Blog Spirit is a great service. The interface is very easy to use, the pages look professional, and the community features are great. Its French origin delights the europhile in me, which has been dormant these last few years. If you don’t mind the aggregated results, the traffic page is pretty much. When tech support gets around to it, they are quite helpful. But some things really grate on you

1. Unless I monkey with timestamps, posts show up seven hours after I publish. But they are linked to automatically on the community pages.
   
2. The template system is nice, but it keeps resetting. Yesterday I wondered why my humble traffic fell like a stone. Answer? The sitemeter tool was reset from the right hand column.

Again, I love BlogSpirit. The “community” features aren’t just a gimmick, but increase readership and promote cross-site dialog. But it can be annoying.

In other vanity news

1. I love my job. Teaching (community) college is a blast.
   
2. To my surprise and delight, I love figure skating. It’s a great spectator sport.
   
3. I hate this awful evil cold I have. It saps any energy I have and it prevents me from sleeping.
   
4. The Good Earth may be the happiest and saddest book I have ever read. Imagine taking Aztec and combining it with A Painted House. I can’t believe I waited almost a year from when I bought it to begin reading it. The first page begins weakly, but once you get to number two you hate to put it down.
   
5. When down with the cold and reading The Good Earth, you can’t go wrong with Coca-Cola and 1 Mile North.