Bravely into 2013

New Year's Day is a conventional time to assess and adjust; there's something about a fresh set of numbers for the date that suggests that a fresh beginning -- and improvement -- is possible.

So let's assess the blog.

I put up 416 posts here in 2012, which sounds like a lot but is actually my fewest in a full calendar year since setting up shot in this corner of the Internet. I missed posting, I believe, on two calendar days, one of them Christmas and the other (if I recall correctly) on a travel day. I may not be good, but I am prolific.

I've already this offseason made a few changes on the siderail. The rule of thumb here is that I regularly visit those sites; it irritates me when I click on sidelink on other blogs and find that the link is to a long inactive site.  By and large, if I have a link to it, it's an active site that I actually use myself; if I don't use it, I'm not linking to it.

But there are exceptions. I'm sticking with a couple of Free Press blogs that have gone dormant, if not moribund, just in case those colleagues reactivate their blogs. And I'm clinging to the hope that Carl Skanberg's cartoon blog will kick back in someday.

Anyway, I dropped a couple of sites I didn't use much, and I added three blogs from cities with Twins minor league affiliates. Those three may not be strictly about the minor league teams, but that's the basis for adding them. To the extent that the blogs are about the affiliates, they figure to be quiet during the offseason. We'll see how this plays out. (I'd still love to find more afflilates blogs, esp. from Fort Myers and Elizabethton, two cities now unaccounted for.)

For a while I had a functioning Twitter feed, but that widget failed. Finding a new one is on my list of things to do here, but that can wait until I've devised a use for my Twitter account that goes beyond announcing a new post. (If you're at the blog, you don't need to know that I've put up a new post, so telling you that I have is rather pointless.)

Happy New Year, dear readers.