Tag Archives: Links

Wow, I thought the spike in traffic might last a little bit longer

Last week I was excited by the prospect of increased traffic here when I discovered that a New York Times blog had linked to a 2-year-old post on this site.

I eagerly watched my hit count go up. The post received over 500 hits in the 5 hours immediately following the appearance of the NYT link. But wow, did the traffic drop off fast. I’m still getting a trickle of hits on that 2-year-old post each day, but my overall site traffic is back down to pre-NYT levels. Here’s a chart of hits on my site over the past month. Can you tell when the NYT link appeared?

For what it’s worth, I think the earlier jump in activity from late October occurred because that was right around the time I worked with my hosting provider to reinstate some third-level domains (such as coltrane.room34.com) for links to subsections of my site. I had used these third-level domains several years ago but they had been “turned off” for at least 3 or 4 years. I can only assume from the increase in traffic that there are still sites out there that have been linking to these URLs for all of that time, even though they didn’t work.

About the (potentially weird) Amazon.com links

In my ongoing efforts to crassly monetize my website, I’ve just added a new feature that synergistically leverages Amazon.com tools to dynamically embed targeted product links within my content. (Surely someone out there has a buzzword “BINGO” by now, so I’ll write the rest of this in the voice of a normal human.)

I’m noticing some weirdness in all of this, in terms of some random phrases that are triggering links to products I’ve never heard of, along with some other things that are too arcane for me to even bother identifying, because I’m a little embarrassed that I’m so friggin’ anal that I’d even notice them.

Anyway… most of the time, I think these links are pretty accurate, and it’s a great way for you to seamlessly transition from reading my drivel to lining Jeff Bezos’s pockets, not that they’re not already overflowing. Mine aren’t, however, and if you buy things from Amazon via links on my site, Jeff might just throw a bone my way. Thanks…

Welcome to the new room34.com!

The new WordPress 2.1-based version of room34.com is here! I’ve been tinkering with this for about a month now so I’m very excited to finally have it online. And I think WordPress has really taken a major leap forward with version 2. (My loyal reader may recall that I had previously moved to an earlier version of WordPress, only to abandon it a short time later. Frankly, looking back I’m just amazed that I actually used it for 8 months; it seems like it was much less than that, but maybe that’s just because I’m thinking about how I only had Drupal running for about three days.)

There are still a few things left to do: some pages have missing content or broken links; I’m still working on a top navigation bar with dropdown menus (for now the navigation is buried below the fold in the right sidebar… look for Points of Interest and the various links that follow); and there are a plethora of WordPress plug-ins I’m eager to implement.

I’m also moving the photo albums of the kids over into Gallery 2. There’s a lot of work left to do on that, so I apologize to family and friends who are looking for photos. They’ll be back online soon, I promise! (I mean, “I hope!”)

And finally… in the time that I’ve been working on this, I’ve written a few other new blog entries (six, to be precise), which I never bothered to post on the old site. But they’re here, below, so read on!