Ry's Blog

I hadn’t heard the term before; it’s been in use since at least 2006, though, and I’m declaring it. Again.

Glenn Reynolds linked to my 787 flyby post yesterday; it turns out it was an experiment on… well, I’m not sure. The post has two thumbnails of the low-contrast pictures I took yesterday. I had about 19000 visits from that link yesterday; I had about 5000 and 3000 clickthroughs to embiggen the pictures. It appears that people coming from Instapundit looked at the postage stamps and bailed; maybe I should have put larger images in the post. Not sure.

The stats on flickr tell another tale, though: they only show 1400 views from my blog for the same time period; did people click and abandon, are wordpress stats garbage, or are flickr stats garbage?

Today is another story entirely: I assume today’s readers are using feedreaders or some other caching mechanism; I have 2600 visits from Instapundit, but 1400 clickthroughs.

Furthermore, I submitted the images to Reddit (as opposed to the blog post); yesterday, it generated 1100 views on the main image, 128 on the second (which was left as a comment). Today, the reddit post has generated about 10,000 views on the primary and 72 (!) on the secondary. I’ll track the curves of the traffic, but I think I can safely say the Instalanche is over; the reddit flood is sort of “who knows”. Without a secondary means of tracking reddit’s initial clicks, I have nothing to compare for abandonment rates. Someone should come up with a product to track that.

My hosting provider has gone from nearly worthless to totally worthless; I’ve been without DNS for over 24 hours. I’m using Dotster for DNS now (there goes $10 a year); I’ll probably keep dragging Dotster around for this service, instead of finding a better one.

I’ve covered this before; to be really short about it, my posts on “how to reset this specific hardware device” are my most popular.

You may imagine how popular my post on “how to reset a Zune” became for a couple days last week; it went from ~800 pv/m to 2000 pv/d for three days.

My top eight posts are:

1. how to reset a phone
2. how to reset a phone
3. how to reset a Zune 2
4. MGS AR57 uppers
5. how to reset a phone
6. how to reset a phone
7. Obama Exclusion Zone: King County
8. Quotable Raymond

The enduring popularity of the MGS AR57 upper post baffles me. There’s no “there” there; I’m lower than the manufacturer and the main reseller in terms of Google juice.

The popularity of the seventh post, though, is starting to go up. After I posted it, it got around 1500 views and died off to ~100 views a month over the last 11 months. So far, Michelle’s link-heavy post has been good for ~100 views over the two articles (here is the second one). You know what’s funny, though? My post on AR15.com about Michelle’s linking to me has caused (so far) ~150 pv over the two articles.

I assert that people wanting to fix phones (and other recalcitrant hardware) is a common problem; one they turn to the web to solve. The love from Raymond Chen is established (did you know I’m 4% of the outbound links from his blog, according to some guy that wrote a tool to analyze Raymond?). The AR57 thing confounds me.

My sister Leah notes that she’s been at this blogging thing for four solid years now. Sadly, my use of this software only goes back to June of 2003; the way back machine captures some earlier goofing around with a date of 27 April 2003. I had a blog-like thing on my web page back on 19 Aug 2000. My guess is I’ll never be able to sleuth a year, much less a date, where I started blogging; like the woman that’s perpetually 39 or the income bracket that is 100k+, I’ll forever be without a real number to mark. With that, I’ll note that every day is my anniversary; I’ll tool around in the warm glow of sharing this date with my sisters – both of them – and with everyone else that blogs, as well. Happy anniversary, Leah!

Joe has noted that stuff on the internet comes to my attention quickly. I’d like to
take credit for it, but I’ve been using Google Alerts to do the dirty work.

Blogs by bouncers, waiters, and Wal-Mart workers. Also Patrick Stack and WW I.

If you buy stuff from Audible, you’ll find it comes in the .aa format. The largest downside to Audible’s format is I cannot edit out the David Sedaris from my This American
Life collection. I found a forum post which I will reproduce here for posterity:

There exists no clear guide to add audible support to dbpoweramp, here is what I did:

1) Install dbpoweramp and the dbPowerAmp DirectShow plugin. When the install completes replace “.xyz” in the text file with “.aa” and save it.

2) Install AudibleManager AND Windows Media Player Filter (bottom of download page):http://www.audible.com/software

3) Run dBpowerAMP Configuration:

Start >> Programs >> dBpowerAMP Music Converter >> Configuration >> dMC Configuration (this step reads the config you edited in step 1)

That is it, dbpoweramp can read audible files and Sveta Portable audio can upload Audible files to portables that support it.

Now I’ll be able to do all of the stuff I want to my TAL collection.