Sunday, January 18, 2009

TRAFFIC




As you probably can see, there is not much traffic in this blog according to the real-time traffic feed I have recently installed. I have decided to install it as the hit counter on top of the page was reporting hits of more than 100,000 a week. I am not sure how the counter works, or how the live traffic feed works, but certainly it is nice to know some people are interested on what I pour on this blog.

A friend of mine sent me some weeks ago a template for Blogger, and forgive me but I am not really knowledgeable on HTML so I still am figuring out on how to use the template. I am planning to overhaul the blog and use a better layout and template, also put in more things, but then I'm holding it for now as I want to be able to work on the blog in just one big sitting. I also am awaiting consents from owners of the blogs I frequent to add their URLs on my links, and I am planning to setup a sub-blog accessible through this one showcasing sketches that I have done over the years.

It is funny how I started this blog some four months ago thinking it may meet the same fate as other blogs I have started before, that is abandoned. Not that I have not gotten enough traffic in my previous blogs, but I really first thought blogging was just a passing trend and will quickly go away in the same manner as it came. My very first blog was way back in 1999, using Lycos owned Tripod services, which really is not a blogging service but rather a webpage hosting service. I favored using Tripod then because of the extent of customization it allows. I later have migrated to Yahoo's Geocities and several other hosting services.

Probably, the widest read blog I have had was during my employment as an internet cafe manager from 2004-2006. I created the blog around mid-year of 2004 and have maintained it up until mid-year 2006. It was with a flash-based hosting service, which allowed for fancy flash animations to hold the contents. It basically was part of the website I created for the club I was also working for then, and it had real-time audio/video streaming every night from the DJ booth of the club, which is owned by the same people as the internet cafe. We also had real-time chat, streaming exclusive mix set of house and urban music, a substantial gallery of events we have hosted, and a separate gallery for my drawings. The streaming contents though were hosted on another site as web 2.0 I think was not that popular then.

Some of the entries that have garnered much attention from my previous blogs mostly were about destinations in my island home- Catanduanes. I have a motorcycle then, which allowed me to go to most places within the island. Other contents my blogs before that had so much traffic were posts containing my sketches in pencils. The sketches may have not been tastefully done, nor it may not be artistic, yet I usually include with them lengthy descriptions or stories related to the sketches. I didn't have digital camera then, and the way I was able to digitize the contents/pictures was through scanners.

I have closed my last blog before this one some two years ago, immediately after my wife and I have decided to try our luck here in Metro Manila. I have contributed contents to other people's blogs or communities in between, but I have never setup another for myself until this one. With still only a handful of entries to count, I look forward into making this grow further. The fact is that I have still a handful of unpublished posts I am not ready to share as of yet. I really do not proof-read my contents so you may find some typo errors here and there, but it is important for me that it could be of use to somebody somewhere, so I make sure the information I post are correct and are up to date.

picture from: thisisbroken.com

No comments: