My good friend and esteemed colleague, Monocle Barbie (great new comics BTW), asked me what hit counter I would recommend, but I was of little help due to the fact that I had forgotten which one I was using! My best guess was "Web Stats", so I naturally I googled the phrase and, lo and behold, it was the top result, an outfit by the moniker of "statcounter.com". This is after she got set up with some other service. I actually run this in an invisible mode to "keep my page free of clutter" (i.e. prevent personal embarrassment).
Well, I had some fun analyzing my web stats, even though I am fairly sure that I represent 90% of my site's traffic. (Even though I have gotten the blocking cookie that supposedly fixes this problem before, I clear the cookies once in a while and shill my site to people from their computers. The most disappointing penalty for not paying for a premium subscription is that the log size is only 100 users. For $9 a month, the log size increases to 1,500 which would be more than adequate. At that price, though, I would take the time to research and install whatever is necessary to track visitors. The internet is kind of creepy in that regard; everyone is tracking your activities through cookies.
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"Well, what did you gleam from your visitor statistics?", you ask. I'm glad you asked that. First and foremost, there is an anomaly in my hits from the yearly perspective:
I can only attribute this (this is a rough theory) that a highly intelligent extraterrestrial being (or the guy who played Carlton on "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air") removed the tracking code near the beginning of 2006, and 11 months later I noticed its absence and put it back. I suspect the alien because I was a key player in the a great revolt on his planet some odd years ago in which we rebel forces successfully asploded Marklarsoft's undersea prison/Go Kart track, where they secretly ran the entire planet. Yeah, we marklarred those marklars good.
//Dammit, this function always craps out on me.
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Another startling concern that the spike in traffic I received in April-May 2007 was truly just that: a spike. (Upon further examination this may just be a Summer lull; business will be booming come Octobruary.) WAHHHHHH! WAIT GUYZ!!1!~!@!2 COME BACK PLZ! DERZ MOAR VEZZY TO NJOI! Excuse me there, I accidentally bumped my noggin on the glass of my CRT when I sneezed, causing me to hit Caps Lock and lose all secondary brain function for 20 seconds, but don't worry, everything's just qweklweq? Hey, "qweklweq", that's almost as good as "Vezquex". It's mine! I own it!
"So, how do you get literally hundreds of hits a month?", you inquire as you look up to me on my cyberkinetic stilts, your eyes swelling to the size of Puss in Boots. I tell you to go back to noob school and learn how to be a real noob (a huge step up) so that you could back with a doctorate in Noobistry and I could mock you for your certified noobiness. Then after some beating, crying, more beating, more crying, consoling, console playing, a third beating, and an "I'm sorry" card, I lay down the facts for you:
The path to 2,824 unique hits in a year and a half of logged traffic lies in your utilization of three distinct techniques: keyword baiting, constantly nagging at your relatives, and dumb luck. That last one is too complicated to explain right now; I think there are schools for that. Since "nagging" is self-explanatory, I'll just teach you about baiting.
Keywords are what people type as a "search term" into a search engine. A list of pages is served up from the search engine's database of the entire 'net. The entire 'net. The entire qweklweq. Although ideally you want someone to link to you using these keywords to make use of the popular "Back Rub" ranking algorithm, if there are not a lot of links containing the search term for any site, then the search engine resort is to just check if the search term appears in the text of indexed pages. That's where the webmaster comes in. Simply put these keywords all over your site and it will be a match-made destination for all interested in those keywords. Well, enough on SEO (a nerdy acronym) theory, here are the results of it:
5th "fire jpg wallpaper" - Yahoo!
That is a damn fine wallpaper and I'm glad it's getting the recognition it deserves.
7th "warning logos" - Google
This one is interesting. My old host, Funpic, which by the way has never gone down in 4 years (and remains hosting an outdated version of my site because I am too lazy to redirect every page (I'm not a traffic cop; or am I?) and see no point in actually taking it down. After all, what if my current host dies and I rapidly need a different host? It's happened before!), has limited PHP functionality, so the image gallery prints out these annoying warnings. And I had a folder called "Logos". Warning. Logos. Warning Logos!
(Note: Apologies for the sloppy overuse of parenthetical phrases in the preceding paragraph. My school never taught me to use em dashes! (And even if I did know how to use them, I would have to use two en dashes in their place or get out the character map out (maps are hard) or learn the stupid ALT code. (It's 0151, geeks! That's ALT+0151.)) So, I picked up this weird habit from my friend of using parentheses instead. It must be a programmer thing. He's a hardcore programmer, despite the bad spelling (odd combo), not a script kiddie (or is that kitty?) like me. I do like me my quirky, shiny javascript debacles.)
3rd "brief history of football" - Yahoo
This last one is my crowning achievement. "A Brief History of Football (Soccer)" was a joke I wrote late last year on the origin (so only a small part of the entire history--maybe should have called it "The Origin of Football", but that would be accurate.) in which a sexy philanthropist inadvertently discovers the formula for Footballium one day late on the miniature golf course. Her assistant, Phil—why wasn't he the philanthropist?—warned her of its power, but the allure of scientific curiosity (much like that of blogdom) was too much for Irina; she sought more power.
She prepared a 120cc batch of Footballium and made a super-concentrated serum to test on her subjects. Having no subjects at the time—Well, she had rats, but who wants to risk losing perfectly good lab rats when the effects are unknown?—so she hosted laboratory tours and sold refreshments bearing doses of Fb, and when that didn't work, ("No, I'm not drinking a glowing purple goo that I'm pretty sure is sentient!") there was always the "Look over there!"-*stabs*-*injects*-"Oops!" tactic. But I don't want to spoil the whole story, so just read it.
I also discovered a link to my site as a "thank you" for my suggestions on his ambitious web app, the AJAX Animator. You'll find it in the menu, "Help -> About". While you're there, also make sure to click on the "Seizure" tab in the help window.
Yeah, I am a web genius...by loose, minimal standards. And I guess I'm only a genius to roughly a quarter of the internets, because I am not bothered with such superfluities as cross-browser compatibility or bathing. "Leave it to the underlings!" That's what I pretend to always say. (You see, that is what I theorize as the secret to getting rich: do just enough work to get the ball rolling, hire some schlubs, make them do all the work, take all the credit, get a really rich guy/girl to invest in your scheme, embezzle like there's no tomorrow, spend 6 months in jail for that, and retire to an island in the Aleutians. Or, take an existing product, and find a new use for it! (Damn pickle matrix... (]{|▌|▌[) <- my ASCII hamburger)) So you may be wondering if this Vezquex is an imposter or an firmware update to version 2.0 gone awry—You know I‘m a robot, right?—but the truth is that I didn’t set out to write a novel, just but a simple novelty, traffic stats.
And as an aside, I will try not to write out loud in future posts. That is, unless that's what you want. ;)