The Trouble with Archives

I’m slowly updating The Stop Button with full archives. I’ve got a lot of the posts, not enough for a full recovery, but probably around 75%.

Except I’m dropping anything under 250 on the actual subject, which is losing a lot. Then there’s the actual writing. It isn’t very good. It’s very familiar, suggests I think I have an audience, which I was never sure I did.

Today I went through June 2005 and dropped most of the posts. The ones I kept I edited, but it got me thinking whether adding these posts to the Indices section of the site was appropriate. I could just have the Archives for people who cared.

Then I changed my mind again and decided to go with the halved month.

I’m not sure when the style of my posting changed so much, maybe when I got Sandvox. Or when I read about it and realized it could give me the site I wanted.

I keep waiting for this trip through the archives to get interesting, but it’s mostly just embarrassing.

Google Analytics

I just got google analytics. Better information than what goDaddy charges me for.

It’s nice and graphical, showing me all sorts of neat stuff like… new and returning visitors, entry paths, and visits vs. pageviews. These things sound very simple to anyone who’s used an online counter (StatCounter for example), but I’ve been stuck with GoDaddy’s lame reports for months now.

I’m going to wait a couple days before canceling the goDaddy, just to make sure the Google’s picking up day-to-day changes (it’s only got yesterday on there now).

But so far, I’m very impressed.

The (un)missing post, follow-up

I went ahead and posted a comic response from the queue, leaving the queue at one….

Yesterday, “The Stop Button” had its highest ever hits for a Thursday, which made the decision for me. (and on a comic post, no less)

Missing a post

For the last few months–wow, it actually has been like two months–”The Stop Button” has had daily updates. The secret, I quickly learned, was to get a queue of posts going. Since the reviews are rarely topical, it’s easy.

Unfortunately, I’m out of movie reviews and I’ve been alternating for a while, so now I need to decide whether to hold off until the afternoon for a movie post or just throw up one of the comic reviews I’ve got.

Fridays are the “Stop Button’s” weakest day too, Fridays are the day I considered dropping. I’m going out of town in a bit and I might switch over to three post weeks, but I don’t like that idea.

More than anything else, the daily posts force me to get on a schedule (I only have a couple thousand movies, taped off TCM, FMC, or just on DVD, to watch) and distribute my time well.

It’s just frustrating. Oddly, if I remember the old days (on Blogger, probably), the comic book posts were more popular than the movie ones.

Traffic

I host “The Stop Button” at bigdaddy and they’ve got an add-on with additional traffic facts (for extra money, of course). “The Stop Button” started at jablog, went to blogger, then went to my .mac account before finally ending up at a real host. I never could get traffic info when it was at .mac, beause I was using domain forwarding (from thestopbutton.com), and at blogger readership fluctuated a heck of a lot.

A few weeks ago, Karelia linked to me (as a Sandvox example site) and my hits went up by about a hundred a day. The funny thing about hits is how much work one has to do to figure out if the hits are actually readers. Google stops by “The Stop Button,” for instance, nine times a day.

The incredibly technical approach I take to it is dividing my hits by three.

Reviewers’ copies

There’s one comic book company who gives me review copies. He gives everyone review copies, so I’m not special. I did just get another reviewer’s copy from someone else, but it’s a one time deal. From the other company, I get them all the time.

I just posted a review, based on said reviewers’ copy. When I started getting these copies, last summer I think, I was worried. I had signed up just because I wanted early dibs on a particular comic book, but then I got a different comic book first, to review. It wasn’t my preferred genre (horror), but it turned out to be excellent (for the most part), and I published an honest review about it.

Nicely, all of this company’s books–to a point–were good and I could post honest, positive reviews about them. Eventually, the inevitable happened, and they published something bad. Here’s where my problem came in–I have no problem being positive about anything, as long as it’s good. I have no problem being negative about bad work, but this negative work is stuff I pay for. This company pays for these reviewers’ copies. But I’m not going to lie either. I used to lie a lot when I was writing for a comic book review website and I hated it so much I had to quit.

Then I came up with a solution. And it hasn’t bitten me on the ass yet. Ignore the bad ones. So far it’s worked–and when I post a review with something moderately negative in it, now it doesn’t get a link anyway, so what would the point be?

Still, whenever I do review one of these reviewer copies, I always worry if the company guy wonders about the other comic in the review packet….

Willkommen

Can you believe wordpress still had "On Blogging" available? I couldn't. I only typed it in on a whim, since I wasn't sure I was going with wordpress for this blog. Also, I had a nice introductory paragraph going in my head this morning and I've since forgotten it. Along with the title for the page.

I'm a lousy person to have a blog called "On Blogging," as I don't consider myself a blogger. I get kind of strict on what I do and do not consider a blog–an online journal, sure, that's a blog. A subjective news site, those sites are probably blogs too. Except California (is it California) considers them journalists, based on the recent decision against Apple.

"On Blogging" is an attempt to be transparant about my other blogs. There's no room for personal reflection–outside the context of the review–at "The Stop Button," my film and comic book review site. It's a pretty site, using Karelia's Sandvox. My other site–all of three days old–is "The Stupid Page," which runs Blogger. "The Stupid Page" is for entertainment commentary. It's supposed to be the equivalent to shooting off an e-mail to a friend when one reads something (entertainment-related) unbelievable or funny. As such, I'm trying to get a friend of mine to post there too.

"On Blogging," I'm hoping, will be some insight into the whole process. I use Blogmad for "The Stop Button," so I know most people just write about their process in their blogs, but such discussion isn't right for "The Stop Button" and it's not right for "The Stupid Page" either. Actually, "The Stupid Page" used to be part of "The Stop Button," way back when "Button" was at the now-gone jablog. It's changed concepts over the… wow… years and now it's closer to the original then it ever was since (for a while, it was a place for me to rant about university woes, then it was similiar to what I've got in mind for "On Blogging").

I did have plans for my first post here, but, like I said, I've forgotten them.

Since making those plans, I did do a post over at "The Stupid Page" and, for the first time ever–in two and a half years of posting–end with a question mark to invite comments, which I think is less of a banner day and more a forecast of the apocalypse.