sweasel.com

It’s the $1.95 that breaks my heart. At least five or six times that price in rip-off Britain.

It’s pretty heavily subsidized, B. In a diner, that would probably be $3-5, depending on portion size.

Oh, hey, it looks like Red Ken got an arse kicking. I know it won’t be official until six, but it seems pretty firm.

Boris is a boob, but at least he’s a right-leaning boob. Did he promise to repeal the congestion charge?

A whole $6 a month in revenue? Jesus, I’m in the wrong game (blackmail).

Oh, yeah, Labour are getting a drubbing. Everywhere. I’ve only even been to Lahndan Tahn a few times in my stupid life, but I’m ecstatic that Red Ken is out on his treacherous ear.

A kicking? I won’t be happy till he’s tried for treason.

Oh, no…this is not a Photoshop. This is for reals.

No fair reading my mind like that.

I was thinking, “Nah, not even Weasel could move that fast” (which of course isn’t true, don’t know why I thought that, but there you go.)

but I’m ecstatic that Red Ken is out on his treacherous ear.

A kicking? I won’t be happy till he’s tried for treason.

Same here, and I’ve never even been to Britain, let alone London! Guy’s an “A” Number One douchebag, and I’ll be happy to see the last of him.

And that other one too…waht’s his name…Jim McDermott!

Stoaty, I have been shamelessly watching your traffic numbers the last few days. Not in envy – but in AWE. And because I wish you exceedingly well. Those were some *really* beefy hit rates.

Just think – to AoS it was prolly just a drop in the bucket.

Went to see Iron Man last night. Not too effing bad! Best flick I’ve seen lately, which is saying almost nothing. Warning – I’m hopelessly jaded with Hollywood. There are NO NEW plots for this old fart. Been there – watched that, decades ago. *Yawn*

Shucks, McGoo, I look at people’s stats all the time. It’s fascinating. The fun is always figuring out how things work.

The interesting thing to watch here is the referral page. Ace delivered a hell of a walloping huge thumping initial spike, but several other links really have some sustain: the Jawa Report, Castle Aaaaargh, the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, the Conservative Grapevine. Like a huge tumbling dogpile of morons followed by the steady, measured reading habits of…ummm…nonmorons.

I … uh, ahem … only recently discovered that if one *clicks* on the sitemeter thingy, there is waaaay more info available.

But I watch the stuff for my site. I get a shitload of clicks from … here! Then there’s DPUD, The Last Of The Few, Mitchieville, Balance Sheet, etc.

I wanted to put sitemeter in at my place, but I believe the EULA has a li’l line something about “no adult material or porn sites”. I don’t know if I qualify as an honest-to-god pron site, but I don’t want them mad at me. (I’m surprised I haven’t gotten more complaints. I keep expecting WP to shut me down.)

BTW: completely off subject: did you know that Alan Kelly – The Skipper – over at Barking Moonbat Early Warning System (BMEWS) died last summer? Did you know him?

Hm. I doubt they’d really care. But I don’t mess with them, either. I’m not sure why. I changed my sitemeter to white because I put it on the Zombie Reagan page, too, and I think black on black is a violation of the EULA. Who knew we’d be such boy scouts?

Before this spike, DPUD and the morons were a healthy chunk of traffic. And fully three quarters of my regular traffic comes from Google images searches (label those images, folks!).

The really fun logs are the ones that live on the server, but I can’t get to them from work. They go into some detail about search terms and operating systems and entry pages.

And you get charts. Chart, McGoo!

After I discovered that the default WP hit-stats page didn’t display daily stats over a month old I started recording my hit counts in excel every day when the thing “flips” to zero again (7PM Central Time).

Heh. I was just lookin’ at it. You can tell from the hit count curve EXACTLY when a certain person asserted – half in jest, I believe – “(post)Boobies, McGoo!”, and I started posting feelthy pichers. The rest is history.

I wanted to do a post on my Hit History – ’cause its funny – , but I wasn’t sure it was in good taste. Hah. Me – worrying about taste!

Yeah! I love me some charts, Weaz! Charts are so Scientific!!

“S/H not included”

You know, due to pixelization I read this as “9/11 not included”, which I took as ironic comment on the event that made the blogosphere.

That would have been more interesting anyway.

Why is it that WordPress stats are so much higher than Sitemeter?

Sitemeter is usually half of WordPress. Does WP count spam as hits or something?

Economists should adopt the term”A Perfect (Shit)Storm”. Maybe it was AoS’ drop in the bucket but – holy shittin’ petunias.

It’s your perfect chance to market the catsophone to major retailers. PetSmart, Pets-R-Us, Petco, etc. Your star is risin’ Weas!

I may just try McGoo’s method but only posting in a word her or there, totally randomly, within the text. I’m thinking it would be another fun trend to graph out.

Interesting observation, bmac. I never noticed that on WordPress. I do know I got fairly significant new readers from people tag-surfing. I missed that when I moved off.

It’ll all melt away in a few days, LK. Well, almost all. I may get a bit of permanent traffic from it. But if you want to keep the spike, you have to keep doing the thing that brought the spike. And I don’t have a boffo graphic idea all that often 😉

Oh, and here’s some sitemeter trivia: there are people who still access Ace using the URL http://www.ace-o-spades.mu.nu. That must have been the original URL and they just redirected it.

The only human being I’ve ever seen that could crank it up to 11 and keep it there longer than you could hold out was Robin Williams.

In your area, I think you do quite well. What amazes me is that doing graphics for work hasn’t turned you away from doing it for fun. I’ve begun to loathe computers to greater extents over the years because of this phenomenon and it’s only recently I’ve gotten interested via blogging.

Badger, you pay WHAT for french toast and sausage? (whups, “Freedom Toast” to appease the masses, and I believe those on the other side of the pond refer to them as “bangers”, is that correct?)

No french toast thereabouts, but they do have fried bread. Very nice, that. Just slices of bread, crispy fried. Mmmm!

A proper fry-up in a working man’s cafe — let’s say a couple of fried eggs, a couple of sausages, a fried tomato, toast, baked beans(!), tea — maybe £5.75? Double it for dollars. I think that’s about right.

That’s not that far off from here, Badger. Back when I used to hit Denny’s (*sigh*) my Moons Over My Hammy plus coffee cost about $8-$9 US. The meals are comparable, size-wise, I think.

Then again, folks, you can’t forget Taco Bell. Why? Because it’s cheaper than food.

Moons over my hammy plus coffee is up to $8-9??? I haven’t been to Denny’s much since living in Washington, about 12 years. Grand Slam was always my fav for sobering up at 3am after lots of beer, shuffleboard, and darts.

LK – If memory serves, that is what I was paying during my Goth-hunting expeditions. It was either $8.09 or $9.08 incl TTL – I can’t remember which.

But if certain folks hit a certain Amazon button sufficiently hard (yes, like a Viking!) in the near future, I’m gonna go re-acquaint myself with the Waitress That Knows and shove some Hammy into my piehole! Maybe I’ll score some decent Goth, too.

Badger! Britlanders! Speak, o’ mighty sages!

So what’s the straight skinny on the regional elections? Does this mean Brown is gonna walk funny from now on?

Yay for our Elder Brethren. Red Ken is out, and a new day will dawn…well, we can fantasize, can’t we?

Love your graphics….stole one just t’other day. *gave credit where due, I’m an Honorable Yank*

Yeah – there are a few places on the web that are all squirty about the election results. London got a new conservative mayor with pathological foot-n-mouth disease, apparently.

I love it when politicians have that. It makes every public appearance by them an adventure.

…And speaking of F n’ M disease … ahem …Red Ken (mentioned in Wollf’s comment above mine) *is* the former London Mayor who has been replaced. I’m getting that familiar feeling of self-doofosity. ‘Night…

Just noticed someone posting earlier in the thread. Wonder if that is someone I know from NYC.

It’s a damned shame, McGoo, that’s what it is.

Panicked by years in the wilderness, the Tory high-ups put a bland, Leftist, Greenie airhead in charge of the party (David Cameron) just as the public had finally begun to realise what a pack of liars, whores, pimps, cheats and criminals were running the show.

As the Tories have finally kicked Labour out of office in town halls across the land, people are wrongly attributing that success to the adoption of Leftist Greenie polices when, in fact, it was simply down to timing.

I’m glad Boris won London (Livingstone is Stalinist filth of the very highest order) but he is a loose cannon and could do great harm.

So what we have here is the right result for the wrong people. Unless Mr McBean’s government collapses early, we won’t get the chance for a real change for another two years. Between now and then expect a full-on attack on the Tories from the UK media (led by the thoroughly politically corrupt BBC).

Personally, I think they will fail to save Labour, whose stock is at a record low, and I think the Tories will win the next election – but they will be Tories in name only.

How dreadful is Cameron? He snubbed Maggie so hard she fucked off to Downing Street and had tea with Gordon Brown, just to poke a finger in his eye.

Damn. I was (naively) hoping the leftward tilt of GB government was being corrected a bit. No such luck.

Sounds like you got a bunch of ‘McCains’ in.

Well, it’s hard to figure out what’s what, McGoo. I always find it hard to work out the UK political scene, no doubt because I’m a ferriner. It’s not perfectly analogous to Dem/Repub.

The egregious George Galloway lost, big time. And the BNP picked up a seat. They’re kind of like the Klan party, so it’s not good news. But it is a measure of discontent.

The egregious George Galloway lost, big time.

Yeah, yeah. Galloway, McDermott. No wonder I got ’em confused.

bmac:

Sitemeter filters out spiders and email harvesters. I manage sites that often take thousands of hits in an hour (from harvesters and spiders) and sitemeter will show just the couple hundred “legitimate” visits.

I’m happy that spiders like google and yahoo, et al, visit the various sites I manage, but I’ve written a “bot-trap” that logs the IP of harvesters and redirects them to a gotcha! page (forever).

jwp – you may have just answered a question I’ve had for quite some time.

A while back, my site had a sudden huge (to me) burst of hit activity. We’re talking 500-600 hits in an hour or less for NO REASON. Then it completely stopped. I happened to be watching at the time and did not understand why/where/who was doing this.

So was it a spider or ‘bot or two taking a sudden interest in me, and then moving on – or being blocked (finally) by WordPress?

On Great Britain politics: Obviously I’m not gonna ‘get it’ in one easy lesson.

I wanted to put sitemeter in at my place, but I believe the EULA has a li’l line something about “no adult material or porn sites”.

McGoo’s got adult material? I’ll be back …. much later.

Steam:

More than likely. Even some legitimate spiders (cough*Yahoo*cough) have to be told to meter their visits; otherwise they act like a reverse firehose and suck up HUGE chunks of your data & bandwidth in seconds.

The email harvesters (and comment/forum spammers) are pretty easy to catch, since they will follow every link they find on your page, despite a robots.txt prohibition of same. So whenever anyone visits a page on one of my sites named, oh, emailaddresses.asp (specifically flagged DISALLOW in the site’s robots.txt), their IP is automatically added to a private DB (one used to check a visitor’s IP on every visit). From that point on, visits from that IP are redirected to a 14-byte page containing simply “access denied.” If the bot still persists in megavisits, I manually ban the IP from accessing the site entirely.

If you’re having serious problems with harvesters/bots, you may want to join Project Honeypot. There’s a whole culture out there in innertubeland dedicated to tracking and driving a stake through the hearts of harvesters/commentbots.

Allow me to formally establish the lex grammatica of the “Holy Fucking Shit!” spike in traffic phenomena.

Commonly abbreviated HFS!, it is a superlative and therefore cannot be modified (for instance, “maximum HFS!” is incorrect, but “nearly HFS!”, while considered by purists to be common and vulgar, is not).

Also, note the “!” in “HFS!” This is required to differentiate HFS! from the more mundane acronyms for Health & Family Services, Hierarchical File System, or Historic Fort Snelling. It does not indicate an excited mode of speech; rather, it is pronounced as a glottal stop, such as what one would hear at the beginning of an gulp of abject fear, as an audible precursor to the gag reflex, or both.