Studio711.com – Ben Martens

I used our nifty new Power Query tool to connect to the database that contains all of the information for this blog to see what I could learn from the piles of data. I found a table that showed how many visitors I had each day for the last few years. Sure this is available from Google Analytics but this is the raw data straight from my blog management program so it should be about as accurate as you can get. It looks like traffic was growing for a while and then fairly abruptly dropped to a pretty constant level near the end of 2011. I’m not sure what that change represents, but the overall chart does reflect my expectations. This is never going to be a blockbuster site. It’s for friends and family to catch up on some of my ramblings and that’s about it.

Oh and don’t think that 500-1000 people are reading my site every day. This counts everything that hits my page so a lot of it is explained by spam bots and search engine crawlers.

This website started 16 years ago and 5 years after that I started writing at least one blog post per week day. The site has never grown huge but it’s a fun way to communicate with friends and family and it’s cool to have a fairly detailed account of my life over this time. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if any of my ancestors had done something like this. Will Elijah or later descendants read through this mess of posts?

To celebrate this anniversary, I have a small giveaway. Two randomly selected readers will get coupons for a free on-demand movie from Comcast. I know, wild and crazy huge prizes, right? Send me an email or use the contact form with the subject “FREE STUFF” and be sure to include your email address so I know how to contact you. Good luck!

Contest ends 8/2/2012 11:59PM Pacific Time. Full contest rules are available at this link.

A recent story on switched.com (the newest addition to my RSS list) notified me that GeoCities is closing its doors! I have a soft spot in my heart for the service as it hosted the second version of my website.

I started my website in 1996. To put that in perspective there were 250,000 websites in 1996. (Note that all the personal pages on GeoCities would count for one website). Now it is estimated that there are over 150 million. Too bad I don’t get some sort of stock award for jumping in early.

Anyway, the demise of GeoCities got me thinking about the various homes I’ve had on the web. Here’s a rundown:

• CompuServe: 1996-1997
  http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/d_martens
  My very first website was started during my junior year of high school. Archive.org used to have an old version of this site on display but it’s not showing up anymore. Too bad. It was a gem. This site started off with all the no-no’s of web publishing: animated gifs, blinking/marquee text, and background music. The highlight of the page was calendar for our baseball season that had a little write up about each game. The above link won’t work as CompuServe deleted the files a while back. Coincidentally, CompuServe is closing its doors on June 31.
• GeoCities: 1997-1998
  http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Bay/9124
  GeoCities was all the rage when it opened. A free place to host your web content? Sign me up! This site got me through the rest of high school and was when I really started learning more about the HTML standard. You can still view some of the content by going to this link and clicking around on the menu. I was able to salvage some of the files off of the server and the GeoCities site is now archived on my server. Note that I have never actually owned the domain name ben.com but for some reason I thought that would make a good banner. If you can somehow snatch that domain for me, I’ll be your friend forever. Oddly enough, the guy who owns it did a lot of Lego raytracing too.
  
• Purdue: 1998-2001
  http://icdweb.cc.purdue.edu/~martens
  Purdue offered me hosting with 200MB of storage (wow!) and no ads so I quickly switched to them when I was a student.
• Tripod: 2001-2002
  http://bwmartens.tripod.com
  As I neared the end of my career at Purdue, I knew that I needed a plan to get off the Purdue servers. I headed to Tripod with a new site design. Unfortunately this brought me back into the land of ad-supported hosting. There’s a decent historic view of this site on archive.org. Most of the navigation links still work.
  
• Studio711.com: 2002-present
  https://www.studio711.com
  I ran studio711.com out of my apartment for a while on custom blog software, but that quickly got old. I switched over to GoDaddy and never looked back. Now when something goes wrong, I call a phone number and complain instead of spending my evenings trying to figure out why the web server is down. 2002 is also when i started pumping out content on a daily basis and my traffic numbers have been growing ever since.

It gets more painful to move each time so I don’t expect to change anytime soon.