DoaB has reached over 10,000 views on its front page. Just took it a while...

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Summary: My website/blog has reached over 10,000 views on its front page. Took it about 3 years. All told, there are about 61000 hits registered on the site in general in that same time. Not bad for a little guy.

BLOT: (30 Aug 2011 - 02:04:55 PM)

DoaB has reached over 10,000 views on its front page. Just took it a while...

I knew I was getting close to the five digit mark. Wasn't sure how close but I knew it was near. I checked my page views for my front page last night and found it to be 10,048! *glitter* *confetti* *big band jazz standards* *much rejoicing* And so forth. I am actually fairly excited. In that way I would be excited to find out Ken Burns was making a documentary about, I don't know, something I liked (I nearly said Jazz, but I'm pretty sure he's done that and I need to look that up). Whenever I glance at my logs, which isn't that often and never for long, I never exactly see a hit on my homepage. They have to exist, the little counter file goes up anywhere from 5-15 hits per day. Not a lot, and I imagine only half of those are unique, but still. Slinking up the stairs and all that. Because I usually see other pages get the most attention, like my walkthrough of The Lurking Horror, my review [as an out-of-shape man] of The Walls of Jericho, and my final summation of going without soap and shampoo for a three week plus period. Those three combined have about as many hits as my front page. I was curious, overall, to see how many hits have been tallied. Wrote a small Python script and let it run through my log files. Turns out it is something like 61,400. For the HTML pages. If you included the pictures on those pages, it would be, I don't know. I didn't write that script and would hate to wager a guess.

When my site was on Geocities, circa 1998, it got quite a bit of traffic. For the time. I was getting emails about once a week about something on there. I spent a lot of time on it and while it was primitive by today's standards it was still a good spot to get gaming information. When it was "updated" and moved to UAH's servers, it was [in some ways] even more primitive than originally but I still liked and it tended to show up in the right sort of searches and such to keep me communicating with people. Now, though, my website is almost exactly like I want it, almost all of the time, my contact through it to the outside world is at a nadir. The world has moved along. I no longer have comment boxes, getting about two dozen SPAM comments for every real one took its toll, especially since many of the real ones were from a small group of friends. There are websites that pay people money to do everything they can to get more attention brought to them. While my site has traditionally been high up on geek interests, I tend to get more hits for my local coverage and, strangely, for my page on Arizona Tea which needs to be heavily rewritten [the need for rewrite partially why I did not include it in the three above, but frankly it is gets probably the second most number of hits of any page I have].

The current, aka dot-com, variation of the page (following the Geocities, the UAH, and the dot-net versions), has been through a few basic ages. First was the static page. Then came the slightly less static page. Then came the shut down of my Livejournal account and moving my blog over (including writing my own scripts to make that possible after a brief stint of manually editing the HTML to fake it). Eventually it reached the "blot" era, which is where it is at, and that works alright. I like it just fine. I am wanting to work in a variation where the blots get "friendly" names but have yet to go for that. Maybe I will start doing it soon? Hell, maybe I'll set that up tonight. Fact is, I'll set it up right now because it really has been too long since I've run that script.

At any rate, here we are. Five digits in. It would take, gosh, thirty years at this rate to hit six digits on the front page, though only about another year to hit it total. I think I'll just wait until it hits it total to brag. I have no idea what I'll be doing at sixty-four, but at some point I'm going to need to let the blogging go, I suppose.

By the way, as for What's Next, my current plan is to, once or twice a week for a bit, dust off an old post, or old static page, and then to edit it some and add in some commentary about the feedback I have gotten from the page and so forth, and then post a link to it and include a sampling of the feedback. Good way to fix up old pages while providing new info about them.

Dickens of a Blog

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: August 2011


Written by Doug Bolden

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The longer, fuller version of this text can be found on my FAQ: "Can I Use Something I Found on the Site?".

"The hidden is greater than the seen."