On the Site in General

SBG, the World's Greatest Online Magazine has been taking off. No, not taking time off, I'm posting quite a bit of stuff. I mean, readership is up. While I write this stuff for my own enjoyment, I certainly appreciate it when people read it and comment. Thank you for your readership. I want to talk about a few things on the site this Saturday morning.

Readership

I have several different ways to measure readership. I have been using StatCounter.Com as my primary counter since August 2004. That counter tells me the number of hits that I get, that is the number of times the page is loaded per day. It also tells me unique visitors, which I display on the page in the left column. By "unique visitors" it means people who load the page and haven't loaded it for awhile. So, if you come and visit and hit reload for an hour straight, you will affect the "hits" alot but not the "unique visitors". Last year (2005), I had 59,512 unique visitors and 92,069 page loads. So far this year, I have had 42,238 unique visitors and 89,196 page loads. Here is a little breakdown on month by month totals:

Basically, readership has doubled in the last five months. I can't really believe it, actually. I hope that some of it has to do with people actually liking what I have to say. Part of it, though, is a growing audience for blogs in general. If you read Aaron Gleeman's comments, there are still people finding out about him. So, the audience is growing. And when Mr. Gleeman links to my page, it is still an exciting thing for me, because he sends me a ton of new readers. This was an exciting week because for the first time I had five weekdays over 400 visitors. Guess which day Gleeman linked here: 401, 402, 413, 683, 414. Considering that there was no Twins game that night, I'd say he sent me well over 300 visitors that wouldn't have otherwise stopped by. Some of those people undoubtedly came back on Friday, which is traditionally a slower day for me. Considering that I am and apparently will always be exclusively blocked out of the consciousness of quite a large portion of the people who read Twins blogs, I am pretty astounded that more and more people are stopping by.

Wordpress provides me a counter and it says that I had 28,555 page loads in May, which is about 5,000 more than what statcounter.com says. However, it does not filter out spam hits, and believe me, I get the spam hits (more on that later).

My Internet Provider gives me statistics as well. It reports a much higher number of hits than anyone else (50,000 a day? Nah. 10,000? Closer). I am suspect about that and in fact I can't even access it right now. I will tell you that I have a huge amount of bandwidth available and I am adding (per my plan) about 8 times as much per week than I have used, total. In other words, I can support huge growth on the site, not to mention hosting my own video at some point.

Spam Fighting
The Spam Karma 2 program has been doing a pretty good job of nailing the spam for me. For the most part I like it because new commenters can get through without me having to wade through 200 spam comments to find their input. It isn't perfect and it has decided to ding one of my faithful commenters repeatedly, to my (and his) great frustration. I am sorry about that.

As a way to counter that, I have decided to counter that, I have decided to publicize that you can, in fact, register for this site. If you are registered and logged in your comments will automatically be posted. I wish that I could override Spam Karma 2 and say that certain name/email combinations are always allowed. I can't do that. I have to fight the spam, though, and Spam Karma is the least intrusive method I have found so far. I cannot believe that I am getting over 200 spam comments a day. It sucks that there are people out there bombarding sites like mine with shite like that. That is certainly one of the downsides of moving from Blogger. Overall, I like that I have my own domain and I like the WordPress tools, save the problems I have with tables. For those of you that understand, I have dumped the WYSIWYG editor because that seems to kill my tables. So, when you see a table, italics, bold, or underlined text or links, know that I am putting them in by typing the html by hand. Sucks, I know.

Bulletin Board
I definitely want to get the bulletin board up. I am frustrated by that. I had it running for a while last weekend and then the damn provider sent an e-mail with a new version and I should have been able to dump files in without effing the whole thing up. But, I effed the whole thing up. Now, another new version came out. I'll try again and make sure it's stable before I announce to the world that it's running.

Comments
It's gonna take a lot for me to delete a comment. Sometimes, I can get ornery and say some stupid stuff. You are encouraged to call me on anything that I write. If you think I'm inaccurate, stupid, an a-hole, let me know. I've not come close to actually deleting a comment or banning a commenter. The thing that makes the site interesting is feedback, so chime in.

Future of the Site
I intend to keep plugging along. I would welcome contributors. For example, perhaps Moss could write a weekly column detailing his love for ScruFi. And hey, I hear frightwig is bucking to write a weekly KG for MVP column! Seriously, though, if you are interested in writing something for the site, let me know. It doesn't take much to start your own blog, I know. And there are other places to write. But, if you'd like to write something here, I'd like it, especially if you have a specific topic that you want to cover. For example, if you'd like to write that "I-Don't-Get-SBG-Jeter's-Not-God" article, let me know. If you are a regular visitor/commenter and want to write, register and I'll give you author's privileges. Your articles will automatically go right on the front page, knocking my stuff down one notch. I will retain editor privileges, but unless you advocate overthrow of the government or something similar, I'll let you spout off.

In summary, I want to thank you all for reading. I really enjoy this little hobby of mine and I am glad to have you all stop by and participate.