Urchincy
I decided to monitor the traffic at my web site as a part of deciding whether or not I should continue running the site. I wasn’t too happy with the tools that are provided by my host (which read the actual web logs), but since it’s been over 10 years since I had monitored my traffic, I wasn’t sure what to use.
I signed up for Google’s Analytics and, even though it requires me to add Javascript to my pages instead of using my web logs, I’ve enjoyed playing around with it. Yesterday I went off on some tangents and went digging into the dark recesses of my memory and playing around with htaccess and robots.txt files. There’s one spammer who hits the blog pretty hard but has never gotten through (Akismet is fantastic and catches nearly every spam attempt), but nevertheless it gave me a little satisfaction to block the spammer’s IP address, at least until they change it again.
It’s too early to say anything definite about traffic patterns, but I’m glad I checked before making any wholesale changes to the site. I’ve been pruning out some pictures and pages the last few days that I don’t think are up to snuff, and one that was scheduled for execution is my page on tidepools.
It turned out to be one of my highest ranked pages.
The tidepool gallery is small and the pictures were edited back while I was still early in the learning curve, and even the HTML code was a bit crusty, so I figured I might as well clean things up. I updated the code and re-edited the pictures and added a couple that have never been online before.
This picture is one of those, a bunch of purple sea urchins that have carved out holes for themselves in the floor of the tidepool. I’m fascinated how a seemingly immobile creature that looks like a prickly cat toy could do such a thing, something I could never do, and yet they can’t remove the driftwood that the tide drops over them.
Give urchins opposable thumbs and they’d probably conquer the world.