Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Site News

Website Traffic

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.

11 Years of Blogging

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.

RIP Geocities

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.

Back to Work

All in all I have to say it was a pretty good three day weekend. I actually stretched it into a three and a half day weekend by leaving at noon on Friday. I'm still happy about pulling out a win in that poker tourney on Saturday night. Hopefully they'll invite me back for another one. My lack of projects from a couple weeks ago has completely gone away. I now have plenty of stuff to keep me busy and good ideas for future projects. Right now I'm mainly focused on getting my site completely operational on GoDaddy and getting Jay moved over as well. That's getting pretty close to completion. I'm also reading again. This weekend I made it about 70% of the way through the second Harry Potter book. We had such perfect weather this weekend that I spent some time reading outside on the back deck and put about 250 miles on my motorcycle. It's good to be busy with fun stuff again.

And finally I'll leave you with my thought of the day: "Mondays aren't so bad when they're Tuesdays."

Search Engine Unveiling

I promised you a new website feature on Monday and I wouldn't want to disappoint. So without further adue, I proudly present:

As you clever people may have guessed, Boogle is my new search engine. Head on over to Boogle and give it a shot. (There is also a link in the right hand menu bar for “Search“.) Any resemblence to another popular search engine is purely… intentional. It's not quite perfect yet. For example, it gets confused on common words like “and”, “the”, and “if” so just leave them out of your queries. You won't get any fancy boolean operators yet.

I wrote this in about 3 hours using the Microsoft Full Text Search feature and ASP.NET. The full text search engine gives you features like searching for inflections of a word (type in “good” and get results for “better” and “best” as well) and searching for two words near each other. I haven't turned any of those nifty features on yet though so you're just getting the word you searched for. I do quite a bit of processing on the results returned as well. You can click the URL that is returned and head straight to the post. The results will also show your search terms in bold with a few words before and after it. The same search works for Jay's site as well. Just click the Firelane17.com radio button underneath the logo before you do your search. If you go to the http://www.firelane17.com/search URL, the radio button is automatically selected for his site.

There are almost three years of posts on the site now and it was getting increasingly difficult to find anything. Hopefully this will make life a little simpler at least until Google catches up with the act and indexes more of my posts.