Okay, this has been sitting in my draft file. So, since I’ve got nothing for today, I’ll clear this one out of the “Drafts” category of unpublished blog posts.

There are sites out there that will estimate the value, traffic, etc. of websites.

A lot of times, this is just a very rough guess, because (in most cases) they are not going to have access to the site’s actual data. So, the estimates are going to be way off.

Anyway, I was looking for links to my soon-to-be-relaunched website to see what was out there and I found one of these sites.

Their estimates were quite interesting. Here are a couple interesting bits:

1. 42% of the audience is under 18 years old.
2. 51% of the audience did not attend college.

The second one makes sense, doesn’t it? You can pretty much rest assured that most kids under the age of 18 have [not] graduated from college. There are always exceptions, but probably not enough to skew the statistics.

Then, things get interesting…

3. 61% of the audience has kids under the age of 18.

So, if 42% of the audience is under 18, that means 58% are over 18. That means that 3% of my audience are under the age of 18 and have a kid under the age of 18.

I guess I never published that one because it’s entirely possible to be under the age of 18 and to also have a kid under the age of 18. I think it just struck me as odd, probably because it generates images of a 17 year old have a 16 year old kid or something. I don’t know. I could never make anything more useful out of the post, so it’s been sitting there.

And, for the curious, it looks like this post was originally written on January 10, 2010.

I’m not up for an Oscar.

I don’t know any one up for an Oscar.

So, I’m not entirely sure why I should care to watch the Oscars.

Which is why I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer tonight.

And doing so reminded me of why I am beginning to hate Chiller as much as Syfy.

First, Buffy was running weeknights at 6 and 7 p.m. That gave me the chance to watch it again and see some of the episodes I missed or didn’t remember.

And, then, one night, it wasn’t on at 6 and 7 p.m. anymore. Nor the next night. Or the night after that.

I think they were in the middle of the 3rd or 4th season when they dropped it.

Well, they didn’t drop it, but rather moved it to the wee hours of the morning.

When I sleep.

But, then I saw they were running it on Sundays at 6 p.m. So, I started watching then.

And, as I was watching tonight, they were running ads announcing Buffy would be moving to midnight on Sundays.

Argh!

They’re getting as bad as Syfy. I think they’re both owned by NBC. Apparently, Comcast isn’t doing any better of a job at running NBC and its networks than the clowns did before them.

So, this is SciFi month on Syfy. So, logically, of course, they’re running a James Bond movie tonight, as part of SciFi month.

Granted, there are occasional elements of science fiction in James Bond, but it’s more in the spy/thriller genre than the scifi genre.

Oh, and then on Tuesday, as part of a day of fantasy, they’re running Star Trek: The Next Generation. So, Star Trek is fantasy and James Bond is scifi?

I need to figure out how to get my TV and my computer to play nice so I can just stream whatever I want from Amazon.com and not worry about what pinhead TV network executives think is a good idea.

If you had a friend named Will,
Would that be for you a thrill?

Would you wish his voice not shrill?

Would you take him to hunt krill?

Or way out back to dig and drill
for an old abandoned and buried mill?

Or have him fix your window sill?

Take a winter trip for him to chill?

Or take him to the garden to till,
So you can plant parsley and dill?

Would you have him wear a tie and frill?

Skip across the fields and down a hill?

If he left would you miss him a li’l,
Or wish he hadn’t left his heart pill?

What would you do without your friend Will?

I’m phoning it in today.

Not literally, but figuratively.

Some potentially exciting things could be happening.

Don’t know for sure yet.

A number of pins have to fall into place.

First pin was the discovery of the opportunity, if you want to count that as the first pin.

Second pin will be a meeting tomorrow.

After that, we’ll see whether pins will be falling into place or just dropping on the floor.

Also, it’s one of those things that could be really smart or really stupid. Hopefully, the former.

There’s a new buzzword making the rounds: curation. More specifically, content curation.

This has been out a couple years now, but is just beginning to hit the IM forums.

And, naturally, the Internet marketers are salivating over this new shiny object like they’ve just discovered a new gold mine.

And that gold mine is your pocket.

No doubt you’ll soon be seeing countless eBooks and courses and videos and whatnot on content curation. Get rich with your own curated site! Curated this and curated that! They’ll be a “curation crusher” and “killer curation sites” and all sorts of nonsense.

Here’s what content curation is in a nutshell: Basically, you pick and choose the best stuff in your topic of interest and present that to your readers with your own insights added.

Yeah. So, basically the same kind of stuff bloggers have done for years. And website owners. And all sorts of people. Nothing new here.

They’re just trying to make it out as something new. A nice, shiny new box. And, they’ll help you learn all about this great new thing for just $97. Or maybe you can get a complete website curation system in a box for 4 easy payments of $497. Plus, there’ll be countless special reports you’ll be able to buy at $7 a pop. Buy ‘em all so you have the complete collection!

I guess with the economy as slow as it is, they need to re-package old concepts in a shiny new box to get you to buy them. You’ll fill their pockets while emptying your own.

Because you don’t need to buy a product to teach you how to pick and choose the best content in your niche. If you have experience or interest in your chosen niche, you already know how to do that. No need to spend your hard-earned money on that!

Today is Wordless Wednesday, which means that, since I had no idea for a post today, I was going to revert to my fallback position of relying on Wordless Wednesday to get away with a post like this…

But, then I was sorting through my spam…

You know how spammers often use made-up names? Sometimes, they will use a celebrity’s name. Sometimes, they’ll use something that sounds like a celebrity’s name. Other times, they will use something that sounds like an everyday Joe, perhaps hoping it will match the name of one of your friends or family members so you’ll be more apt to open it.

Anyway, I received one “from” a fictional character.

My fictional character.

From a WIP that’s not even finished yet (and not posted even in draft form online).

It’s random, certainly.

But it grabbed my attention.

Of course, I’m not going to be buying their Ritalin, so, in the end, it doesn’t matter whether they got my attention or not.

You know, I really haven’t been getting out there and commenting on as many blogs as I used to.

So, I thought I’d go through my blog list and started reading some posts and leaving some comments.

I picked some at random and popped in for a visit.

Here’s what I found…

Blog 1: No posts in two months.

Blog 2: No posts in over a month.

Blog 3: Gone.

Blog 4: No posts in four years.

Blog 5: Members-only.

Blog 6: No posts in two years.

Blog 7: No posts in two years.

Blog 8: No posts in a year.

Blog 9: Most recent post 8 days ago. Left a comment. Hopefully he remembers me and approves it.

Blog 10: No posts in a year.

Blog 11: Gone.

Blog 12: Hacked. (But archive.org shows no posts in four years.)

So, there you have it. I guess I really, really need to update my “Viral Blogs” list.

A lot of people still confuse website hits with website visitors.

I’ve seen people brag about getting a million hits to their sites.

But, hits are not the same as visitors. So, unless the person is looking at the number of visitors in their stats and calling them hits, as opposed to vice versa, those million hits are less impressive.

A “hit” is a call to your website to grab something, whether it be a page or a graphic.

A “visitor” is a person that visits your site. There may be varying differences in how statistics count a “visitor” but what it’s meant to count is how many people are actually looking at your site.

For example, let’s say that you have a web page that has four graphics on it. When someone visits that page, your site will get five hits: one hit for the page and one hit for each of the graphics. But, that’s just one visitor.

Now, if you have two visitors, you’ll have ten hits (assuming they all wait for all the graphics to load and whatnot). If you get ten visitors, you’ll have fifty hits.

Let’s say you have a photo gallery with 99 images. Those 99 images appear as thumbnails on your photo gallery page. Each time you have a visitor to that page, you’ll have 100 hits: one for the page and one for each of the thumbnail images.

So, for ten visitors, you’d have 1,000 hits. One hundred visitors would give you 10,000 hits. And so on.

So, if you’re getting 5,000 visitors a month to your blog and you want to see one million hits on your blog, put up 199 images on your landing page.

Of course, I wouldn’t recommend that because it could eat up your site’s bandwidth and you might get a bigger bill for hosting.

At any rate, that’s the difference between hits and visitors. So, be sure not to equate the two and don’t be impressed when someone brags about how many hits their site is getting. Ask them instead how many visitors they get.

Here it is, almost 11:00 p.m., and it just occurred to me that I hadn’t blogged today.

Not that yesterday’s post was anything to write home about, but it was a blog post, so it counts, even if it’s lame.

Those are the rules around here. What counts is a daily blog post. Quality isn’t an issue.

Though, I did try to start having quality posts again recently, but hard to keep up with that.

Especially when you don’t remember to blog until an hour before deadline.

Any rate, was busy today working on client websites. I finished the coding on one. I coded a simple photo gallery for the site. Just need to upload more photos for the galleries. I did enough to test that the code is working, and will finish uploading the remained at the office tomorrow.

The other client site is nearly done, I hope. Just one more thing to do in the latest batch of changes. But, I have to figure out how to work that in and still have the site look nice. Thought I’d have something by now, but no such luck. Will probably sit and stare at the page for a while and hope an idea springs forth.

After that, I have a new site I’m going to get to work on. Yes, another new one. Oy. Anyway, I think this one will be a promising one. It’s also in an area I’m pretty familiar with, so that gives me a slight edge over the normal “This seems like a good idea” projects I tend to do. That sounds bad.

And, no, I haven’t forgotten my forums either. At first, I considered integrating this new idea into the forums, but then it seemed like it might be better as a separate site. After some consideration, I decided to build it as a separate site, but it could be merged into my forum site at a later date. Or, it could continue to be its own site. So, I’ll have some flexibility in the future.

Anyway, so that’s what’s up. Yeah, lame closing. But, it’s late and I’m a bit tired, so deal.

I write the blog posts you’ll never read.

I write the blog posts you’ll rarely need.

I write the blog posts in torn-up tweed.

I write the blog posts ’bout a milkweed.

I write the blog posts for doggy feed.

I write the blog posts for ev’ry breed.

I write the blog posts on pepper seed.

I write the blogs posts to keep the deed.

I write the posts. I write the posts.