Thursday, October 2, 2003

As it’s (roughly) the beginning of the month, I reset my blog referrer log today. Search phrases people have used to find CnV today include:

Muse Absolution
Sam Neill Australian film
hummingbird hawk moth
Concorde cause of death
chocolate
dewey decimal system
free download full album of Once Upon A Time in Mexico*
Welsh language pointless**
Blaine t-shirts***
pointless things****
toy helicopter David Blaine pictures

Anyway, going through the referrer log, I noticed that quite a number of referrals come from various webmail pages, which means people are emailing links to me to other people. Third party recommendation. That’s nice. Thank you.

I also found my way to my Alexa page, where someone called Darryl wrote a short, succinct and, I think, very accurate review of this blog. I don’t know you Darryl, but thank you very much! 😉

Alexa appears to be Amazon’s attempt at a Google-powered search engine and has a section which aggregates data such as traffic, speed, links to, reviews etc. about any given web site.

That’s a great idea, but it’s got a bit of a flaw. Alexa screws up because it lumps all weblogs hosted at Blog-City together and treats them as one site – it just can’t always tell the individual blogs apart. Thus although the page appears to be relevant only to CnV, the list of links to this blog is actually a list of links to the home page of Blog-City.com. If I try to edit the information for CnV I end up at the page for Blog-City.com instead.

It also seems that Alexa can’t consistently cope with the concept of permalinks in blogs. Instead of linking to the blog entry featuring the relevant link, it just links to the blog home page. With the speed that some blogs move, that’s about as useful as a chocolate teapot. In other cases it picks up links from ads in blogs instead of actual blog entries.

I like stats and I like links and I like tools which analyse them both for me, but I’ve yet to find any blog-related analysis tool that is in any way accurate. Many of them seem to rely on the Ecosystem data, which doesn’t pick up half of my incoming links. The rest that I know about are either horrendously out of date or simply no longer functional.

Call me a geek if you will, (and you undoubtedly should), but I think that part of the fun of blogging is the interconnectedness of all blogs, however it’s hard to appreciate whether one is starting to actually become interconnected without trawling through all the other blogs looking for links. And even my curiosity has a boredom threshold.

I love it when I find that a blog I read has now linked to me. I love it when people I’ve never heard of link to me. It even more cocklewarmingly lovely when someone links to me and says nice things about my blog. Someone please point me in the direction of a tool that takes the randomness out of finding out who’s linked to me, and I swear my cockles will remain toasty for weeks.

* Boy, they must have been disappointed
** Now I take exception to that!
*** Why? Why the fuck encourage him? Stop it immediately! (Unless the t-shirts say something like ?Take up a new sport – start Blaine Baiting today!?)
**** Good point!

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Eddie Izzard, again. I think this might be because I'm going to one of his gigs next week. In New York. I think I may have mentioned this once or twice to one or two people, but to say I'm a little excited is a bit like saying the Pope's getting on a bit.

This time, I was in a radio show audience when the presenter comes up to me with an earpiece and who's on the other end but Mr Izzard. Predictably, I lost the function of coherent speech and turned into gibbering gibbon, but Eddie was very gracious about it.

In real life, however, I'm actually cool, calm and collected around famous people. They're just people, after all, and when you start having conversations with them about whether Pet Rescue is better than Animal Hospital, you realise that many of them are not all that interested in doing the big star/fan thing. The only person to turn me in an incoherent wreck in real life was Gruff Rhys, in front of whom I lost the power of speech along with every single IQ point I'd ever had. He was very kind and patient with my stammerings though, but he has a smile that can empty my brain of all thought so I had to keep staring at the ground instead.

I also had a strange dream in which my right hand had been amputated above the wrist, along with half my left first finger. I've never dreamed of amputation before and them most peculiar part of my dream was that I could actually feel it when I touched my face with my stump, or when I tried to hold things with my damaged left hand.

Dreams for me are, on the whole, a sound and light affair. As a rule, they are not synaesthetic and don't include the senses of smell or touch. This dream, however, definitely included the sensation of having a hand that was no longer there, a strange mix of the phantom limb syndrome and the sensations of how the stump itself felt against my cheek.

I wasn't upset at all about the loss of my hand in the dream (I'm left-handed, btw). I was quite adept at doing things one-handed, although I do remember thinking 'Oh, I'll have to see if I can get a special keyboard because that curvy one I've got will be a bugger to use with one hand.' If anything, I think I was actually quite happy with my situation.

Hm, maybe I should start a new category for dreams, as I seem to be both having a lot of very vivid ones lately and blogging about them.

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