Technology: June 2004 Archives

I'm ordinarily averse to competition. I don't thrive in an environment where i'm always having to play games or compete to win, and I find that sort of stress trying. I'm probably the only person who invented a non-competitive variation on Monopoly as a child.

So why am I all excited about June's web log statistics?

Well, they're the highest ever on this website, which is amazing because last July, we kicked some serious weblog butt with our wedding photos.

The thing is that since then, the number one reason why people have come to the blue-room web site has been looking for wedding advice. It's enough to make you want to hang up your blogging hat and just write long pieces about matching flowers to a bridesmaid's dress.

Even more discouraging, the one thing people are looking for most of all is instructions on making tissue packets, which just so happens to be the one thing I made for the wedding that almost nobody used. So there.

I should put our ceremony online. It was carefully edited to be gender-neutral, making marriage between two people rather than a man and a woman. Also, we cut out large sections on childbearing, as they didn't really apply here. I don't think marriage is about raising children, any more than eating is about having a biscuit tonight. One would hope that the marriage outlasts the child-raising years by decades. Unfortunately, it would actually break my heart if the ceremony didn't immediately become the most popular part of the site, so I leave it offline for now.

(I'd like to note that despite my giving scripts with cues to the audience, erm, our dearest friends and closest family, almost none of them responded properly when it was their turn. So there was something else I made that went unnoticed.)

Anyway, this started with a log note. I was looking over the web logs (as I do every evening, almost compulsively, since Noel installed analysis software for me) and realizing that 30,000 visits in June is actually quite a lot. This web site used to be sadly unvisited, except by search spiders. I used to have a script that would show me my four or five unique visitors every day; that had to go away a long time ago.

This is odd to me, because although I can see which pages people are hitting, I can't figure out what they are reading. My boring life, on this blog (OK, if you're my parents, you have an excuse). The details of my wedding which was not that unique, folks. Some drawings of houses, which are unaccountably popular with the German crowd. There's not much stuff here.

Seeing how people find the site makes me want to change that. I've got a whole series of web pages about doing various art projects in process. I'm considering putting up even more wedding advice. I want to respond to my readers, make their Blue Room experience more fulfilling! Alas, there's this minor issue of having no free time whatsoever, but I'm sure I can work around that.

My new goal: 50,000 visits in August!

I've heard people griping about how hard it is to make the move from Berkeley DB format to MySQL with MovableType, so I was kind of dreading it. But I knew I wanted to do it because there are some spam tools I wanted to use to keep the various spammers from trying to use this site to advertise their web sites.

I had Noel make me a MySQL login, and geared myself up for spending a whole evening working on this. I even blocked the time out so I would have enough time to finish everything.

It took five minutes just now, and everything is functioning perfectly, as far as I can tell. Maybe if somebody tried to see the site while I was doing it, they would have noticed the brief glitch, but I don't get that much traffic.

I just got an unsolicited call about a web job.

Weird. I thought the market had a lot more slop in it than that.

Note that I edited this to reflect a second call with clarification of terms. People can be very odd about wording when they are trying to convince you to do something.