davintosh

I changed the website theme a few years ago, but now that President Obama’s days are numbered, it might be time to change things up a bit with a new website visual theme. Donald Trump won the election. That fact doesn’t thrill me, other than that it means Hillary Clinton lost, but I’m cautioiusly optimistic about the prospects for the country with him in office.

True, he’s no prize, but I’m still hopeful that his Presidency will work out well for the country. And it’s that optimism that makes me think it’s time to change the theme. It will take some time to find one I like and to tweak it to work well with my content, so watch this spot for news of the change.

Last week saw a huge jump in this site’s visitor count…

Doesn’t matter which counter I check, they both show a bit of an increase after Christmas, with a huge jump on January 2. All that is attributable to an Instructable that came up last week which on a $200 Paint Job; the writer included a link to my Cheapskate’s Paint Job post. The big jump happened when that Instructable was featured in the email newsletter. Traffic has dropped off a bit since then, but from the Google Analytics info it looks like there is still some traffic coming from that link.

You know, I was thinking of putting up an Instructable on the Rustoleum paint job, but never got around to it. Probably ok that it went this way; I would’ve felt guilty about posting a link to my own post in an Instructable, but since someone else did it, it’s all good!

A milestone slipped by me over the weekend; 20,000 visitors to this site, as measured by my Sitemeter account. Fifteen thousand went by without much hoopla, but thought I’d at least mention it for twenty.

Looking back at my other posts celebrating other milestones, the pace is picking up a bit; 10,000 was towards the end of June last year, so it took about nine months to add 10,000. Before that, I hit 5,000 in early December of 2008; adding 5,000 took a little over six months. We’ll see how quickly 30,000 comes. The one constant is that Google is my best friend; direct hits to the site are few & far between, but there’s a pretty steady stream of referrals from Google searches. The most recent favorite is my post on the Citroen CV2 Rat Rod, but the Ford Freestar trailer wiring post and the Plymouth minivan instrument cluster post remain perennial favorites.

At the risk of letting the exuberating get out of hand, I celebrated the occasion by picking up a roll (chocolate-covered Bavarian cream-filled Long John!) from Sunshine on my way to work today.

Yeah; I really know how to live.

Where was I when this new milestone was passed? I dunno, but it blew by on Nov. 30 and I totally missed it. Come to think of it, 4,000 went by just as stealthily, but I guess you shouldn’t have too many milestones.

According to Sitemeter, somebody from Kirkland, Washington, was my 5,000th visitor; he/she did a Google search for “Pat Rooney Hawaii” and ended up here, probably because of the post I wrote a while back about my cousin Pat’s WubbaWubbaWubba.com site. Of course, it’s not exactly 5,000 visitors — lately my cookie setting to ignore visits from the default browser on my laptop has been ignored — but close enough.

I’ve got scripts for both Sitemeter and Google Analytics running on my site; most days their numbers jive, but others… Wow are they off.

Just two short months ago — June 10 — davintosh.com hit the milestone of 2,000 site visits, as recorded by Sitemeter. I commemorated that event with this post.

Now it’s August 17, and it looks like that number will likely break the 3,000 barrier sometime today. Two months; how about that! It took about 21 months to get to 1,000, 7 months to get to 2,000, and 2 months to get to 3,000. Most of the hits still come from Google searches. Others come from comments I’ve made on Jalopnik, Neatorama or elsewhere.

Even though the numbers are climbing and Google has been a good referral, the visitors that come here to read what I’ve written for the sake of reading what I’ve written are few. Most come here looking for something specific then they’re gone. I guess there’s nothing terribly compelling to draw people here. I’ll have to do some thinking on that…

Oh, and the Google Adsense ads that were added… So far I’ve earned a whopping $3.29. At this rate it’ll be decades before I get to the $100 mark that’ll warrant a check from Google. Patience.

Yes, that’s me alright. I love to take on a new project, and am just as ready to set it aside to start the next one.

That’s true not only in my home improvement projects, my bike projects, my automotive projects, my work projects, etc… It also holds true right here on my WordPress blog. Right now I’ve got 50 posts that I’ve started, worked on a bit (some more, some less) and have abandoned. 50 of them. That’s pretty pathetic.

So my new project(!) is to clear out some of the dead wood from my pile of WordPress drafts. The first of that group was the ebike post that went up this weekend; I started that particular post back in October or November. Seven months to complete a post is really pathetic.

Some of them I will have likely lost interest in (obviously), and others have more than likely become out of date and wouldn’t make sense to finish up & post. At any rate, I hope to have some slightly fresh content gracing this collection of 1’s and 0’s in the very near future.