January 2004

Now in the Technorati top 15,000

by Suw on January 31, 2004

Just found out that my wee blog ranks 14,647th in the Technorati cosmos, which is not bad going considering that it indexes 1.6 million blogs. Technorati ranks not on traffic, but on inbound links, which is I suppose both a measure of popularity and interestingness, as people have to first know about you in order to link to you, and you have to be writing something worth linking to in order to get a link.

I find myself to be rather pathetically chuffed at being in the top percentile of bloggers. I know I shouldn't care, but I do, really. Ok, so I'm not Gary Turner, up at 90th, but gimme some time and I will be.

Measuring the vital statistics of my blog is rather tricky though. We all know I suffer from chronic hitnosis, but the last couple of months the stats provided by Blog-City have been unfortunately skewed by spammers. December's figure was something like 36,000 hits, which was patent bollocks. This month's hit count is up to 21,428, but Nedstats insists the figure should be more like 4,000. Ok, so Nedstats can't count my RSS feed hits (5,140 for Jan so far), but even when you add that in, it's still only around 9,100 hits. That's still half the 'official' figure.

Thing is, even if I can rationalise the hits numbers, that still doesn't tell me all that much. Hits do not equal visitors. Blog-City have said they'll implement full downloadable logs at some juncture, so hopefully that will happen soon. Then I can do my own analysis and draw probably completely different conclusions.

More interesting than all that, though, is why am I so fascinated in this? I always have been – for almost every site I've ever run I have obsessively combed through the stats whenever I've had the chance. I shall start doing that again for Clwb Malu Cachu and Get Fluent soon, now I've got them both on a decent hosting service with reliable stats info. But at least I have a business reason for doing those two.

For this blog, though… is it really just down to ego? I'd really like to think not. I think it's more a fascination with you, the reader. Where do you come from? When do you visit? How often? Sadly, the one thing my logs won't ever be able to answer is Why?

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Not content with Fox…

by Suw on January 31, 2004

Now GT's on CNN! And I missed that too! Pfft!

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Orkutslut

by Suw on January 31, 2004

If Orkut only ever does one useful thing, then it will have been showing me pictures of all the #joiito dudes.

If it does two, then the second will be introducing me to A Subtle Sweetness. Any blog that recomments peanut oil for cooking in has to be worthy of further inspection, and has to be written by someone after my own heart. I rarely cook in anything else, and if I do have to use a different oil, it's olive oil.

But, if I'm going to steal some content from Maciej Stachowiak's blog, it'll be:

Have you ever wondered why some words or expressions, like “inept” or “disgruntled” are only ever used with a negative prefix? What ever happened to the opposites of these words? What would life be like if we used them all the time?

Actually, I'm still waiting for John Peel's 'begruntled' to catch on.

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Procrastination is the thief of time

by Suw on January 31, 2004

And when the bastard gets nicked he's going down for 15 to life, I swear.

The only useful thing I've done today was one script review. Admittedly that was fairly worthwhile, but really, not worthwhile enough to redeem the rest of the day.

Tomorrow… I shall pack. I shall do another script review. And I shall do something towards getting Clwb Malu Cachu back up.

Expect progress reports.

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My new dating policy

by Suw on January 30, 2004

And don't you forget it.

But in the meantime, go visit GapingVoid and buy me some blogcards as a token of your affection.

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Timesinks

by Suw on January 30, 2004

Bloody IRC. Can't get anything done for the interesting chitchat in #joiito and #cym. I'm going to have to get the better of it soon, just as soon as I've delt with Orkut.

Must stop playing on the internet. I have scripts to review, my own to edit, boxes to pack (up to 30 packed now), and blogs to write!

Aaah, timesinks. Dontcha love 'em?

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Pickled baby dragon found in garage

by Suw on January 30, 2004

Via Neil Gaiman comes news of a pickled Victorian baby dragon, found in a jar full of formaldehyde at the back of someone's garage.

It may be a fake, but it's such a cute fake! Whoever did it might have been intending to defraud the British scientific community by passing it off as the real thing, but it's a shame they were born a hundred odd years ago, because they'd do well as a fantasy sculptor now.

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The one time I'm not being force-fed a steady diet of Fox News and Gary Turner goes and gets interviewed on it! Isn't that just typical? Mind you, maybe it's better that way. My squeals of excitement at seeing Gary on tv could possibly have broken windows for miles around, and that wouldn't be useful in this weather.

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One room empty

by Suw on January 29, 2004

The office in the loft is now empty. All the eaves are now no more than hollow spaces home to spiders.

I was up there, looking out of the window at the fields and woods that surround us, wondering how it was that I've lived here since I was six, yet I've never walked up the little hill out the back. It's covered in fields except for a crown of woods on its head. I always looked at it and thought to myself 'I must walk up there one day, and look back across the valley and see if I can spot our house', but I never did. It's not as if it's much of a distance away, or even a big climb, it's just that was always there, infinitely procrastinable.

This move is making me view the whole area with the eyes of a stranger. For example, we never used to shop in Ringwood. Ever. Wrong side of the A31. Instead we would go to Ferndown and complain about how few shops there are there. Now that we're moving to Verwood, we're going to be far closer to Ringwood, so we've started shopping there. Got a pass for the car park and everything. Suddenly, we're discovering that the shops in Ringwood are rather good, and that it's not all that difficult to get to at all, even if it is on the wrong side of the A31.

Funny how moving no more than a few miles is like moving countries.

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I just packed my favourite rock

by Suw on January 29, 2004

Say nighty night to my favourite rock, everyone. He's going buh-byes for a while, whilst we move.

In case you were wondering, I've had this rock since I was a kid – it's a piece of serpentine, picked up on The Lizard in Cornwall. It's possibly why I did a degree in geology. Well, that and the pretty pictures of gem stones in Dad's Readers Digest Atlas of the World.

Update: Is it just me or does the rock look like it's levitating?

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I did have something to say…

January 29, 2004

No, I did. I opened up this tab with this blog admin page in it specifically because I had something important to say. It was something short and pithy which would really have made you laugh. Well, that's pre-senility for you.

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Poo truck's here!

January 28, 2004

We don't have mains sewerage here – too far off the beaten track, apparently. Instead we have a local mini sewerage plant that serves just these eight houses. That's an improvement on the old system, where the waste would just sit in the cess pits until collected fortnightly by the council, but we do still […]

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Two degrees of separation

January 28, 2004

Between lil ol' me and Steven Spielberg. The link? Why, the inimitable Joi Ito of course (pics). They say that the power of networking lies in the weak links, the people you sort of know who know someone you need to know. If this isn't a weak, yet potentially rather spiffy, link, I don't know […]

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Well, that was interesting!

January 28, 2004

Mum teaches of an evening and has a rule that if it snows, she doesn't go. No one would turn up anyway. This week's forecasts of snow have, though, been met with some derision and the repeated refrains “Oh, they can't forecast snow!” and “It never snows here anyway”. Which is true. It really never […]

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There was a young lady from Bournemouth…

January 27, 2004

It's not often you get limerick composed in your honour: Suw, our blogging friend from near Bournemouth Watched Trumpton while feeling forlorn. Cuth- bert Dibble and Grubb Became her social hub, and beside her, covered in popcorn, Knuth. Admittedly, The Limerickster had a few problems with rhyming 'Bournemouth' – which should be pronounced 'bornmuth' in […]

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