One year ago today: May 11, 2020, backyard resident.
Five years ago today: May 11, 2016, peek at naked sidecar.
Nine years ago today: May 11, 2012, contemporary e-car comments.
Random years ago today: May 11, 2013, production line, ha!
It’s too early to wake up the neighbors by testing my chain saw, but I do come from a bloodline that would find nothing wrong with that. The early mornings are still cool enough to get a couple hours in. I’m afraid it is true, Matilda is no more. The hillbilly found some feathers in the vacant lot by his place. I liked that chicken. Here’s a less than dramatic picture for you. This is typical of the size of log that the electric chain saw should slice in seconds. Instead, the cut goes so far and stops. Then you turn the log over and so on.
Reviewing some blog stats, this publication is solid by the “metrics” that measure such things. We are in the top 5% for endurance, but that statistic includes a lot of news and other paid publications. Where would this blog stand in relation to similar works? We are approaching 6,000 individual posts, hardly missing a day since around 2006. Photos were a huge boon, but other than learning how to format for better screen appearance, the fundamentals of the blog, that is, a journal of the most outstanding events of the day (good or bad) has not required much alteration.
Readership is consistent, but where the daily visits used to be that average, I now get wild swings. The metric again. Here’s a circumstance where it fails. Elliott has a site where he sells a line of products. He’s totally into whatever “metric” the advertisers sell him and it usually centers on total visits. He compares his visits to mine, and yes, he does have ten times as many. In a recent comparison, he had 2,077 hits to my 204. You can see where that conversation went. They have him so sold, he even calls my vocabulary outdated. He says “unique visitors” while I use the database terminology of “hits”.
Test yourself. Which of us knows ten times as much about “computers” than the other? Myself, I would differentiate between a web page and a blog, but Elliott is your typical user who got into computers some thirty years later than I did, so has a “more modern” perspective and thus the generic grouping of all activities as “computers”. Elliott got his web page around the time I rejected the idea for myself because the true cost was hidden and I still had a day job. If you recall, I said it was around $10,000 before you sold a thing. Elliott insists he got his at a much lower price from one of those “internet mall” sites, but will absolutely not say another word about it. Here’s the test, how would you balance the following criteria?
A) How did the visitors find his site? Were they looking specifically for his page, or breezing past on a shopping spree?
B) Did his visitors stop and read his entire site? Did they return the following day? Unique visitor – unique guest – not same thing, people.
C) Define success by the goal. Did he sell something to every visitor to his site? If not, what percentage? Was it 10%, because that would be remarkable.
You see the complicatedness of comparison. He also bases much on the number of buttons and hot spots. My blog has three, namely newer post, home, and older post. I’m guessing but I’d say close to 90% of the people who visit my blog daily do read the entire text, or why bother showing up? I don’t serve milk and cookies. I know it isn’t 100% readership because sometimes I post just the Yesteryear, or the Picture of the Day, and have to return later. The result shows around 10% only look at those features and may casually scan the rest.
Nor do I accept his contention that paying “experts” to make his site better as a given. I have to keep fending off Google experts whose obsession appears to be making all blogs look and act the same. Among their confreres, they’ve largely succeeded. My blog is not dependent on successful sales and has survived many a depleted stretch. Furthermore, he tends to believe what the people selling him say, where I’m more keen on personal observation. I’m pretty sure when I get a long stretch of 85 to 88 people viewing my site every day for a month from a certain foreign country, they are reading the whole post—and yes, I count those as very unique.
Feta cheese.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
Cancel most of the work planned since my eye clinic says they have not yet received my labs. That’s dumb, I left clear messages for them staring a week ago to holler if there was any delay. I had to drive back to the lab, who gave me a contact number, where they confirmed the results had been sent the very next morning at 4:09AM. This is the scenario all of America has been headed for since 1985. Everybody’s in charge but nobody’s in control, and every screw-up can be blamed on somebody else.
The bottom line here is I need a very serious and expensive eye scan with a doctor present. But it is my vision which I’ve grown fond of over the years. These are last minute developments so cancel everything I had planned up to the 22nd. Except dinner with Alaine later this week. One does not simply cancel out on Alaine. You know, I just remembered she left that massive glass vase in storage back in Miami. I know JZ is feeling better and I bet the two of us could pick that thing up and put it in the van. That would sure make her happy. Get back to me on that.
Later in the afternoon, I got in the van and drove to Miami. Taking it easy, a four-hour trip, I got there after dark. It didn’t take long to remind myself why everybody hates Miami traffic. Bottom line, the police are afraid to ticket minorities for bad driving. Ask yourself how many times do you see with your own eyes that the person blocking the road or causing the delay is a specific ethnic before you are forced to draw conclusions? We may not know the exact number, but the number exists.
