Playing in the Gutter on the Blog

I have been playing in the gutter on the blog. A few additions:

• I have enabled comments on the blog -- something I disabled a long time ago when spam comments were really thick. Now there is (supposedly) new code that will discourage this.
  
  
• I have added a counter that notes visitors by country and city. I have had an invisible counter on the blog and web site for a while (over 250,000 visitors so far), but this is more interesting. The counter simply notes where your nearest ISP node is located -- it does not (and cannot) capture email or real addresses, so the paranoid can relax (a little).
  
  
• I have added a computer-generated translator.
  
  
• I have added little icons at the end of each post. Kindly click on them to increase traffice each from Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us and others.
  
  
• I have added two Amazon links to my book (of course) and the Ames Pony D-handle shovel, which is my prefered tool for field work (along with a decent bar and a posthole digger).
  
  
• I have added a feature that shows a "preview" of the linked web page.
  
  
• I have added my email. Putting in "at" instead of an "@" both discourages spam and is a small intelligence test.
  
  
• I have added several new blogs to the permanent links: Diary of a Mad Natural Historian and Birds Etcetera and Blue Crab Boulevard as well as the more "corporate" web sites The Straight Dope and Snopes / Rumor Has It and Skeptics Dictionary.