A Few Minor Changes To Homer's Travels

I made a few minor changes to the blog yesterday.  I doubt anyone will notice the changes but I will explain why I did them.

First, I removed the Travel Magnets from the sidebar.  After the discontinuation of the slide show function back in October I kludged together a fix that I found unsatisfactory and required too much work on my part.  Therefore I have added another tab under the header (beside the Camino and Appalachian Trail (AT) tabs) that takes you to the Google Photo album of all the travel magnets.  I used to add a new magnet each week (more or less) but now that all the magnets are in a single tab, I will work to add all the magnets that I have not posted.  In a few days you will be able to see all of our travel magnet collection.

Second, I removed the Goodreads Book Challenge widget from the sidebar.  This is a temporary change since I will not be setting a reading goal this year because I will be on the AT.  I'm sure I will read some books this year, I just don't want to work towards a goal.

Finally, I changed the page view counter in the sidebar.  I'd been using sitemeter since I started Homer's Travels to keep track of visitors to the blog.   In the past I used to check it religiously but over the past year or two I've kind of ignored it.  Last month I realized that it had stopped counting ... for at least eleven months.  It could have been more but, since I wasn't paying attention, I have no idea.  Shame on me for not catching that sooner.   I have replaced it with the Blogger statistics widget.  The counter appears a lot higher than my old sitemeter count (119K before quitting) because sitemeter counted visits while blogger counts pageviews. In other words, if someone visited Homer's Travels and viewed three pages, sitemeter would count it as one and blogger would count it as three.  The higher number, over 730K at this posting, also is more impressive.