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Mailbag, June 2002 |
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are emails sent to the site in June 2002. Reader names and emails
are not revealed unless requested, and then it's up to my
discretion. Normally I'll just list your nick name or first name,
or nothing at all if you request total anonymity. No one really
cares; it's not like I'm taking tips on solving a murder here anyway;
this is a humor website. People just don't want their emails
listed to keep down their spam.
There were more site visitors, and more emails in June than any previous month. This isn't real surprising, the site content keeps going and many visitors find it and enjoy it and return, while more and more people keep finding the site for the first time. Away we go.
Amazing how she visited the site and just somehow knew that it wasn't listed in some search engines. L33t skillz, she has. The email comes with a little image that loads of the site main page, which is sort of a nifty feature. It's not a current picture, you can just read the date as June 1, so I guess their spider takes a picture when they visit the site, and that's pulled from their server when this automated mail arrives. Below the text and small image there's a "Signup Now!!!" button, which when clicked takes you to their main page. You can see it for yourself if you desire. The page is a crock, trying to get you to give them money for some imaginary search engine registration. Since virtually everyone uses Google (or Yahoo, which is powered by Google), and the whole point in Google is that it searches out sites by their content, rather than some potentially-misleading yellow pages site directory, you'll need to explain to me why this Seeker Center service is of any value. I'd equate it to those late night commercials for invention registration, which are parasitic companies that send you free government patent office forms for a large fee. Preying on people who don't know what they are doing well enough to be self-sufficient, basically.
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It's nice to see that someone else finds my perpetual talk of site stats and searches interesting. I love looking into those figures and search results myself, and I'd keep posting them on the site no matter what feedback I got, since I find them fascinating, and the whole point of this site is to talk about things I'm interested in . If they are interesting to you guys is sort of irrelevant. *cough* Of course it's nicer when they two fields overlap...
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Speaking of odd site searches, as Saidin's email just was, here's an example of one. For some weeks in May I had the book this guy inquires about listed as one of my "Books Lying Open" on the nav bar, and obviously he searched for it and his search pointed here. Since I had the book from the library, it wasn't in good shape, and I'd already returned it when he mailed, my email to him offering one mint copy for $500 was sort of cruel, I suppose. I didn't hear back from him. His email came written in a huge font, 20 point or so, and I was going to recreate that here, but it just looked too annoying. I find mails with the big "certified outgoing virus free" footer amusing, and have left it here for your edification.
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This was the first mail I'd ever received here from someone wanting a link or a plug or whatever, so it's got sentimental value. If I had to evaluate, I'd say this site is medium-small in size. By size I'm referring to viewers, not pages. Being as Black Champagne has only been online since February, and has never had a big plug from any big site, I think the hundreds of unique visitors and several thousand page loads a day are pretty good for 5 months work. Especially when there are approximately... well actually there are an infinite number of other blogs and humor sites around. I'm in sort of an odd position, doing this site while working on another site that has a daily readership in the tens of thousands, and is one of the busiest sites on the entire internet. Literally. I've never plugged this site from dii.net, at least not directly. I've posted a few things in the forums, and had a link here once or twice from content pages, when it was appropriate (like to the slang page), and those have brought in a few hundred viewers total. Not bad, but I get that many hits a day from Google lately. I'm also a hit whore, but at the same time I've been content to let this site grow in popularity sort of on it's own, and have never asked for a plug from any bigger sites. Well, I've hinted at plugs, but never actually outright requested them, and haven't gotten any, in any event. The biggest hit day thus far was a day this site was mentioned on a radio station in Georgia as a weird site to look at, and I only found out about that from a reader email a few days later, after I posted about the unexplained reader spike. Back to the email at hand, I looked at his site at the time, and I'm looking again now (July 6, 2002) while I'm doing this mail bag, and it doesn't really thrill me. It's a blog of sorts, but is mostly weird text colors and point sizes, with lots of photos. My links page is designed to be just sites I personally really enjoy and would recommend. Not just every site on the Internet that I happen to have visited at some point. It's sort of a "Flux says go" listing, and I'll stand behind the content and quality of any site listed. However as I've had this link request, and a few others, I think I'll make a section on the links page for link requests. Readers can check them out themselves if they are curious, though I'll of course put in a few comments about them to provide some guidance.
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This is my favorite email ever, thus far. I posted about the surge in hits June 15th, and got this email later that day, explaining where they'd come from. It was a mystery, since I didn't see any jump in site referrals from anywhere, or to any particular page. So tons more people than usual came to look, but they all came to the main page, and they all arrived by typing in the URL directly. I couldn't explain how that would have happened, other than to think a link from a forum somewhere that didn't allow HTML, so people had to paste the URL in. Nice of SLB here to explain things. I got another mail from him with more detials about things, but it's been extensively covered in the June 21st update, so go read that if you didn't see it the first time and want more details.
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This is in regards to the emoticons portion of the Internet Slang page, and it's been noted and added. Note that they aren't just lowercase "o"'s on each side of the upside down question mark, they are the degree symbol, which looks like a levitating "o". The fact that they are 167, 168, 167 is damn convenient; makes it easy to remember and quick for your fingers.
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This appears to be spam, but it's very odd spam. I'd expect it be pitching me on their hosting service, I.E. trying to get me to join up with them, but no, it's asking for a link. It was sent to webmaster@sinate.com, and I was one of the BCC recipients, but can tell from the path that they sent it to mailbag@blackchampagne.com, which is not the email address on the links page. It worked as spam though, since I was curious at their approach, and therefore went to look at their site. I doubt I would have if it had just been a "hosting service for you!" mail. Clever bastards. The interesting subtext to this is that they set my gaydar to tingling. The URL of their site, with "out" in it, and the site logo, which shows three smiling, hunky guys standing close together, are a bit suspect, I think. To quote Monthy Python. I don't see anything on their site that's openly gay, and they show a male/female couple on most of their pages, below the three guys logo, but maybe that's just to throw off the homophobes. The guy's email name, "BobbyDBadboy" is about as gay as can be, but I don't mean that in a necessarily-homosexual way. Though it might be that also. Their hosting terms are more expensive and provide less bandwidth than my current host, so I have no consideration of switching to their side (so to speak). Heavy bonus points are removed from their score for the address on the email. Look at www.sinate.com; as far as I can tell it's just an endless list of scams, crappy ad spy ware, pyramid schemes, spam operations, etc. The biggest asshole stuff on the internet, in my opinion. Since that's the recipient of the mail, not BCC'ed like me (and the others?) I figure they know each other, or the same person is running both sites, or something, though I guess it could be just happenstance. So I shall give them no business, I think.
If you would like your mail to be included in a future mail bag, give it a try. |
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