Kool Aid Served Daily

I'm always surprised when I don't write new entries for a while and for some reason check the Popular Blogs at blogs.sun.com and find myself listed. I want to think it is because of my witty views on technology, but I think that is far from reality. Also, all of my attempts to artificially boost page hits have failed.

I think I end up writing about what people want to hear about - and when it comes to a technology blog, that is about facing problems and solving them. Figuring out your target audience is critical. Most people would view my blog entries as not being very interesting. I'm not trying to reach out to them, I'm trying to reach out to myself. Also, since I want this blog to have 1 identity, it is why I'm pushing the Serialized Science Fiction to a static web site and a blog at Behind the Scenes.

I'm not afraid to write an article about some braindead mistake I made in configuring a system. I'll also make sure to write something if I can't find an existing answer on the web. Going back to my earlier statement, I'm reaching out to myself - next time I have this problem, I know where I can find the answer.

I've suspected I had hit a target audience for some time and I think I can confirm this from reading the latest summary of page hits from whatever tool we use to track them. (Okay, I'll confess, it is SiteCatalyst from Omniture http://sitecatalyst.omniture.com).

About 10% of the hits were just to the root of the blog. I guess that means people read the new stuff. But the single most called page was grub: error 17, cannot mount selected partition - type 0xbf. Indeed, if I search on grub error 17 in google, it is the 9th returned page.

That article is from Feb 19th 2007. It has to be something that people are encountering enough. About 5% of my traffic from Fri. 1 Jun. 2007 to Fri. 30 Nov. 2007 was this single page.

So my summary on how to get the page hits would be:

• Don't worry about getting page hits.
• Write about what you would want to read.
• Write about a lot of stuff.

The more interesting content you have, the more page hits. And the more people come back, the more they will reference you in their blogs, or tag you at del.icio.us, or pump you up at Technorati, etc. You may never hit the top tags at Technorati, but you can carve your own niche.

I added some links to allow the RSS feeds for both Kool Aid Served Daily and NFSv4 in Action to be added to user accounts of the Alesti RSS Reader.

They will look like this:

www.alesti.org

I've seen a big spike on my blog today. Normally, it means I've put on a lot of new content. But in this case, it means I'm finally on the blog list for OpenSolaris.

Now I blog quite a bit about OpenSolaris and I never bothered seeing if I was on that page. But I started looking at it, saw the stuff for NFSv4 in Action, and wondered what the criteria was to get my feed pulled there. It is simple, follow the instructions on the site page.

I also like playing games with google and my latest is with kanigix. I invented the term last week and registered a couple of domains - kanigix.org. It took a couple of days for it to show up, mainly after my posts on creating a bootable x86 DVD.

But what I found was interesting were the sites which are Agrregators. Now, I saw someone else get mad about this, (wow, I was able to hit this one: Making Money With Someone Else's Writing?), but I figure the intent is to be seen. If you are ranting, who cares how the message gets out? If you are doing a technical entry, who cares how the other person gets help from you?

But, it should be the case that a reader can easily get back to where you blog. I don't care for the page hits, but I do care about being quoted or allowing someone to find something I did before I was put on the agrregator. So I've stuck a copyright section on each of my posts - it also contains a link back to Kool Aid Served Daily.

By the way, I found myself on planetsolaris.org and planetsun.org. Both of these made sense. Also, so does the The League of Professional System Administrators. Some of the others do not.

Also, if I was concerned with page hits, I think I would take the javascript from statcounter.com and figure a way to embed it in every entry and only have it count once.

Or perhaps it is as simple as a protocol for Agrregators to pass back hits to the site being fed from?

So, I'm trying to get kanigix.org in shape and I wanted to add one of those little icons up in the URL bar of the browsers. One google later and I'm at http://www.html-kit.com/favicon.

I followed the instructions, upload my .jpg file, and got a new resource. I downloaded the favicon.ico, did not get a virus, and then uploaded the resulting file to my website.

I then added the following snippet of html to my pages:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/images/favicon.ico" >

Note that I have to use special escape characters in the raw html here in order to keep a blank line from appearing. It should really be '<' and '>'.

Two weeks ago, I was the second entry for 'Tom Haynes' on Google.com. I wrote about it in Finding Myself on Google.

Well, I'm now number one and two. The first is this blog. I've checked on and off for a couple of years - call it vanity or call it a deep rooted interest in search (a large basis of my dissertation). I've never gotten this close to the top.

Now to work on getting higher in Yahoo!, I'm only fourth there. :->

I don't know why I blog. I mean, I know I like to write Science Fiction stories and I think I have a lot of interesting things to share. But, I'm normally very reserved and quiet shy. I'm insecure about my writing - I had no problem in publishing technical papers or making technical presentations. But then again, they aren't a window into myself.

I've never had a diary or a journal - I don't even like keeping one at work.

Why then do I blog? I don't know. I try to tell myself no one is reading it - but people at work send me email about my entries. I also get very competitive with the Daily Hits rate. The internal mailing list talks about how inaccurate the counter is - it goes on page loads. They all mention statcounter.com, which counts hits based on javascript code running. It paints a different picture of how busy my site is each day.

I like looking at the pretty map on clustrmaps.com. Ignore for a moment the information you deliever whenever you querey any web page. This app is really quite powerful in letting you see which locations are accessing your product.

And finally, I tag all of my article in the hope that technorati.com will start giving me a higher ranking.

Why do I care who visits my site? The numbers really don't mean much. I could write a robot to drive my page count high. I could add keywords or pictures to make Google searches hit my page. As a matter of fact, we don't have a metric to tell us how the big hitters in our ballpark compare to other blog sites.

One thing I did find, the more content you put on your blog, the more hits you get. That actually makes me feel better. When you first get a Sun blog account, you get instructions telling you to write about what you know. I decided to do technical accounts of getting gear to work or debugging NFS problems. I also decided to write about company culture. I think I've done okay on both fronts.

But I also like to write Science Fiction. I've decided to not just share my stories, but to also start sharing the mechanics behind writing the stories. I don't know if I do it like other writers.

I also want to start recording when I change my blog appearance. I flipped through several styles early on. I eventually picked one and started heavily modifying it. I wish I had recorded what drove me to add each little bit. I've tried to add some of that flavor here for the counter information.

So one of the things I've been doing since I started blogging is seeing if I'm popular on Google. I'm now the second entry for Tom Haynes in the web search. I don't think I was even on the page a month ago. I'm still on the first page for the pictures. I don't fare too well for Thomas Haynes in any category.

If I throw in some additional keywords, I'm sure I'll rise higher.

Amazingly, the match for Tom Haynes goes to my really old page at loghyr.com.

What I really found that was interesting was a link to Interaction-Design.org. The page was created '28 Apr 2000'. And this is the first I've seen of it. My bet is that someone found some bibtex entries of mine from back in the research days and created a page. Ahh, I published some case-based learning in predator-prey games back in 1998 in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies.

So I added a picture and a link back here. What I really find interesting, and which I'm going to steal for here, is a little search table:

By the way, I would be remiss to not cite the copyright notice put up there by Interaction-Design.org at copyright.

Okay, I added a StatCounter to my blog. I've been seeing emails go by about doing it, I had some down time, so I learned how to do it. Basically, just go to StatCounter to get set up with the minimal counter. It will give you some HTML to add to your web pages.

I added it to the '_day' template. I got there via 'login' -> 'Preferences' -> 'Templates' -> '_day'. I added the link there, it isn't where I'd like it, but that is a nit. Also, I decided to add the javascript code to the 'Weblog' template to keep it up in the 'head'.

I figured this out via the User Guide link at the bottom of the page. Sounds easy, but I was Google crazy for a bit.

When tracking, you do get to see the IP (but you need my account name and password to get in) but that is it. Anyway, it also reports how the entry was linked to. I found an entry which came from http://www.google.com/ig. Okay, I clicked on it and evidently Google allows you to have a home page - basically it is the search engine with your own content. Now, I still can't tell who was on this page either - you have to login.

Well, gmail is my primary web email (i.e., for when I can't ssh past my firewall), so I logged in. I added weather for Tulsa, stock info for NTAP and SUNW. By the way, I guess I'll stop using Yahoo! for my finances now. :->

It also allowed you to add your own content - I thought I would create a section with my favorite humor:

• Dilbert


• User Friendly


• Get Fuzzy


• News of the Weird


• BOFH

Okay, I mainly listed them to see if I could create a list in a blog.

But, I couldn't do that. I could however search for content, so I searched for NFSv4. One of the returned items was my blog! Okay, I added that and it was really, really neat. Until I get a screenshot, it basically showed the title of the Blog as a section header and had the last 3 blog entries as linked news items. Sweet.

Okay, here is the image, which some stuff zapped for privacy:

Note that you can drag and drop the sections to different locations.

Technorati Tags: Google