New: Milestone: 11 Million Hits (plus gratuitous Taft domain pestering)

Wow, it's the site's eleven-millionth hit.

195.225.178.21 - - [20/Feb/2008:06:20:03 -0400] "GET /anecdotal/hunt/15/darcy_ian.html HTTP/1.1" 200 853 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"

If you look at this hit in isolation, it looks like someone is browsing a page with a photo of Darcy & Ian of Team Taft on a Raft (more about that team later). But this "someone" is probably a robot. If I look at other hits coming from the same IP address, there are a few of them per second; this thing moved faster than most humans would click. It loaded many photo pages--but not the accompanying photos.

OK, that hit's not so interesting, but it gives me an excuse to talk about webmasterly stuff. Since the last time I hit a million-milestone, Microsoft Live Search created a site for webmasters where we can glimpse what Live thinks about our site. It's pretty cool. (This is probably one of those times when I should mention that my opinions are mine; I don't speak for my employer.)

Their site is new, still "finding its legs." I find it confusing (but figure it will improve in the months to come). It says that they indexed 19,500 pages on my site--but my site has less than 3000 pages; less than 8000 files. I asked about this on their support forum, but never got an answer. OK, that's confusing, but overall their site is really useful!

They give a list of the top five pages on my site:

  1. New
  2. Comment: All of the Comments
  3. Seattle/Vancouver Road Trip Travelog
  4. 36 Views of Seattle's Pier 86 Grain Terminal
  5. New: the Book Reports

I'm not sure how "topness" is measured here, but this is an interesting collection of pages. It might measure how many people choose to visit those pages from a Live Search--many people visit that "All of the Comments" page (but I think they go away disappointed... at first they're so happy to find a page that mentions both "St Louis" and "wh*res", but then they find out that those phrases came from totally separate emails...).

What else does this Webmaster site let me do? I can provide them with an email by which they can alert me to problems with my site. I appreciate this feature very much. If evil spammers take over my site, I want to know. Heck, the taftraft.com domain expired a few days ago, and now it's just showing boring rafting ads. Wouldn't it be nice if MSN live had some way to tell Team Taft on a Raft about that? You bet it would. (I mailed Ian at his berkeley.edu address, was there a better thing to try? Can I renew a domain for someone else? I am not enjoying the rafting ads.)

Especially interesting was a list of top sites that link to me:

  1. Graphic Novel Review » Realism/ Slice of Life
  2. Graphic Novel Review » Literary
  3. Vishwas M S Curriculim Vitae
  4. Divided Review Project: Page-by-page Review of Prank the Monkey, the ...
  5. Graphic Novel Review » Autobiography
  6. Graphic Novel Review » Fantagraphics
  7. Graphic Novel Review » Elsewhere on the Web
  8. Graphic Novel Review » Elsewhere on the Web: The Squirrel Mother and ...
  9. Graphic Novel Review » Megan Kelso
  10. Piaw's Blog

Most of these are the result of one blog post in Graphic Novel Review. In this article, the author points out that I am a philistine for not properly appreciating Megan Kelso's comic book "The Squirrel Mother". Which just goes to show that there's no such thing as bad publicity.

Thank you for reading!

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Posted 2008-02-20

 Piaw Na said...

Hey, I'm so glad I got in at #10!

22 February, 2008 14:53