Today's Topic : Site Statistics

I guess it shows what I know about the internet, meaning, not very much. When I set up this web site a couple of weeks ago I put a hit counter on it. Who doesn't have a hit counter, they are great. Now, as I mentioned before, I signed up for this web service called bravenet that lets you enhance your web site with various doo-dads like polls, forums, chat rooms, etc.

So, I added the counter and didn't think too much about it. However, the next time I was at my bravenet page I noticed it had an option to 'view stats'. Well, I sure got a suprise when I did that. It showed me the domain name of every person who had visited my site and what URL they clicked on to get here! What an amazing feature! Since I found this little gem, I have been fascinated by what people type into search engines to end up at my blog page. In fact, my blog page was registered with google and yahoo search engines within about 2 days of it's creation, and it seems to be kept current on a nearly daily basis.

So, as soon as I started expounding on various topics in my blog posts, all of the sudden I started showing up on some people's search requests. Currently I get about a hit every day or so from search engines. Most of the time what fascinates me, is not why my blog site came up as a result of search (the words are somewhere in my website afterall), but what really suprises me is that people actually follow the link! At any rate, for your amusement, here is the list of search engine requests people have done that have brought them here.

Search: "16mm Wizard of Oz print for sale" - no real mystery in this one.
Search: "dialouge to pickup women" - this is my favorite search so far. I wish this guy a lot of luck!
Search: "buckaroo bonzia mp3" - Sorry, no MP3's of the famed BB here.
Search: "custom purse picure print" - What was this person looking for!?
Search: "Number of mailing lists that discuss Lord of the Rings" - Talk about trying to get specific. If those words are on my site, then they are scattered far and wide.
Hit: Some kind of site monitoring service, called sitemeter, showed up as a hit to my blog. Kind of strange.
Search: "The Christmas Carol" - Out of the five million matches this guy must have found, I wonder why he clicked on my site??
Search: "John Ratcliff" by somebody from Nottingham in the United Kingdom. Well, there are a lot of Ratcliff's in England, I guess he was looking for his long lost cousin.

David Metzener redesigned his website and his link is back up again. The weblink has changed, so I am updating it on the sidebar. I also found the blog of an interesting fellow named Chugg, so I added his link to my site as well.

My friend David Whatley just scored some tickets for the midnight showing of the Two Towers at the Esquire theatre. I went to the midnight showing last year for the Fellowship and it was an unbelievable and unique experience. I saw LOTR in the movie theatre six times. However, nothing came even close to matching the experience of the first midnight showing. It wasn't that the crowd was rowdy, it was that the crowd was incredibly 'in to it', as well as both knowledgable and reverant. Every time a character came on screen for the fist time the whole audience would react. Every time a spoken word of dialouge was delivered word for word from the book you just *knew* every single person in the theatre had the same line memorized for years. It was simply amazing. In contrast, when I watched the film the next day in a sold out theatre at a shopping mall, the audience seemed dull and lifeless by comparison. I don't think anything else could describe the difference better than this anecdote. When exiting the theatre I heard someone comment aloud to their friend, "I can't believe we have to wait a year to find out what happens next." My God, the horror!

This year I am doing something quite special. I'm taking my 10 year old son Alex to the midnight showing. He is just now finishing up reading the Hobbit for the first time, and he is a huge fantasy buff. Alex is very into the "Lord of the Rings" story, and is very excited about us sharing this unique experience together. Well, if you are going to be at the midnight showing, I'll see you there, otherwise, be square. In fact, I should make that be today's poll question.

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