Some Observational Comments

So I was doing the maintenance thing last night and going through some of the old posts when I realized the most recent ones seem to have lost their humor. There have been a few, here and there, but we're definitely lacking those short runs of hilarity for which this blog was once known. Maybe I've gone all girly, but there has been a lot going on personally the past few months...

Actually, it's safer to say that November was a pretty shitty month for me, all the way around. There was the Google shakedown, then my XP computer went bust and I couldn't do much on the 98 box (but that's all over now), and even though I have a brand new computer (that can beat up your daddy... er, computer), I have yet to recover the site files I have been working on for the past two years or so. And November's cold weather and the return of steady rain (I am in one of the Southern states that suffered a summer drought like we haven't seen in a century) really brought on the pain from my Degenerative Disc Disease. Then there were some bill payment problems which are apparently still going on; last month, my cable payment was two weeks late and I found out the other night that my telephone payment still hasn't come through this month - I am going to have to find an alternative to my bank's automatic bill pay program.

Add to all of this the fact that I have to come up with $400 by January 7th to pay the corrupt county in which I live for a "crime" I never committed - a crime they couldn't even determine until four months after it had supposedly happened. Needless to say, I don't have it. But I am determined to come up with it, somehow... if only I had a kid to sell! But I digress; my lackadaisical approach to fatherhood has no place in this discussion.

I woke up really early this morning and for some reason was not angry; I have been waking up angry for weeks now and I am not 100% certain why - probably has everything to do with my butthole neighbors who insist on getting up at the asscrack of dawn and don't mind who else in the building knows it. Of course, all of this other stuff has basically everything to do with it, as well. I haven't been watching my regular news programs because I didn't want to add to my bad mood, and the continuing writers' strike has added to the lack of content. What helped my mood this morning was waking up to a really good episode of Angel I had not seen, followed by two good episodes of Charmed I had not seen (didn't think either was possible at this point!). And I got the new CBG yesterday, so I will definitely have something to talk about for the next day or two.

Back in July, one of our entries here got picked up by AOL.com and we had a banner day - over 1500 hits in a single night! Alexa and many of the other "ratings" sites responded by ignoring all of our hits for the entire month! Why, I don't know. If they thought we somehow fudged the results or did something underhanded to achieve them, well, we really didn't; I wouldn't have any idea how to do that. I had no idea it had even happened until like a week afterward (same with the Google PR thing - I really need to keep a closer eye on this shit) and had to do some serious poking-around to figure out how it happened! In fact, I really only know the hits came from AOL and went to one post, so I am only assuming they picked up that story for that one day; I only know that around 1500 hits came from AOL.com on a single day in July and went to a single post. And that Alexa and several other hits sites dropped us for the entire month - a month that should have single-handedly improved our overall popularity and authority ratings immensely across the boards.

That is why it is so imperative I do this maintenance: Google updates their PR thing quarterly, and that means the new ratings will be coming up in just over a month (hard to believe, ain't it?). Not to mention that I have to keep on top of these things so that whenever a story, or the entire blog, is featured on another site and we get an influx of traffic (hey, it really does happen; we've been linked to from CNN, InsideCable, MSNBC, AOL, CourtTV, and others), I obviously need to know this - at least within a week or so of it happening. I don't know to whom I can complain about being dropped for the month of July, but it may be too late to do it now. I just discovered we had been dumped like that a few weeks back; before then, I didn't even know where to go to check such things.

I've said before that the Google debacle did have some positive results. I think a lot of us got too complacent; we had decent PR we never really tried to attain and naively assumed it couldn't fall. I didn't even know what PR was until about six months ago! Now, I know all sorts of tricks and "hacks" I can employ to improve and maintain these things - not to "fool" Goober or any of the other monopolies, operating unchecked against me and other individuals and small businesses who will not pay them "protection" and fealty (sounds high-falutin' but think about it), simply to play their little game without compromising too much of myself and what I want to do here.

But this does take a lot of work to get started, and I have been running this for two years now without ever bothering to do any of these things... because I didn't know I needed to, nor how to go about it! So I know it's been slow and I will try to get back to cranking things out, but please be patient in the meantime and let me get this bit of hassle out of the way.

Oh - speaking of visitors! - I said that hits have been down since Google removed us from their results, shoved us around, and literally took our lunch money, but I was wrong! It turns out that, even though we were getting around 100 hits a day for the past 2-3 months, they were almost all going to a single entry, thanks to its being posted on several message boards and the like. I got to looking into it a few days back and feed subscribers are about 3x what they were then, which means that, while unique hits have slowed down for the time being, regular readers are up almost 300%!

Thanks!