I'm not sure what other people can see on these boards, because "Moderators" have things showing that I don't think are visible to everyone here.

But this board currently says it's received 861 visits in the last week. That looks very likely to me, because it works out to about 123 "visits" each day. When MANY people will often drop by to LOOK AND READ, but don't always post anything, that seems very believable. (I also see a count under each message, showing how many people have SEEN it, so these numbers seem likely.)

Similarly, it says there were 65 messages posted in the last week, which is just over nine a day, on average. I know that with MY messages and replies, and the replies and comments from our more prolific posters, many of whom post on a daily basis -- often several times -- this is also quite believable.

In CONTRAST, when I look at that other shorthand board, it's saying they have 7K weekly visits. Really? A thousand people a day? Is that likely? And they say 197 messages were posted in the last week. That works out to 28 new messages every day. REALLY?

Does that board look that BUSY to you? Aside from the usual "Which shorthand should I learn?" questions, where they haven't looked at any other posted messages, and the "What does this say?" messages from people who are never heard from again, I see very little activity there.

A really neat thing about writing stenotype shorthand with a real-time translation system like PLOVER is that you can use keyboard combinations to give commands to the computer.

Anything that you don't need to write a WORD can be used for other purposes. I was reminded of this when I was editing the dictionary that PLOVER comes with -- which was based on Mirabai Knight's own personal dictionary, which reflects the theory that she had learned.

Because I had learned a different theory, my short forms and abbreviations were often different from hers -- so I needed to alter the dictionary so they used the abbreviations that I'd used for twenty years. It was easy as pie:

If I wrote something the way I usually write it, and the translation was different from mine, I wrote the outline DUPT on the keyboard. That's not a regular word, so it's been programmed as a command to the software to open a dictionary editing screen -- which immediately appears on the display.

When the cursor is in the first window, I press the keystrokes that I use for the word, and they appear in the window. Then I press Tab, and the cursor moves to the second window. In it, I could SPELL the translation I wanted.

In PLOVER, you spell a word letter by letter, by using the letter keys on the keyboard with a * attached. It fills in the word as I want it spelled -- and when it's correctly spelled, I hit ENTER, and it automatically adds my version to the dictionary, and closes the edit window.

I've written recently about PLOVER, the amazing software that enables you to write stenotype shorthand on a QWERTY keyboard. It's just amazing that the software and the translation dictionary are FREE to download and use, when MOST people using computer-translated stenotype pay a whole lot of money for their writers and their software.

I bought another keyboard with NK-Rollover (meaning where you can press any number of keys at once and they will all activate, which is something gamers often use and need).

For my previous keyboard, I had bought laser-cut keytops to attach, so it would feel more like the stenotype keyboard that I was used to, which I had used for about twenty years! THIS TIME, though, I decided to make my own keytops.

I took a sheet of rubber padding about a centimetre thick, and carefully cut pieces of just the right size, which I then GLUED carefully to the appropriate keys on the keyboard. It has a really nice cushiony feel under my fingers. Much more comfortable than that hard plastic that I used to use.