Yesterday, I rearranged the blocks on the right side of my site. I’ve added a block for ‘Cambodian Bloggers’. Beth Kanter is trying to raise money to attend the Cambodia Bloggers Summit. It will take place August 30-31. She has been invited to provide a keynote, train the trainers and help bring a stronger connection between Cambodia bloggers and those of us here in the United States and around the world.

I’ve known Beth for quite a while from the non-profit blogging circles and have great respect for the work she does. If a bunch of us all chip in, it would be great; money well spent.

I also moved the Lijit Widget from my general group of social network widgets up near the top. They provide a neat interface to Google so you can search on all your sites, both directly and within your social network. They provide nice little icons pointing to the different social networks your in, and a cloud for searches that have been done.

Lijit is still very early stage. There have been a few bugs setting it up, but their customer support has been great and I hope to see a lot of neat features coming in the future. Like RapLeaf, which does provides reputation related information, I believe their social network aggregation is one of the really important emerging trends, and I’ll be writing more about this soon.

In other website related stuff, quantcast has now gathered enough information to start giving me additional details about my audience. The graph shows the ups and downs of the week. They are currently saying that I get around 2000 unique monthly visits, or which around 1400 are from within the United States. Of that, around three quarters are people passing by, yet the regulars make up about half of the actual page views.

A lot of the traffic I’ve been getting has been Trackback Spam. I worry about the amount of strain the filtering of the spam places on the server, so I’ve ended up completely shutting down trackback on the site. The blog posts that have been getting the most traffic recently have been my posts about Falcon Ridge. I posted a comment about it in Livejournal and Facebook. I expected that Facebook would drive more traffic, but interestingly enough, much more of the traffic has come from Livejournal.

My post about The Motherhood got a fair amount of traffic, some from The Motherhood itself, others from Salon, where my wife wrote about it and on Been There, a blog by Emily and Cooper from The Motherhood. It terms of the interconnectivity, that sites like Lijit and Rapleaf are starting to explore, I found it interesting that Emily and Cooper were also both early contributors to Beth’s fundraising appeal to go to Cambodia.

Yet the post that has been getting the most traffic over the past few days has been my post about Zachary Cohn. I do hope that people reading the post stop and think a little bit about pool safety, the importance of product liability lawsuits, and getting more politically involved. Even more so, I hope that readers stop and read a few of my other blog posts. Yet the whole thing feels a little bit uncomfortable. It feels a little bit like people rubbernecking at a celebrity car crash. I sure hope that isn’t a major reason for the traffic.

Beyond the website housekeeping, the legal issues around the selling of our house continue to escalate. I do believe there is a place for litigation, but it should be avoided wherever possible. Kim, however, sees the actions as impacting Fiona’s education and is starting to talk about wanting not only fairness, but vengeance. I am hoping we will find a peaceful resolution soon enough. Until then, since we are looking at litigation, I’m going to remain mostly quite on this.

Some of Kim’s anger is perhaps fueled by the flareup of her lyme disease; yet another stressor. The final stressor I want to talk about is my mother’s surgery. On Tuesday, she had knee surgery. I spoke with her yesterday. She was groggy from the painkillers and from the lack of sleep. She wants to get home as soon as possible, but it does sound like the surgery went well and she is mostly getting the care she needs.

Any of you with a religious bent, are encouraged to lift up prayers for my mother, for Kim and, I guess, for all of us right about now.