Sunday, March 30, 2008

Some Random Crap

If you're looking for the round-robin writing game, Sophie From Shinola, its here.
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...that I shall now allow to leak out of my head. First, since "Crap" is in the title, I'll mention that two days ago, I had to side-step a pile of emerald-green dog crap on the sidewalk. Immediately, a few things came to mind. First, I wondered if this was some left over St. Patrick's day prank? Or had someone fed their dog green beer for a week to create this work of art? The second thought was that I needed to get a picture of said pile of emerald-green dog crap to send to the folks at NewYorkShitty.com, a site dedicated to documenting piles of dog crap in NYC. (I shit you not. And, no, there's no pun intended.) The third thought was that GF had my camera, so I couldn't take a picture except with my cell phone. The fourth thought was that I couldn't remember how to get pictures off of my phone and onto my computer, so why bother. The fifth and final thought was that I should go look at newyorkshitty.com just to confirm that it was still there, and when I did a few minutes ago, I discovered that it seems to have shifted its focus to shitty buildings, so nothing lost.

Random crap, the second. Here I am blogging for a second time on Sunday in spite of the fact that I know blogging on a Sunday is like the tree falling in the forest with no-one there to hear it. It is howling into a gale. It is spitting into the wind. It is a fart aimed upwind. My sitemeter tells me folks have visited today. I got an email which clearly referenced today's earlier post. Yet, no comments. None at all. Yet, do I neglect you faithful visitors. No, I most definitely do not. Do I begin speaking in odd archaic cadences? Yes, yes I do. Is it too much to ask for a few well stated non-sequiturs in return? I think not.

Speaking of sitemeters (smooth segue, huh?), I've realized that there are two problems with mine. First, if someone visits only the front page without navigating to any other pages, their visit registers as zero time spent on the blog. I dislike that. Second, it doesn't make note of unique visits. I realize that being able to recognize unique visits would be a slap at my self-importance, but I still want to be able to see what those numbers are. Anyone know of a different sitemeter than the one I'm using that I might want to try?

Lastly, I thought you might be interested to know that the GoogleSearch that brings the most unsuspecting visitors is for "Dominos delivery" or some variation on that. This is followed closely by the search for "Amish underwear". I thought you might find that interesting. Then again, I'm often wrong about the things I think.

11 comments:

MWT said...

Statcounter logs people in a category called "unique visitors" - but it's entirely cookie-based, which means it's probably wildly inaccurate.

It always seemed sensible to me that to determine true uniqueness you should be logging the number of IP addresses, not cookies, but nobody asked me...

vince said...

My question would be why would anyone search for Amish underwear. But then, the Interwebs is full of unique and different personalities.

Steve Buchheit said...

Well, for one the Amish are big consumers of Victoria's Secret. I'm assuming here it's mostly the women folk who do so.

Shawn Powers said...

Yeah, sitemeter is frustrating on it's complete lack of voyeuristic completeness. Of all the choices, including running stats on your own server, though, it's the one I like best.

The unique visitors thing I guess would be nice to know, but it would probably be ego deflating anyway, so I don't look too hard for an alternative.

I do have stats turned on in wordpress, but I don't think it ignores bots properly. Google analytics I think is nice if you have eleventy billion visits, but not so great with a handful. I've tried a couple others too -- but in the end, sitemeter, with it's horrible ad affiliate, and questionable cookie feeding is still the one I choose.

Nathan said...

And Steve,

Somebody was just here from Florida and found their way in looking for you.

Random Michelle K said...

Speaking of random...

When I got my latest gardening catalog, I saw this product and thought of your weed problem.

But really, if you're going to go that route, then what you really need is this.

Just so you know I was thinking of you.

Anonymous said...

Sundays are quiet in blogland! And your stats miss a whole additional dimension - RSS feed readers, those who don't actually click on your site at all but read remotely. I'm not sure if there's any way to count those stats outside of using a third-party feed aggregator like Feedburner. Any more technical folks know of a way?

Nathan said...

Michelle, thanks for the thought, but I don't have a few isolated weeds coming up in the sidewalk cracks. I've got a forest of grass. Somehow I doubt the neighbors would show much understanding if I get rid of my weed problem by burning down a few houses.

Jeri,

'splain me how that whole rss feed thing works, please. I haven't really got a clue what it is.

Random Michelle K said...

But it would be FUN!!

In fact, it would be AWESOME! I mean, your OWN FLAMETHROWER! What could be better?

Hey. Why are you looking at me like that?

Great, now I see I'll be kept away from fire in the bomb shelter as well as breakable things.

Nathan said...

I'm starting to think we should just keep you in a padded chair in the middle of a very large empty room.

Random Michelle K said...

Awww... No one ever lets me have ANY fun!