Sam over at Digital Ambler used to do this — he’d take the search terms from the previous month, and try to guess what it was they were searching for.  It appeared to help new readers orient to his blog, and it had the tendency to uncover oldies-but-goodies, and it also helped cross-reference his blog a bit.  I liked the feature, and I’ve done it a few times off and on.

The following are some of the popular terms in 2015 May that brought people to this blog.

1. tattva vision and tattva cards — Three of the top ten searches dealt with Tattwa or Tattva cards and tattva vision.  I made up a set of tattva cards you can print out in a PDF form (but they’re not really as effective as making your own).
2. icosahedron earth — Folks were looking for a copy of Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller’s map of earth on an icosahedron. It seems like they didn’t find it here, because many of them visited for a couple of minutes. They probably found this entry on making globes, or maybe this one on the Platonic Solids, but then went on to locate the Dymaxion Map.
3. quatrains on geomancy — I wrote a poem that’s designed to encapsulate many of the major themes of each of the sixteen signs of geomancy.  It’s nice that someone was looking for this by my title; my guess is that they didn’t know it was by me.  There’s also a companion poster, and of course the stave-book is a copy of this poem.
4. memory palace technique — all of my resources on practicing palace of memory technique are reachable through one webpage on this site, although I haven’t added much to it in several years because the kids I’ve been teaching have been less invested in it  (the last group that really grooved on it is graduating tomorrow).
5. moon sonnets — When was it? About 2006 to 2004, I wrote sonnets to the full and new moon for three years.  They’re in the poetic catalog as part of the Sun and Moon sonnet series, although they’re heavily rooted in central southern New England (think Connecticut-Rhode Island-Massachusetts meet-up area).  If you want to learn to write sonnets so you can write your own about your own area, my advice on learning to write sonnets is here.
6. children of john alden — Kids in my seventh grade were studying the early American colonies, and second grade was studying the Pilgrims (1620, John Alden, Miles Standish, Priscilla Mullins: “Speak for yourself, John”).  So with the help of parents and older students, we assembled a set of objects representative of the objects listed in John Alden’s Will into a kind of mini-museum exhibit.  It was pretty cool, and there’s a short video… but it took so long to assemble that we only got to leave it up for about twenty minutes before it had to come down.  I’d like to do this again, and I wrote some notes on how we did it.
7. weight shift in tai chi — Oh, boy.  Maybe you’ve noticed, but I’ve been writing about tai chi for a long time. Including weight shift. Maybe you could read the poem, it would be a place to start.  So is the index, which would help you keep track of what you have and haven’t read.
8. building a Japanese toolbox —  I did that.  It was one of my first carpentry projects to learn from.  And currently, the box contains essentially no carpentry tools (because I’ve been working on things at school with my tools, and so one by one many of my tools have migrated there).  I’ll have to bring them back… or maybe just take my toolkit there.

There were other search terms that people used to find the page, but Google is encrypting a larger number of their searches and keeping that data hidden.  Many of the remaining terms that people searched for were actually just variants of the ones above.  So, welcome, and I hope you found what you were looking for.

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