Okay, it's getting late into Friday night and I don't know how long I'll last so here we go.
Saturday morning- Hmm, looks like I didn't last very long at all. Right, so this blog of mine clocked up a million page-views earlier this week.
However, I can't say I feel like it's a milestone because much of the traffic on this blog seems to come from Easter Bloc countries. The Teeritz Agenda is HUGE in Moldova, if the monthly stats are to be believed;
The traffic sources tend to come from obscure Russian sites that are to do with roof repairs (I think. My Russian's gotten rusty since The Cold War ended. JK) and there was a period about a year or so ago when I was getting a lot of traffic coming from some sleazy porn sites, which was odd, to say the least.
Some of the traffic was coming through from some toxic, spam/virus-laden websites which seemed suspicious to me and I didn't click on the links to see what they were, just to be on the safe side.
So, I have to say that it doesn't feel like I clocked up this milestone number of views based on the quality of my blog posts. In fact, there was a time where my post about the Dry Martini was getting four or five hundred hits a day. Were there really that many people out there wanting to know how I mixed a Martini? I think not.
And for a long time now, my post for Ken Coghlan, about how to look for a decent wristwatch, has been the second-highest viewed post on this blog;
My true wristwatch-related posts, such as the Tissot and Railmaster reviews, seem to have gotten more genuine hits over the years. I say this because these two watches still generate a lot of interest on the internet and I think people are still chasing info on these particular watches. The How To Buy A Wristwatch posts scored high, probably due to the bland and generic titles of the posts. I would imagine that anybody who Googles the term 'how to buy a wristwatch' will land on my posts.
Other posts have such obscure titles that it makes me wonder why they get so many hits, but I have to assume that these posts are the one being skated through by folks on their way to Russian roofing companies or porn sites. I don't know how all this internet stuff works, so I just assume that my site is a piggy-back location for nefarious web traffic. From memory, I think a few of you with your own blogs have experienced similar issues.
My daily page-views usually number anywhere between five hundred to seven hundred, but they've been averaging around 1,200 to 1,500 hits for the past two or three weeks.
And this is why I didn't pop the champagne when this blog reached a million hits.
Basically, I think these numbers have been padded out artificially by crap.
Shame, really, but nothing to sweat over. It's just a little ole' blog after all.
I briefly wore the circa 1969 Omega Seamaster Chronometer earlier this
week. The dial on this watch has some slight discolouration on it. This
is something that I may try to correct at some point this year.It will be a fiddly and nerve-wracking process involving distilled water and lemon juice, but I've seen the results on the web and I figure it might be worth the risk. Worst-case scenario, I remove some of the lettering from the dial in the process. If that happens, I'll have to let Omega give the watch a full service and replace the dial. I'll let you all know how it goes.
A friend of mine got himself a 2008 model Porsche 911* recently. I caught up with him this week and he took me for a spin in it.
"Don't try and impress me", I said as I strapped the seat-belt on, mentally scanning the car's interior to see where the airbags were located (the dashboard, the door).
We took off sedately enough, but when my buddy got the car into a quiet residential street, he shifted
gears and put his foot down ever-so-slightly.
I didn't glance at the speedo as I felt my body push noticeably back into my seat, but it felt like we went from 40kph to 80kph in the blink of an eye.
My head spun slightly and the pressure in my eyeballs lifted a little as I felt the blood drain from my face. Is this what G force acceleration feels like to astronauts, I wondered?
The car slowed down seconds later, but I still felt dizzy for a few moments. As far as European high-performance sports cars go, I have always loved the 911. They look to me like a Volkswagen Beetle that's gone on a crash-diet. The DNA is clearly visible, especially considering that German designer Ferdinand Porsche designed the Beetle (in 1934) and his grandson, Ferdinand Alexander 'Butzi" Porsche designed the 911 in 1959 (as the successor to the gorgeous 356), although the car didn't go into production until 1963;
A classic 1952 model Beetle, beautifully restored. There was a time when I was seriously considering one of these. Used to see plenty of them on the road back in the 1980s. Nowadays, they are a rare sight indeed.
A 1971 Porsche 911. If I could ever justify spending more than fifteen grand on a car, I'd get something like this. But it would cost me around four times that much. At least.
Wore the freshly-serviced Omega Seamaster 300 Professional later in the week. It seems to be running nicely, although I haven't checked the timekeeping yet. The crown winds as smoothly as butter, making it feel like a new watch again. I'll have to give it a little more time on the wrist, to really put it through its paces.
Finished off the week with the Oris Diver Sixty-Five. I sat down with the General Manager on Friday morning. He has offered me a full-time role. I was doing thirty hours per week, but the workload has increased in recent months. I really like the job, but I was getting irked by the fact that some duties were not getting finished in time. For my liking, anyway. I normally plan a rough outline of my day while I'm on the train heading to work in the mornings, but these plans can often be thrown out of whack by some convoluted e-mail or phone call from a customer. This invariably ends up with my having to chase up a repair that was not part of my day's agenda. No big deal, because it usually just takes up five or ten minutes, but some customers can be a little pedantic, wanting daily updates as to the progress of their repairs, etc, and I just don't work that way. I tell them that their watch is being repaired as per schedule and is well within its repair turn-around time (four to eight weeks). If they begin to get unreasonable, I inform them that it is impossible for me to give them weekly updates due to the volume of repairs that we receive Australia-wide, and that their watch will be attended to in the order in which it was received. First in, first served.
Because there is such a thing as being fair to everybody.
Anyway, it's these little changes in plans that can tend to bug me a little, but I'm learning to deal with it better than I used to, having accepted the fact that plans can change in a heartbeat regardless of how carefully arranged the day might be.
The GM has always told me not to worry too much about these things, since all watches will be repaired in due course and that's the nature of the game.
So, I spoke to the GM and I'll be commencing full-time hours next week. This may mean that these weekly updates may not be as regular as they have been. This blog has always been updated on a weekly basis (most of the time, anyway) and this was mainly due to the free time that I had while I was studying, out of work, or working part-time.
A great deal of my day is spent in front of a computer and I've found in recent months that I'm less inclined to park myself in front of the laptop when I get home. Hence the reasons why these weekly posts have gotten shorter at times.
Still, I'll see how I go. Also, I've thought more and more about the content of this blog in recent months and I feel that, if I don't have anything to interesting to report, it's better not to write anything at all some weeks.
I'll be getting home later in the evenings than I have up till now, so I think I'll be spending some time thinking of how to best utilise my free time. I'd still like to give my writing a serious crack and I definitely need to make time for exercise. More importantly, family time is crucial.
We'll just see how it all goes. We live in interesting times, as the saying goes.
Thanks for reading and I hope you're having a great weekend!
*Silver Porsche 911 picture courtesy of carfolio.com
Thanks again to wikipedia for the info on Ferdinand Porsche.
Congratulations on the million page views! If we could only keep the spambots and other worthless hits to our blogs we'd have a more accurate picture of the page views. Still, one million is a nice milestone. Mine used to get hit with spambots quite frequently until I removed the Hermes 3000 header.
ReplyDeleteThe Porsche 911 is quite an impressive car. One I'll never be able to afford.
Congrats on your blog. I think the most important thing is sticking with it and being consistent in writing, even if it's not much, or up to your otherwise high standards. Too many blog have been ignored, then it becomes easier to keep ignoring them.
ReplyDeleteShare yr experience on the stats - since a few months also been getting more bots. The referral spam was a regular feature, realtively low traffic. But recently there's weird bursts of traffic that make the stats useless really. Can't understand what, where, or why - pattern doesn't fit a scraper, perhaps some search-engine really misconfigured a crawler :-)
ReplyDeleteThank-you, gents. The spam seems to have slowed down, but all the traffic from BS sites or phantom sites has increased.
ReplyDeleteAhh, well, not the worst thing that could happen. Never started this blog for any glory, after all.
@ Joe V, I'll try to post regularly, but I'll see how these full-time hours treat me. When all is said and done, I'll be getting home around 7pm each day and that really shrinks the amount of free time that I'll have. Still, I'll see how I go.
Rest assured, not all of us are bots. :)
ReplyDeleteGood to see you have an excellent taste in cars as well! Sadly old 911 have indeed become rather expensive over the last couple of years...