Web site news

Investigating the cause of a collapse

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After a two-day spurt following the link from David Morgan-Mar’s LiveJournal, Da Blog fell back to essentially the levels it held prior. Which could mean one of two things. It could mean the people who came here weren’t interested in my writing long-term, which probably means the comment I received saying “I can’t imagine why you don’t have a job” is a minority opinion.

Or it could mean everyone is reading off the RSS feed (and not being moved to comment) or the-zaniak’s LiveJournal feed. the-zaniak left a comment the last time I brought up the LiveJournal feed, leaving what seemed to me to be a good enough justification for what seemed to me to be redundancy: aiding the addition of Da Blog to people’s LiveJournal friend lists.

But the more I think about it, the more I don’t like it. There are several inferiorities of the LiveJournal feed to the Blogger-provided RSS feed. I don’t know this for certain, but it appears that the LiveJournal feed allows people to leave their comments on the LiveJournal feed, and not on Da Blog. I’m not paying attention to comments left on the LiveJournal feed, so you’re going to need to head over here to comment. For you, LJ updates only at certain intervals (as opposed to every post) and might not be updating with every single post. (It omits the post that caused that spurt of popularity in the first place, but does include older posts.)

Also, it appears that Blogger allows me to add to the RSS feed an element that cannot be included in the LiveJournal feed. That’s something I’ve been thinking about and that I may have more on later in the week.

Oh, and if you don’t like my writing, feel free to let me know as well. You don’t even have to engage in constructive criticism; just telling me I suck should be good enough for me to keep my ego in check. But don’t overdo it.

Some comments on my street signs, and other webby stuff

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A while back (in the Pre-Morgan-Mar-LiveJournal era) I mentioned Samuel Klein’s street blade gallery, and I e-mailed him about mine, and I never got an e-mail back and I never saw anything pop up on his street blade gallery tag, so I thought it had been ignored and that was that.

Well, today, on a lark, I decided to see if maybe he’d put something up without telling me, and lo and behold he had… but as it contained no Blogger tags (it did contain Technorati tags), I would never have found out by following an RSS feed without subscribing to his site’s general feed. And street signs are about the only aspect of his site I’m interested in.

(And it was only put up on Monday anyway.)

So. I looked into my site’s hit logs. 49 hits so far this month for my street sign gallery alone, 101 in June, 67 in May.

Wait… again, 49 of those hits are coming from the month in which the post was made. The street sign gallery more than doubled that the previous month alone. And I’m looking at a daily average of 408 hits for June (across all pages and including reloads) but only 136 for this month. That includes 1873 hits June 6.

This (scroll down to the comments) accounts for only 148 of the “referrers”, with all the higher ones being either direct hits or coming from the website itself, mostly the webcomic. Again, this is across all page views. So that helps explain the deluge for the web site.

But I last mentioned the street sign gallery on July 17, when I also mentioned Klein’s gallery, and before that it had been ages since I brought it up. So where did 101 hits for the street sign gallery, of all things, come from? The only thing I can think of is that a lot of my referrals come from Google Image Search, and they can’t all be Sandsday.

But it also got me thinking about something else. Subtract any referrers that begin with “morganwick.freehostia.com”, and in July so far, I have a total of 749 hits to my web site, doubtless some of them referring to images, and 15 of them coming from variants of morganwick.blogspot.com. And some of them are probably me. By contrast, I have about 370 hits to Da Blog in the last month and about 640 page views. That’s an average of 25 a day to the web site and 21 page views on Da Blog, with half a hit a day coming from Da Blog to the web site.

It’s not exactly the most popular of sites, but I am thinking of making some changes to capitalize on what little popularity I have. Stay tuned.

(Oh, and after my e-mail contained a lengthy explanation of several signs for someone unfamiliar with Seattle, I find out Mr. Klein had seen many of the signs I had before, just had never taken any pictures of them.)

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

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Cooking By Numbers this week. Have a look if you want. I don’t have much to say about it.

Judging by the results of the poll, I’m going to be using all the StumbleUpon interests. Sorry for pushing the polls down with the sheer size of the label list. I need to find a more compact label list that doesn’t require me to do some hacking.

Getting the house in order when the visitors are already here

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So it seems we have a few more readers now than we did a week ago, especially with a second LiveJournal linking to us. Yesterday and the day before, Da Blog had nine times more visitors than it did the day before that, so it seems some housekeeping is in order.

First: RSS feeds. The-zaniak has created a LiveJournal feed for Da Blog, and my response is: Um… you do know Blogger comes with its own RSS feed, right? If you have IE 7 or Firefox, you should see an RSS icon light up when you see the page. (I can only speak to IE there; I don’t know how it works for Firefox.) Unless I get something else cool from having an LJ feed, it seems a bit unnecessary. This has prompted me to add feed links to the sidebar. (If you wanted to create an LJ feed, you’d have done better to create one for Sandsday. I’d create one myself if I knew how to create an RSS feed from a pre-existing MySQL database.)

I’ve also posted in the past on the idea of Da Blog as a collection of sub-blogs, and as such I’ve also added a list of all of Da Blog’s labels to the sidebar. They come complete with their own feeds; this post explains how you can form them. Both those new sidebar items are right below the larger blog archive, which makes them, and Da Blog Poll, less visible.

I’m also re-opening and extending by one week one of Da Blog Poll questions, removing the Random Internet Discovery from the list of options and replacing it with the fairly self-explanatory “Explorations into History”, which could include such things as my opinion on the presidents. Although I have saved the other results to a personal file, if you are one of the three people that have voted on the poll before, I strongly urge doing so again. If you vote “other” I expect you to specify what you have in mind on this post (where you can also learn more about the options) or this one. This is probably the last time I’m going to re-open this particular poll, which has existed in some form almost since Da Blog was founded. I’m also giving you until the end of August 16 to tell me whether you think I should post every time I put up a new strip. You can vote on any or all of the poll questions. I also encourage you to contribute to the poll on the front page of the web site.

Also, after nearly a year since the Web site was put up, I’ve finally deleted the long-dormant Da Blog Poll from the days when Blogger didn’t have its own poll element.

Finally, I’m offering you the chance to have your name in lights, as long as you won’t get paid for it, at least not right away. If you’re a movie buff – and not just the “Spiderman” kind, but one with a real grasp of film history – I invite you to join my 100 Greatest Movies Project, my seemingly endless quest to create the definitive list of greatest movies from all the ones that have come before, to sing the praises of the movies that make the list. E-mail me at mwmailsea at yahoo dot com if you’re interested and I’ll show you a sample write-up and a list of movies that are either on the list or close enough to make it on when I retabulate the list (or at some point in the future when new lists come out). I used the same principle in creating the NFL SuperPower Rankings, and released lists for last year, but it proved to be too much work. If you’re an NFL buff, and you’re willing to put in the work, you can have it for your own website as long as you credit me with the idea, and I’ll link to you on Da Blog.

And if you have any other ideas for what the web site or Da Blog could use, feel free to leave a comment on this post.

UPDATE 7/25: Okay, this is why I have long thought about leaving Blogger, because of unnecessary bullshit. Evidently for the last 24 hours the reposted poll and the two new features were at the top of the sidebar even though I had THOUGHT I had saved their moves. Then when I was told I had changes I hadn’t saved, it wouldn’t save, and then it would tell me “an error occured” no matter what I did after that. lk asfdasilnbg grlkldoe m,x bjfk dsndihtsgugvwbgjwhidxdyf

This must be what Eric Burns felt after Scott Kurtz gave him such glowing praise and hits.

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Wow. Wow.

David Morgan-Mar went beyond just commenting on one of my posts this time, linking to my Darths and Droids review with a thumbs-up on his LiveJournal. (And I didn’t even ask for the link!) Between that and Morgan-Mar’s various LJ friends, I got 60 hits yesterday and I’m already approaching that mark today, numbers Da Blog has never heard of outside football season.

So a quick welcome to new readers and a polite request to read my various other posts, on webcomics or otherwise. Of course I also invite you to check out my web site, link is on the top of the sidebar.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

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Well, I’ve decided that until the poll is closed, I’m setting StumbleUpon to check all topics – even though that often leaves me without anything to say – and here’s why.

I have my toes dipped in a lot of fields. One thing I’ve noticed is that there are often groups of sites that all tend to have the same group of regulars. It’s fairly rare, though, for those regulars to really cross over into fields that are too different. It’s rare for me to encounter someone from a webcomic board on a political board, or a sports board.

One thing that I hope to do with Da Blog is to connect various different groups together and expose them to vastly different viewpoints, and a variety of fandoms. I hope that large, disparate groups can come and cross-pollinate, become exposed to new ideas and experiences, and come out richer for the experience. That’s part of the reason why I’ve conceived of Da Blog as a collection of smaller sub-blogs.

So we begin with a brief history of the Middle East through the people who have conquered it, which reminds me of David Horsey’s “Brief History of the Holy Land“.

Update on the Random Internet Discovery

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Well, I’m running a new Da Blog Poll alongside the other current one, which I will refresh presently. This one asks if I should select between all the StumbleUpon topics, pick only the ones I like, or poll you for the ones you like. (The latter may end up being hosted on the Web site. There are 78 topics?

The poll will run through next week’s RID. I’ll think of something else to get us through this week’s RID. And I may have to use that something else to get through all subsequent RIDs as well.

My webcomic write-up for tomorrow is finished, so I can spend tomorrow either recreating my Truth Court announcement or working on next week’s webcomic write-up. Who says I don’t have a job?

Important Webcomic Post Update

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I was going to post on Robert Howard’s Tangents on Tuesday, but its current host is shutting down, and Howard’s plans to move it to an independent host were not far enough along yet for him to implement. So it is currently being hosted on LiveJournal and is archivefree. That last bit, plus my reluctance to link to a temporary site, means you get something completely different (as in, an actual webcomic) on Tuesday.

I will make a post on Tangents when it moves to a permanent host in “a couple of weeks”, though I may have a week delay to actually read the archives and write the post. I have at least three comics which I’ve read enough of to make it through any delays, plus a second post on Order of the Stick, so I’m good through August 19. Now I need to get to actually writing them. Throw in another webcomic blog, a fourth comic I have some things to say about even though I’ve actually read none of it, and a third OOTS post and I’m good through September 9. I can probably throw together something on Penny Arcade or User Friendly if I need to after that.

In other blog news, I made a change to this week’s Sports Watcher upon being reminded of something.

Hmm. Here’s another feature I’m stumbling on.

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Well, it turns out that part of the reason the StumbleUpon Demo draws from such a small pool of sites is because, once the Toolbar is installed, it requires me to select several interests before I can do any stumbling.

So either I select a long list of “interests” that don’t interest me at all, or the Random Internet Discovery turns out not to be so “random” after all.

I’ll think this over over the weekend.