Category Archives: Technical Nonsense

Technical Nonsense

Your Scratchbomb Analytics Update

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Here are a few items of note about traffic to Scratchbomb.com in the last month. Absolutely none of this is made up or exaggerated in any way. I’m presenting it because I constantly get SEO-related spam, and I’m hoping this will prove once and for all that this site has zero interest in improving the size and quality of its audience.

  • Despite a late surge from my Extreme Couponing post, the Scratchbomb piece with the most page hits is once again my recap of game 6 of the 1999 NLCS. This is bad in the sense that nothing I wrote recently tops something I penned almost two years ago, but good in the sense that I am hard at work at something closely related to that post (/vague)
  • Top five countries visiting Scratchbomb: USA, Canada, UK, Philippines, India. That last one I kind of understand–considering there’s a billion people in India, from a purely statistically standpoint, any site should get a significant number of visitors from there. The Philippines has me stumped, but I’ll take it, and will also learn how to speak Tagalog.
  • On the low end of the scale: Two visits from Vietnam, and one each from Tanzania and Nigeria. Still looking for those first elusive page hits from China and North Korea.
  • Number one search term inexplicably remains “rip taylor,” with most of those hits generated by this almost-two-year old post (number three on the page hits charts). Your guess is as good as mine, folks.
  • Number two search term is now “studio 60 on roosevelt avenue,” which means I will NEVER stop writing these things.
  • Rounding out the top five search terms: “rapture”, “scratchbomb”, and “jeff kent.”
  • “steve phillips” has plunged all the way to #9, below “jersey city crank crew” and “jim dolan”.
  • Best search terms of the month (sic all spelling mistakes):
    • “does anyone know the song with the tune coco coco”
    • “extrene couponers eat shit”
    • “gary carter racist”
    • “how to write story about vanilla ice whose song ice ice baby into cape town in gravedigger theory”
    • “jamie farr shirtless”
    • “what else looks like a swastika”
  • Worst search term of the month: “chipper jones y’all”
  • Number 10 traffic source leading to Scratchbomb: google.ca. Thanks, Canada!
  • Number seven search engine directing traffic to Scratchbomb: Yandex, the top search engine in Russia. Cπacибo, Poccия!
  • The fifth most popular browser used to view Scratchbomb is something called Mozilla Compatible Agent, which I’m pretty sure is a SkyNet product. Thanks, Terminators!
Technical Nonsense

Scratchbomb Bats a Thousand

My Spy Tech post from earlier today was, it turns out, the 1000th post ever at Scratchbomb. Let’s celebrate!

Technically, this site has existed in some form since 2001 (!). So there have actually been significantly more posts than 1000. Back in them days, I basically posted when I felt like it, and some of the posts tried to be quite artier and involved. I didn’t quite know what I was doing (even more so than now). The 1000 mark signifies how many posts I’ve done since switching to a bloggier format circa 2006.

Maybe if you guys are good, I’ll try and dig up some “gems” from the site’s Precambrian period, like an interview I did with Guy Picciotto many many moons ago (if I can find it). Until then, many thanks to all those who have read. To the rest of you, the back of my hand.

Technical Nonsense

Scratchbomb Status Update: Bent But Not Broken

So late last week, this site started performing erratically, when it performed at all. Faced with this crisis, I summoned all my strength and resolve and used it to completely freak out. I’d just spent an enormous amount of time migrating my site from one CMS to another, and the thought of having to do it all over was too gruesome for me to contemplate.

When I was done screaming and crying, I prevailed upon my webhost to move the site to a better server, which has now been completed. I’m able to use this site’s dashboard without trouble once again, and have added a few optimization plugins that should increase overall site performance.

The site appears to be functioning again for the reader, but if you find pages loading slowly or anything else similarly weird, please let me know. Here’s hoping this is the last such post for quite a while, and thank you for continuing to read despite the technical hiccups.