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Arimathea
Welcome to my little patch of web grass.News
What is new in Arimathea
Thursday, October 1, A.D. 2009
First Anniversary
Arimathea today celebrates its first anniversary. I actually did not get everything up and running until the third of October last year when I found a site host, but who cares about small details? When we allows ourselves to indulge in the narcissism of the age, we can confidently dispense with minutiae.
The statistics are modest but respectable for a personal web site.
Total combined page hits: 51,294
Permalink page (for individual posts): 13,784
Main (introductory) page: 8,425
RSS feed link: 7,271
Comments: 4,411
Philosophy realm: 3,430
Music realm: 2,232
Religion realm: 2,211
Fun realm: 2,083
World realm: 976
Nature realm: 864
Arimathea realm: 817
Commerce realm: 785
Links: 560
About: 386
Archives: 360
Atom feed link: 287
Acknowledgments: 178
Categories: 94
Fonts: 68
Smileys (for comments): 66
Search with results: 62
Search page itself (as opposed to searching from another page): 16
Search without results: 8
Comments preview: 9
The stats must be a bore to everyone but me. I personally like to see how people read my page. I am surprised that so many people have clicked on the comments pages, though there have been so few comments. The current number is only fifty-three, though I have likely deleted a score. Still, it means that visitors click on pages with no comments frequently, as I cannot believe that so many people have clicked on the few posts with comments. I figure that many people click on the comments page as a form of permalink even when there are no comments. They must do this out of habit, as most blogs do not have separate permalink and comments pages. I have thought about combining both of them to meet the standard format, which might generate more commentary, but I like the look of a clean post page with no comments or comment form.
The order of realm popularity is not that surprising, either. However, I wanted to see how closely the popularity matched the number of posts. One would assume that the realms with more content would invite more hits, but visitor interest must play a role, too. Moreover, a realm would draw hits just for its existence, as a visitor does not know how many posts each realm has from the main page. So, here are the realms with the number of their entries and the number of their hits:
In the order of the number of posts:
Philosophy realm: 120 | 3,430
Religion realm: 71 | 2,211
Fun realm: 59 | 2,083
Music realm: 52 | 2,232
World realm: 27 | 976
Nature realm: 19 | 864
Commerce realm: 9 | 785
Arimathea realm: 8 | 817
In the order of popularity:
Philosophy realm: 120 | 3,430
Music realm: 52 | 2,232
Religion realm: 71 | 2,211
Fun realm: 59 | 2,083
World realm: 27 | 976
Nature realm: 19 | 864
Arimathea realm: 8 | 817
Commerce realm: 9 | 785
As expected, the philosophy realm came in first in both categories, as it is the page’s realm for aesthetic, anthrological, epistemological, ethical, metaphysical, physical, and political content. The music realm proved to be more popular than the religion and fun realms, though it had less posts. For a more rigorous analysis, I divided the number of realm hits (13,398) by the number of posts (365, one for each day), which gives us a mean of about 36.71 hits per post. The averages and deviations for the realms are:
World realm: 36.15 hits per post (-0.56)
Fun realm: 35.31 hits per post (-1.4)
Religion realm: 31.14 hits per post (-5.57)
Music realm: 42.92 hits per post (6.21)
Philosophy realm: 28.58 hits per post (-8.13)
Nature realm: 45.47 hits per post (8.76)
Commerce realm: 87.22 hits per post (50.51)
Arimathea realm: 102.13 hits per post (65.42)
Such gives us a standard deviation of almost 31.73, if I remember statistics correctly, though the Arimathea and commerce realms skew the result due to their small number of posts. Clearly, their relative popularity is driven by links from the main page.
The page also has had 916 non-spam referrals, with the largest source of traffic coming from search engines, especially Google. On such engines, the page regularly comes up as the second or third result with “Arimathea” as the search term. Take that, BibleFacts.com!
The site’s costs have been quite reasonable. I have paid $33.09 in the last year, and such includes the domain registration and an e-mail service. NearlyFreeSpeech is an excellent and inexpensive host if your site does not get much traffic. If you want a cheap blog with its own domain name and with maximized control, it would behoove you to consider NearlyFreeSpeech and ExpressionEngine software.
Anyway, thank you for visiting my third incarnation as a blogger. It may not be much, but it could be worse.
on Thursday, October 1, A.D. 2009
Tuesday, March 24, A.D. 2009
Perverted Trolls
Arimathea has been online for almost six months, and I am happy to report that the number of total combined page hits is 18,418. 3,449 of those hits were for the main index page, and the remainder consists of the various thematic weblogs and permalinks. Sadly for my ego, only seventeen comments have been logged, and several of those are my responses. I could delude myself by thinking that after I post an entry, nothing further could said about an issue, but I would then be a fool. Far more likely, the lack of comments suggests a lack of interest in my rambling.
Until this week, Arimathea had not received any trackbacks. I was not even sure if Expression Engine’s trackback mechanism worked. Well, it surely does function. For the past several days, I have noticed trackbacks from different I.P. addresses to my “Christ Is Born!” post. Normally, I would be elated to have trackbacks, though confused that someone would be remarking about a Christmas post in late March. As it is, I am fairly annoyed and somewhat horrified. For each of these trackbacks leads to some perverted YouTube channel featuring various bestiality videos. I infer the content from the trackbacks’ descriptions; I certainly did not visit the sites. I would be shocked that such a thing existed anywhere on the internet, but I have received so much bizarre spam over the years, I have come to the conclusion that the web leads to any conceivable content. I once received an e-mail advertising “grandma barn porn.” I shudder to think what that possibly means. On a search engine, put in any three relatively common words, and you will find a site. The world holds many messed up folks.
However, I am surpised that YouTube has bestiality channels. I have read several accounts of YouTube’s shutting down conservative sites that feature Ann Coulter interviews or documentaries on militant Muhammadanism, but animal rape is fine with them? I suppose that it is possible that no one has reported such channels to YouTube’s administrators, yet. After all, who would visit “teendogsex” who is not already sympathetic to such activities?
Moreover, I am confused that these channel owners make trackbacks on a blog entry about Christmas—titled “Christ Is Born!” I have deleted these trackback for the last several days, and I cannot understand why they keep appearing. The basics of marketing tell us to speak to our audience. Is there something about the celebration of Christ’s birth that corresponds to this filth? Perhaps, there is a bot that simply makes trackbacks everywhere on the web, and it happened to find my Christmas post somehow. I looked over my post, and the following words could have triggered the bot: “Virgin” and “young Child” from the kontakion for the feast. I wish that I were kidding. O wretched earth . . .
The other disconcerting evidence of cultural decay that I have found through Arimathea involves my list of referring pages. This list shows the pages from which visitors to Arimathea come. An inordinate amount of visitors stumble upon my “Boy Movies” post from search engine queries. Somehow, I suspect that those queries were not seeking coming of age films, especially when the query terms include “fine body.” So, Arimathea manages both to attract bestiality pornographers and to disappoint trolling paedophiles. I never expected such diversity in the reading audience.
However, these facts confirm the old marketing adage that sex sells. Perhaps, I should strive for double entendres in my titles, like my “Man Candy” post. My poetic abilities are quite limited; so, I am not sure that I can manage such creativity. One must set goals for himself, though. When I cover a local Virginian autumn harvest festival, I can title it, “Endless Goat Action,” or when I comment upon a contentious debate, I may name it, “Heated Man on Man.” My page hits will skyrocket.
Wednesday, October 1, A.D. 2008
In the Beginning . . .
Welcome to Arimathea, the online presence of me—a Cincinnatian named Joseph. Now, I know that every Tom, Dick, and Harry has an internet site these days. So, why should I clutter cyberspace with yet more armchair philosophizing? Well, I expect that the only folks likely to read this page are my family and friends, but I sometimes have a need for mental catharsis. Moreover, I egotistically figure that someone else might appreciate my ideas every now and then.
My knowledge of web design is rudimentary at best, but I have been learning. I still cannot figure out how to make the feeds work, and I expect that I shall tinker with the layout and code in perpetuity. However, I am going to start posting; torpedoes and faulty url paths be damned. If you find that the layout does not appear comely in your browser under normal monitor conditions, or if you find broken links, please let me know.
The basic structure of the page is a series of “weblogs” dedicated to various themes. You can access these different topical realms on the left side menu. Within each topical realm, there are various categories. The main page on which this entry is posted will serve for personal and site news. Each realm has its own imported feeds, links (“blogroll”), and patron saint. The general patron saint for the page, as for me, is Joseph of Arimathea, naturally.
I always appreciate friendly or thoughtfully critical comments. There are nutties swarming about, though; so, please only use your first name. Cheers!
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