More stupid housekeeping and moronosphere history

As long time readers will know, xmas eve, 2013, my friend Brandon Dawson died of an overdose.

Brandon – despite the obvious – was a kind and generous human being, and a good friend, and i’m forever grateful to him for hosting so many of my (and my friends) blogs, free.

However, his demons won out, and when he passed away, he left me locked out of our server (he’d recently updated passwords, and didn’t give them to me, or did, and I didn’t write them down). I struggled to get access to our server, but was unable to do so.

Several friends lost blogs when the server was taken down; I was lucky to be able to export all my writing from THIS blog, though I lost a few others (one that was sort of a secret, exorcising the demons and confess the sins sort of thing which is probably better gone, anyhow).

As i’ve mentioned, I was able to recover nearly 1400 entries; everything, basically. But in rebuilding all of this, i’m finding a vast number of broken links, including internal links (my direct links used to be at site/blog/archives/<title>.php, but is now site/title), lost images/songs/etc, as well as the simply outdated (links to news articles, links to now-gone blogs, etc)

All in all I had more than 1500 broken links. I’m gradually repairing all this (sometimes by deleting no longer relevant entries, sometimes by just un-linking, and going forward, sometimes updating links). But, it’s quite a bit of work.

Why do this? Well, first, broken links hurt SEO, which I am trying to improve to bring in more readers (and by more, I mean, higher single digit counts; i’m keeping expectations low here). But also, for the couple of friends who may delve into archives (Hi Liz!), broken links are annoying (and annoying for me as well).

I’m down to 1350 broken links as of this writing, but I think it’s just going to take weeks of a-few-at-a-time to get through it all, with the image posts being hardest (trying to figure out if I have the original images someplace, and then uploading, or replacing, or just un-linking).

or i’ll give up and quit dickin’ around and just wrote porn instead.

Mmm. Porn.

By the way I now have ‘subscribe’ option for new updates, when you comment, so if you’re aching to know the second I put up something new, comment and look for subscribe options.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics

It’s been interesting to look at stats since I got more active.

I used to be able to judge engagement by comments, and had sitemeter (I think it was called) to measure hits. I learned a lot as to who was hitting from where, and how much, and when someting had gone viral (as when I blogged about Snakes on a Plane, back before it was actually made, and my post went viral when the whole SOAP thing took off).

However, in the last 10 years or so, things have changed a lot. Far more users have privacy blocks of various sorts, including what’s built into IOS and MacOS, as well as various browsers.

The tracking tools I have are vastly less informative than in the old days. Thus is a good thing in privacy terms, obviously, but, as a blogger who wants to know if anyone is reading, the whole thing is a bit of a mystery.

I had a burst of hits a week or so ago, which I took to mean a combination of SEO and frequent updates (and a big increase in my activity on Twitter) were paying off, as was my own increase in activity on blogs; i’ve been liking and commenting anywhere I can find, and was seeing increase in activity in logs. But, no increase in comments, which is the only way I can actually tell if I’m getting read, and, after that burst a week ago, there’s a sudden drop both in stats data, and in ‘like’ activity.

It’s all a bit of a head-scratcher at this point, and i’m back to assuming that, aside from one (new) friend i’ve made, i’m not actually getting much readership, even if something hits my posts and pages.

But, the point isn’t just being read (though it helps), the point is to write more. For me at least, shark-like, I have to move or die. If I stop writing, I fear I won’t start again for years.

So as much as possible, daily updates will keep coming.

It’s not that I lack things to write about; it’s that I lack time to write about all the things I wish to, and often don’t start for fear of doing a half-assed job.

As always though, if you read this, please comment. I don’t need a real name, or a real email, you can put junk in there. But I do like to know someone got this far down the page.