Writing this blog has been a good exercise for me, and no doubt will continue to be for a long time to come. It’s gotten me to seriously flex my writing muscles on a much more regular basis than I have for quite some time.
Although it feels like there may be a lull coming in the Floyd Landis case, I’m not making any more predictions like that. The last time I did, all hell broke loose within days. Let’s just say that it will continue to be interesting times as the doping world turns.
So here are a few things I’ve learned by blogging:
Never make an off color crack about someone named Dick Pound. Not because of the obvious, that the jokes are too easy, but because of some of the unintended fallout. I watch the statistics for this site on a somewhat regular (OK, nightly) basis, and after making an off color joke about Mr. Pound, traffic from certain types of web sites (p*rn) started appearing. As in the p*rn sites were linking here. I’ve had some fun imagining just how disappointed some of their readers might have been to find this blog. Bummer for them.
People are still using WebTV. I haven’t ever met anyone who does, but there are a few readers who are reading this site using the WebTV browser. Never would have guessed it was still in use.
Nearly 7 out of every 8 readers are getting to this site on their own, rather than clicking links from other sites or from search engines. But of the people who come here from other sites, the majority come from Trust But Verify, followed by Endless Cycle, and Floyd Landis.com (linking from comments I’ve left there).
People are linking here from favorites they’ve set up on MySpace, Bloglines and a number of other places. And they’re emailing links to this site to other people. A humor site in Sweden linked here. A news summary site in Austria linked here, too. I only got one hit from either of those sites. Same for the International Atomic Energy Agency. Never found the page on their site that linked here, but it probably had a link to the obit I published for my dad.
Ever since I wrote about the ETG test (A Test That Works Too Well), a number of people have come to this site via links in search engines like Google and Yahoo. It may well be the most visited post, but the ISP’s analytics don’t capture that much detail. It’s certainly the post that has gotten the most comments. Apparently, there are quite a few people who are affected by this test. Not necessarily for the better, judging by a couple of the comments/questions posted here.
About 1 in 8 visitors sticks around for more than 30 minutes, and of those, about two-thirds stick around for an hour or more.
The busiest day so far, not surprisingly given what I rant about, was the day the Landis camp released the lab documentation pack for all to see. I suspect there will be a few similarly busy days in 2007, but I won’t even hazard a guess as to what dates they will occur.
Thanks for making RYHO a part of your day. Here’s one prediction I feel safe in making for 2007: There’s much more to come here at Rant Your Head Off.
