Technology: February 2004 Archives

I've spent most of my awake time today making a new home page for The Blue Room, then updating the table-based layouts of the wedding-related pages on this site (the last remnants of the table-based layouts). I also revamped the tourism page slightly, with a new image and the blue background that's used on most of the other content pages. I haven't gone through and updated the information because there haven't been visitors here forever, though with the in-laws visiting the week after Easter I might have to get my act together.

This is all because I had a dream last night, while under the influence of Vicodin, about how my old home page had too much text on it and what it really needed to be was a bunch of links and nothing more. I'm a big believer in the judgement of my subconscious mind (except for when it tells me to do things like dress up like a giant hotdog and go swimming in the English Channel; it has an absurdist side that is fairly easy to filter), so I drew up something quickly and it did in fact look a lot better. Maybe I'll get more clickthroughs from the home page now.

(The analysis I did a few days ago revealed that most visitors hit my homepage and go no further, apparently scared off by my confession of wanting to make plate cozies.)

So while I was waiting for Noel to come home this evening, I decided to do a bit of analysis of my logs. It was quite interesting.

Keeping in mind that MovableType itself generates a lot of apparent hits on the server, half of the 16,000 hits in the last week were from my desk computer's IP. Of those, a good half were me reading my own pages. With my own web page, I am apparently like a monkey with a mirror. I'm fascinated by myself. And who wouldn't be? If you could only follow me around all day, you would understand the attraction, I am sure.

The real surprise was that the most popular area on this site is all our wedding crap. Now, I could look at my own wedding pictures all day (and apparently, sometimes, I do), but what on earth would anybody else find in there that's interesting? I can only think that there's a link to the page somewhere on The Knot or something, except I'm not getting quite enough traffic for that.

Also, a surprisingly large number of people have been looking at my portfolio. Which is odd, because it's not as if it's a great one. But OK. The favoured page is my rendering of the Rietveld Schroeder House, which I can understand, because when I was doing that rendering I was also obsessively searching for anything that showed what the house looked like. It must be in a search engine somewhere.

Which just goes to show you that a vanity web site maintained without regard for cross-browser compatibility can actually satisfy many people: drafting students, brides-to-be, and its own incurably vain maintainer. A win all around!

Upgraded to MovableType 2.661 today on a whim. I think have made it possible to use some HTML in the comments, but there are some configuration options that seem contradictory, so we'll have to see.

I've always felt a bit self-conscious about this whole blog thing, although I had a reasonable facsimile of it before I installed MovableType (no archiving, natch, and updated significantly less often). Now I've found a page of obscenity-laden ranting about inane personal weblogs. And a pledge:

I realize that nothing I say matters to anyone else on the entire planet. My opinions are useless and unfocused. I am an expert in nothing. I know nothing. I am confused about almost everything. I cannot, as an individual, ever possibly know everything, or even enough to make editorial commentary on the vast vast majority of things that exist in my world. This is a stupid document; it is meaningless drivel that I do not expect any of the several billion people on my planet to actually read. People who do read my rambling, incoherent dumbfuckery are probably just as confused as I am, if not moreso, as they are looking to my sorry ass for an opinion when they should be outside playing Frisbee with their dog or screwing their life partner or getting a dog or getting a life partner. Anyone who actually takes the time to read my bullshit probably deserves to ingest my fucked up and obviously mistaken opinions on whatever it is that I have written about.