthermore, that the year 2009 is a good year.

Just as a sidenote, I'd like a draw a little attention to the goal above about comments. The last part (about my comments not counting) is more important than you would think. I tested how last year would've done in this aspect by running this query:

SELECT COUNT( * )
FROM `comments` AS c, updates AS u
WHERE u.pubDate LIKE "2008-%"
AND c.page_id = CONCAT( "updates-", u.id )

It returned 104 as the number of comments posted on 2008's posts. However, when I added AND c.username <> "Hatkirby" to the end (so it wouldn't count my comments), it returned 49. Ouch.