I don’t have anything to post today, so I thought I’d write another entry about interesting search terms that have brought people to this blog, and provide links to the things they were seeking.

But there’s a problem. I can’t find some of these things, either!

Let’s start with one I do know:

the duchness relation to rolaty
Aha, I say wisely. This person wants to know about the connections between the 18th century’s Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire — subject of the Keira Knightley movie “The Duchess” — and the current British royal family. And as it happens, two modern princesses — Beatrice and Eugenie — are reportedly direct descendants of Georgiana.

Now for the ones I can’t answer:

Princess diana respectable mother and wife
The Charles/Diana fan wars are still raging on royalty forums, so you can find plenty of people to argue for or against this statement. Personally, I’m not getting involved.

joke “about a king”
Um… why did the king cross the road? To get to the other side! Well, OK, I admit that’s not a very good joke. If someone out there knows a better joke about a king, please share it in the comments.

“i was napoleon” song lyrics
I tried, but I can’t find a song like this. So instead here’s a 1911 recording of “I’m Henery The Eighth.” It’s not even about the real Henry VIII, but it will have to do.

I mentioned in an earlier post that my other blog, the Royal News Blog, has been relocated to RoyalNewsBlog.com.

The new blog’s RSS feed is now available, but I couldn’t get its existing Widgetbox widget to work with the new feed, so I had to disable it and create a new widget. I regret this because a number of people were using the old widget. I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

Here is the new widget. You can customize the size, color, and display mode.

I like it when bloggers talk about the unexpected search terms people used to find their blogs. For example:

Monday morning keywords
“And as the nail sunk in the cloud…”

I’m a contributor to The Kate Middleton Report, which gets some interesting searches. But people generally find the World of Royalty Blog using the search terms you would expect: world royalty, world of royalty, royalty blog, etc., as well as more specific but sensible searches like royalty in popular culture and Viking teeth.

Where, oh where, are my wacky keywords? Is my blog is suffering from a wackiness deficit?

Looking more closely at search terms for the past month, I find a few promising, if familiar, phrases:

kate middleton dirty feet
kate middleton feet
kate middleton’s feet
kate middletons toes

This would make a good blog post, but alas! it’s already been covered over on The Kate Middleton Report, where we are well aware of the popularity of Ms. Middleton’s feet.

If I eliminate Kate’s feet from consideration, that leaves me with just the following:

weeding pictures of king mohamed 6
OK, I know you meant wedding, but weeding is kind of funny.

Prince william future wife psychic
I hope so. That would be cool.

And that’s it… no, WAIT! AHA! We have a winner!

“wonder woman” troll gossip
Wow. I bet that’s quite a story.

The World of Royalty Blog is three years old today. And to celebrate, here’s my entirely un-royal but nonetheless fun gift to you…

Space Invaders! Use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move and the spacebar to shoot. To learn more about this version of the game, see the Neave Games website.

I’m out of town for a few days, so I won’t be posting a “Royal Week in Review” this week. But you’ll still find plenty of royal news on the Royalty.nu News page.

I should be back on Monday. See you then!

Two of my favorite blogs — Sarah Johnson’s Reading the Past and Julianne Douglas’s Writing the Renaissance — were recently awarded the Excellent Blog Award by other bloggers, and in turn passed the award on to me. Congratulations and thank you to both ladies!

I recently participated in this blog meme by naming 10 blogs for the award, so it’s probably too soon for me to do that again. But you really should check out Sarah and Julianne’s blogs. They both focus on historical fiction, and they’re both truly excellent.

I’ve added a tag cloud to the blog’s sidebar (look under “Categories”). This is an experiment, and I still haven’t figured out exactly what I’m doing with the tags.

Right now, I’m trying to use tags that don’t just duplicate what you’ll find via the categories or search function. I’ve also been giving tags to most authors, and some royals who are likely to be mentioned here a lot. Maybe that’s too many tags — I’m not sure if I should be aiming for more tags or less.

I’ve shamelessly added a few tags that might attract search engine users (why, Anna Nicole Smith, what are YOU doing in my history-royalty tag cloud?) And I’m stubbornly denying tags to a few people I don’t like (I’m sure Prince Frederick von Anhalt and Germaine Greer are heartbroken).

OK, it sounds like I know what I’m doing with the tags, after all. But I don’t know if this tagging system is useful or fun for anyone other than me. So if you have comments, please share them.

So far the cloud says this blog is about Princess Diana, plus Ancient History, with some Historical Fiction and Marie Antoinette thrown in. Well, that doesn’t sound so bad.

I’ve just figured out how to add an avatar to my comments on this blog. You can do the same by signing up at the Gravatar site (it’s free).

You will be asked to upload an image and associate it with an email address. Use that email address when you comment, and your avatar will automatically show up next to the comment on this and other Gravatar-compatible blogs. Don’t worry: Your email address won’t be shown on this blog.

None of this is necessary, of course. It’s just for fun. You don’t need to give your email address in order to comment here unless you want to use an avatar.

The new blog is still under construction, but I’m working on it a little every day. As you’ll see in the sidebar, the New Royal Books list is back! It’s more work to maintain on WordPress because I have to do the coding myself, but I think it looks somewhat better than it did on TypePad.

I checked the blog on someone else’s computer and the colors seemed washed out. It looks better on my computer, probably because I’ve recently calibrated my monitor. I hope it appears at least readable to most visitors.

I’ve also noticed that occasionally the sidebars get jumbled in Internet Explorer. This seems to happen on archive pages that don’t have much content yet, and reloading the page corrects the problem. (Instead of IE, I recommend Firefox… it’s free, and a better browser, in my opinion.)

If you notice any major display issues, or other problems that stop you from enjoying the blog, please let me know.

And thank you for bearing with me through this transition. Running the blog is a lot of fun for me, and I’m glad I didn’t have to give it up.

I was tagged by Michael Lorenzen of American Presidents Blog for a blog meme! How cool. I’ve never been tagged before, as far as I know. Actually, it happened last month but I didn’t know about it until today, when I saw this: Book Meme Tagging

This is what it says I’m supposed to do:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

OK, that sounds easy enough. And the nearest book happens to be… “The Life and Times of Grigorii Rasputin” by Alex DeJonge. Not sure if I should count a partial sentence carried over from the previous page, so I won’t. So, with that said, the sixth, seventh, and eight sentences on page 123 are:

“Nicholas and Alexandra did not normally see members of the family with anything approaching such regularity.

“Anastasia Nicolaevna, who, it will be recalled, was married to the Duke of Leuchtenberg, grew increasingly close to Grand Duke Nicholas, a rapprochement both sensed and encouraged by Rasputin, who was an adept at providing his protectors with sayings that might encourage them in doing whatever they wanted to do. He observed that ‘the marriage of the brother and the sister will be the salvation of Russia’ — Militsa, it will be remembered, was married to the grand duke’s brother.”

Yes, that’s just three sentences. Whew!

And I will tag:

Marilyn’s Royal Blog
Reading, Raving, and Ranting
Tanzanite’s Shelf and Stuff
Tea at Trianon
Writer of Queens

Not sure who wants to participate in something like this, so, of course, if you’re not interested, just disregard it.

I followed Typepad’s instructions for exporting my old blog’s content so I could easily upload it to this new blog, and it didn’t work. Given the way things are going at Typepad recently, I’m not surprised.

It doesn’t matter much because a lot of the blog’s content is perishable and expendable. I don’t need to save hundreds of years-old news links. So I’ll be going through my archives and deciding what’s worth saving.

I’m starting with the books section. I will, of course, save any book reviews I’ve written and things like that. So you’ll see my review of Catherine Delors’ excellent novel “Mistress of the Revolution” on this blog shortly.

If there’s anything in particular you’d like to make sure doesn’t get deleted when I finally dispose of the old blog, please let me know. Luckily my Typepad account is paid up through October, giving me time to sift through everything. I’m going to keep the original dates on the posts, so if you’d like to watch my progress, check this blog’s archives.

I have the basics of the new blog set up, so maybe I can resume blogging about something other than my blog! I’ll try to post a Royal Week in Review soon.

But first I want to say that I haven’t forgotten my blogroll. I’ll add it to the sidebar as soon as I have time. I hope I can figure out how to add my New Royal Books list, too. I enjoy updating that every week.

For anyone considering a switch to WordPress from Typepad or some other blogging platform: WordPress isn’t entirely easy. You probably won’t be able to customize your theme if you don’t know HTML and CSS. But the more I use WordPress, the more I’m enjoying it. It’s fast and clean and seems logical. In the end, I think, I might not be sorry I switched.

It turns out I did have permalinks already (duh!) I didn’t like the default format, so I changed it, and now the comments on my earlier blog posts can’t be accessed (duh duh!)

So I’m checking to see if the comments will work correctly for this post…

Maybe I should change the name of this blog to “Confessions of a WordPress Newbie.”

I’ve installed a free WordPress theme called NotePad that I found on the Infocreek Blog. (And they have some other very nice themes available, so check them out.)

This theme isn’t exactly royal, but it’s one of the best-looking WordPress templates I’ve seen so far. It’s hard to find pretty themes with some sort of historical flavor, or that are at least a bit feminine, like this one.

One of the few things I don’t like about it is that it doesn’t show the year something was posted, at least not on the blog’s main page. So, if you’re wondering (perhaps you’re a confused time traveler), I’m typing this in 2008.

For now at least, I’ll stop my theme-quest and use this one unless something goes wrong with it. Next I need to figure out this permalink thing…

I’m going to try out some Wordpress colors and themes, so this blog may look varying degrees of horrible and/or bizarre for a while! I’ll try to find something acceptable, figure out how to add permalinks and RSS, and get back to my regularly scheduled royal blogging as soon as possible.

Well, as you can see, I have a domain registered and I’m getting started with Wordpress. I’m beginning to like it, but it’s been a struggle to figure everything out. It was especially difficult to choose the theme because nothing was quite what I wanted. What I settled on* isn’t very fancy, but so far it actually works so I’m sticking with it. (I do miss my beautiful red Typepad template, however!)

This blog doesn’t seem to have permalinks so I’ll have to tackle that next. I hope to resume real blogging soon. Thank you for bearing with me, and if you have any comments on the new blog, or any Wordpress advice to share, I’d be happy to hear it!

*Note: When I first posted this, the blog was plain white with a purple header and not much else. Hopefully you’ll agree that it looks better now.