I’ve been busy lately. It’s fricking cold out — the kind of weather that generates nostalgia in this expatriate Winnipegger — so I’ve been staying in and making good progress on updates to a few of my projects. Around here, I’m continuing to tinker with this site’s design, updating old pages and making sure that the new design doesn’t go blooey on IE 6 for Windows, which happens all too often because I don’t have ready access to that browser/platform combo. That, and because of IE/Win’s non-standard (read: assy) CSS implementation.

One new thing that isn’t just a fixup is the “Recent Viewing” sideblog over on the sidebar (except on individual pages): we’re trying to watch more movies, so I’m keeping track. Similar to the books I’ve been reading, which I’ve been keeping track of for a while.

Elsewhere, I added a new feature to The Map Room last week, called Map Questions: it’s meant as a way of dealing positively with all the questions I get about maps (because of that site) that I simply don’t know the answer to. So I give my readers a crack at it. Speaking of readers, The Map Room’s got a lot more of them lately: here are some stats. And it keeps growing: this month’s average daily page views is now more than 1,700 (it was about 55 in July). Holy crap. Ad revenues haven’t been too shabby either: not enough to live on, but a small, steady stream.

Over on Ankylose This!, I’ve signed up a few more people who wanted to join. It’s not high-traffic by any means, whether measured by traffic or by posts, but I’m happy with how it’s turned out so far; critical mass seems just over the horizon.

Gartersnake.info launched at the end of September (previous entry), but I haven’t done much with it since. One of my goals for January was to rectify this, and today I gave its design another going-over. I’m a little happier with how it looks now. (Before you ask, the big, dark green patches around the page headers will eventually have interesting background images.) I’ve still got lots of catching up to do in terms of getting some posts up and updating content, but this is, at least, a start.