davintosh

A mere six months ago, I wrote a post when my Sitemeter count had nearly reached 1,000 visitors. Now, the count has nearly reached the next milestone, 2,000 visits.

As I wrote last time, 2,000 hits isn’t much; many of the more popular sites will see traffic like that in an hour or less. The always excellent Lifehacker ranks number 8 in Sitemeter’s list of Top Visited Sites. I looked up their stats and they receive an average of 735,803 visits in a day; that translates to 30,658 every hour. Wow. In a way I hope I can someday hit numbers like that, but in many other ways, I’m very happy with my meager 11 visit daily average.

The site has changed a little since then; I applied a different CSS theme — Upstart Blogger Minim with a few tweaks here & there, added some Google Adsense addy’s to the left column (made a whopping $1.54 so far!)… But essentially the site is what it’s always been, just a random collection of stuff that I find interesting and take the time to write about. And I just think it’s kinda fun that others find some of the same things interesting, are able to find my little thread of the World Wide Web, and stop over, even for a short visit.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with Sitemeter’s performance. I’ve also got Google Analytics working on the site. And while Google does an ok job, Sitemeter is much more accessible; ie… no multi-click plus password routine to get to the summary of information. Also, there often seems to be some disparity between the stats produced by the two, and I’m not sure who is right. So I look most often at Sitemeter and sometimes at Google, but try not to overanalyze the difference in the numbers.

Sometimes I wonder if I obsess with the site stats too much. I’ll check them daily or so, just to see where the inbound clicks are coming from, and to see where some of the readers are located. Not surprisingly, most of the visits are from locations within the US, and many others from Europe. Not many visits from non-English speaking countries; again, no surprise there. The more popular pages are a bit more surprising, at least to me. Most hits come from search engine traffic; Google seems to like my content and helps my site to have a relatively high pagerank on some keywords. Sitemeter doesn’t seem to have a stat page that shows the all-time page ranking for the site, just for the last 100 visits. From memory, the pages that seem to consistently get a lot of hits are as follows:

Be A Good Do-Bee — Romper Room
YouConvertIt.com
Grandfather To The SUV?
Stupid Computer Trick — VNC Echo
’09 Dodge Purple People Eater
The Virtual KVM
Hillbilly Horseshoes
Citroen 2CV Rat Rod

The post that probably sees the most traffic is The Dash 30fx; it’s linked from at least two different Mac-centric sites and gets a Google hit or two on occasion. There was a time when I thought I might put that old guy up for sale, but in truly rare computer hardware, older is better, so I think I’ll hang onto it for a while longer. Might be able to retire on that someday. Or at least use it to prop open the door to my shop.

Another one that seems to be a perennial favorite is It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere, the post about the ’54 Ford Delivery with the boat-topped camper trailer. (I saw that rig at the Automania show in Sioux Falls last year; this year’s show is coming up next week, so I’m hoping it’ll be back, and I’m also hoping that there will be some other notable cars or trucks there.) The photos of that thing ended up on Neatorama, and from there ended up in several different places, bringing in hits from all over. One of the problems is that since that one went up about this time last year, I changed web hosts, and somehow in the process of moving, the link to that page got changed, but all the other linking sites still have the old one. So visitors from those sites get a 404 error page, but I’ve modded that to include the proper links. Not sure how helpful that was, but it’s something.

So here’s to davintosh, another six months older, and with ever-increasing popularity. It may still be fly-over country of the World Wide Web, but I see a bit of an upward trend here!

1,000 visitors, that is. Sometime today (or maybe tomorrow), I should cross the threshold into the four-digit realm, at least as it’s measured by Sitemeter since I first signed up in April, 2006. I should probably also note that I didn’t realize until just recently that Sitemeter allowed you to ignore visits from my own computer, so a fair number of that 1,000 is due to me checking on things. But since I added my computer to the ignore list, traffic has kept up a steady two or three a day routine.

That may not seem like much of a milestone, given that amount of time, and especially compared to some of the busier sites that will see that kind of traffic in an hour or less. But for me on my little outta da way corner of a minor thread in the World Wide Web, 1,000 is something!

So here’s to davintosh. The fly-over country of the World Wide Web!

It’s been a while since I changed the theme on this site; about 2005 to be exact. So yesterday I did some digging around amongst the freebies available at WordPress & found Upstart Blogger Minim to suit me quite well. Nicely uncluttered & clean, easy to read, three columns… what more could I ask for? I did throw in the requisite Thornton Chocolate on Sioux Quartzite header image, just to stay a little consistent. Besides, I like that photo. And the choc-o-late.

The main thing that prompted me to change was the addition of Google Adsense ads. I don’t expect to make a ton of money from advertising on my site, but I figure it can’t hurt. And it might also get my site back on the map on Google. Before I moved things to PowWeb, my post about the Hillbilly Horseshoes game would get regular visits, which hit the first page of Google results for many people searching for information & plans for it. Now, searching for the domain name www.davintosh.com only gets returns from a few more popular sites where I’ve posted & left a calling card. I’m not supposed to tell you to click the ads, so I won’t. Even if you do, I don’t think I’m any closer to retirement.

As for the new look, I hope you like it. All 7 of you who have visited today.

According to Mingle, this site is rated PG — Parental Guidance Suggested. And all because of four instances of two words; C-R-A-C-K and D-E-A-T-H (had to add the dashes so as to not throw in more of that nasty stuff!)

The First Dread Word comes up in some text I copied from another site telling about what happened to a boat when it flew off a trailer (it cracked), and the others from references to one of my favorite blogs, Say No To Crack. (Oops; I think I just added ‘crack’ to my site two more times! Dang; make that three! I’ll be at NC-17 before you know it.) The Second Dread Word comes from the post I wrote about Tsakhiagiyn Elbegdorj following his visit to Sioux Falls. Is it a bad thing to say someone was rescued from jail?

Sheesh; I’m gonna have to watch it!

It’s been over a month since my last post. Probably not unusual for a lot of writers (I don’t care much for the name ‘blogger’) — and it probably doesn’t matter much to the half dozen readers who hit my site in a month — but it bothers me a bit. So, whether it’s long or short, interesting or not, I’m gonna try to put something new on these pages every day.

And if most days go like this one, it’ll be coming in just under the wire. Like this one.

I’ve been kinda thinking about getting a real domain name that would point to my blog for a while now, but never really thought long and hard about it. Then today dotster.com had a deal going for 50 cent domain name registration. Heck, that’s almost as good as free!

Being a guy that has a hard time passing up a good deal, that got me thinking a little harder about a domain name. thornton.com is taken, as is davidthornton.com. davethornton.com is taken as well, but davethornton.net is available. Hmmm.

Then it hit me; davintosh.com! I started using davintosh as a username when I got into AppleFritter.com, and since the moniker identifies me with the computers I know & love best, that ought to be the name for my site. So look for www.davintosh.com to point to these pages sometime very, very soon.

Update: Well, I’ve got the domain name, but one thing I didn’t realize is that my hosting service will support only one domain name. Adding a second domain name would cost $2.00 a month, which is a little steep considering the service I have now is only $2.95 a month. I could also upgrade to the next package for the same $4.95, which would give me two domain names, twice the disk space and twice the bandwidth (like I’m maxing out what I have now; right!)

So for now, I think I’ll just park davintosh.com and think over the added cost. It’s not that terribly much, but is it worth it just for vanity’s sake?