Saturday, June 7, 2008

Saturday Stuff

It's official. My fingers are too big. My keyboard is too small. My brain is too atrophied. I are uncompetent.

It seems like at least a third of the times I set out to post here, I get a headline typed (or like today, 1/2 a headline), and I publish the damned thing by accident. Sorry!

Stuff to tell you about:

Todd Wheeler is running his Summer Reading Contest again. He's giving out prizes every two weeks, and a Grand Prize when the whole thing ends on August 31st. Also, like last year, he'll donate $1.00 to a library for every book the contestants read up to a total of $100.00. Last year's contestants (which I was one of), read 51 books. Go on over there and help make him cough up the entire $100 this year.

Also, he's kicked off Episode VI of his blog. I snagged the first comment, for which I am moronically proud.

Also, this morning, I ran across the WebSite Grader. It's only marginally applicable, since it seems geared toward business websites, but it's kind of interesting anyway. How did I score?

Weird!

On the one hand, it gives me a website grade of 70 out of 100. What's that mean?

"A website grade of 70/100 for nathansmusings.blogspot.com means that of the hundreds of thousands of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 70% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others."

Incidentally, if I submit Polybloggimous.com I come up with a much lower score.

It goes on to tell you a bunch of other stuff, like the fact that I have 40 images on my website which makes the page load slower for visitors. That's a bad thing. My "Readability Level" is Primary/Elementary School. This is a good thing, since you want to market to the lowest common denominator, apparently.

My Google Page Rank is 4, but I couldn't find out what the hell that means...and if it's 4 out of 5, 4 out of 10, or 4 out of 100. Somehow, I think that could make a difference.

How 'bout my Traffic Rank?

E. Traffic Rank: Top 3.43 %

Alexa is an online service that measures traffic for millions of sites on the Internet in a similar way to Nielsen television show ratings.

Your website has an Alexa rank of 1,040,511 which is in the top 3.43 % of all websites.

How the hell do I get 70 out of 100 as a grade and only land in the top 3.43% of all websites. I demand a recount.

Update: I re-read this and it's worse than I thought. I originally read it as meaning 3.43 percentile which is probably right. But if it really means I'm in the top 3.43%, then clearly it hasn't got any idea what it's talking about.

I've been linked 1755 times. (I'm imagining that includes being linked multiple times on the same site, because I pretty damned sure there aren't 1755 unique websites that have ever heard of me.)

Hey, remember that 70 of 100 grade. Don't get so excited blogger-boy. Check that Technorati ranking:

B. Blog Ranking : Top 0.39 %

Technorati is a popular blog directory service. It measures the popularity of a given blog as compared to all other sites that have been submitted to its system.

This blog currently has a Technorati rank of 270,290, which puts it in the top 0.39% of blogs tracked by Technorati.

Update: This, too is obviously utter bullshit.

And, hey, I got to the bottom of the page and found out I could have just sent you there in the first place. Website Grader Report For nathansmusings.blogspot.com Read the report for yourself...or don't. Grade your own blog...or don't.

Update: So, now that I have a better idea of how far off the mark this thing really is, I'd be very interested in hearing how your blogs get graded.

Happy Saturday. I'm gonna go foraging now.



18 comments:

Sub-Tropicaligal said...

Thanks. I'll fix the time zone buggery...and hey, when you're on CT unemployment you need to find things to do like say...wash all the leaves on your tree!

Hey that's a damn cut kitty you got there.

One question: How do I simply respond to a particular comment to a post on my blog? I clicked on your name, and it just brought me here to your blog. Is there a better way?

Di

Nathan said...

It depends on which window you're seeing the comment in.

If you're on the page that includes the post and the comments, there'll be a "post a comment" link below the last comment.

If you were reading comments from clicking on "3 comments" or whatever on the front page, it'll take you to the page with just comments and a window to leave a new comment in. Yours will be the next one in line.

(When you click on a commenter's name, it'll take you to whatever they've linked...in my case, my blog.)

Nathan said...

And thank God, you signed off with Di, meaning you're not totally anonymous...and I don't have to type sub-tropicalgal every time I'm talking to you. (BTW, you seem to have an extra "l" in there.

Janiece said...

Nathan, my score was similarly screwy to yours. I got a 73, plus an Alexa rank of 4,422,041 which is in the top 14.58 % of all websites, 1,713 inbound links (yeah, right). HCDSM currently has a Technorati rank of 250,890, which puts it in the top 0.36% of blogs tracked by Technorati.

But here's my personal favorite: BlogLines, a leading RSS reader, reports about 57,134 subscribers to the feed through their system. This is usually a small fraction of the total subscribers to the feed.

57,134 RSS subscribers? I don't think so. It's doubtful that that many people have ever seen my blog EVER.

Judgement: POS.

Ilya said...

Reading your and Janiece's numbers, Nathan, I am not even going to try. I keep an eye on my site's statistics through various channels (Google Analytics, WordPress stats, Technorati, etc.) anyway - and they never give me a rosy picture...

Incidentally, Google Page Rank is on 10-point scale, and 4 seems a reasonable number for a blog with a few dozen "friends"...

Random Michelle K said...

My website is down.

Again.

Which is surprising, since I've used my hosting company for years and never had problems like this before.

Maybe when it comes up I'll check.

Nathan said...

Ilya,

I don't think I trust that Google rank any more than anything else I learned from that little exercise. I'm sure 4 is a completely respectable number; I just don't believe the source that found it for me.

Michelle,

Yeah, I was getting a little pissed I couldn't get onto your blog.

I need me some random.

Random Michelle K said...

Well, all I've accomplished so far is a nap, so you're not missing anything.

But I just did shoot some flower pr0n, and we're going to go get ice cream.

How that for excitement?

Nathan said...

We went for kitchen gadgets and groceries.

Now I'm too beat to cook.

Random Michelle K said...

If you check the google toolbar, you can see the page rank there. You're rank is indeed 4/10.

For whatever that's worth. :)

Nathan said...

Google toolbar? Where? I don't see any rating stuff

Random Michelle K said...

Check your settings on your Google toolbar to see if you have PageRang displayed. When you're on your main page there should be a green bar under the words "Page Rank"

Hold your cursor over than bar to get your page rank.

Also, regarding your earlier questions, the fact that Polyblogimous is simply a redirect to your blogger page is why you would have the page ranking differences.

In Technorati different sections of my site have different rankings.

Nathan said...

It's possible that since I didn't have a Google toolbar 'til a couple of minutes ago, I wouldn't have noticed that.

Thanks.

Steve Buchheit said...

I don't wanna share my rankings (they're depressing).

vince said...

Google's PageRank is officially explianed here: http://www.google.com/technology/. However, the PageRank you see on the Google toolbar is of little use. It is updated very infrequently by Google, take its relevancy with a grain of salt.

I kniw a bit about this because search engine optimization is a big part of what I do for a living.

Nathan said...

So Vince,

How did that POS so badly identify me as being at the very top of the heap as a blogger?

I mean, that's nuts.

Anonymous said...

Nathan, my results were very similar to yours.

Actually, the numbers indicating you're in the top 5% may not be that far off. I wrote an article on my now defunct tech blog on the blogging industry:

http://ungeekit.com/2007/06/19/blogging-slowing-or-changing/

The sheer numbers of blogs that are out there, and the super high percentage of blogs that are dead or spam-type endeavors, is truly depressing.

Given that most of us UCF types write frequently, if not daily, and tend to link to and from each other regularly, we are moderately active bloggers. That puts us fairly high in the heap.

Scary. Next stop, Dooce-level popularity, and blogging about religion and constipation. ;)

Anonymous said...

Many thanks for the shout out, Nathan!