Dhivael/Anne’s Hyperactive Blog

I just got finished (I hope) with the move to the new subdomain. I had to change a whole ton of stuff to not point to the old address anymore, but now… Everything seems to be working alright.

There was a lot more stuff to change than I anticipated and I had to go edit the raw SQL stuff, even. Bleh! Glad I don’t have to do this every day!

So I’ve moved everything over to blog.annelions.com, as you can probably see if you’re reading this. Some images and stuff still point to the old blog address and I’m working now on correcting them. Shouldn’t notice anything major right now, though, except a few missing images. Working on getting that all fixed ASAP.

Okay, maybe not, but that’s what it felt like when I upgraded WordPress earlier and, instead of getting the upgrade page, I got the install page. Oops! A quick refresh, though, straightened things out.

Still planning on moving this to blog.annelions.com soon. I just thought I’d get the upgrade out of the way so I don’t have to deal with both at once.

So. Off to make sure nothing’s broken!

I am so tired of searching for a WordPress template and finding one that is perfect only to download it and discover that the stupid thing is encrypted somehow. The footer links invariably end up being:

• Irrelevant. I highly doubt that a business card company actually designed the theme. Nor does my site have anything to do with business cards (so it’s not going to help their PR by that much, as far as I know.
• Outdated. The sites are completely dead and have been for some time.
• Objectionable. Gambling and ‘adult’ sites. These are somewhat rarer, but I still have no wish to link to either.

I’m usually willing to leave in a link if the footer’s not obfuscated in some way, but otherwise I either will fix it (unencrypt and remove the links) or simply not use the template. I know a lot of other people are getting tired of this and removing the encryption from their templates as well.

So, if you’re thinking of buying ‘advertising’ in the footer of a WP template (‘sponsoring’ a template), you’re just wasting your money. If you’re selling ‘advertising’, you’re scum.

I have no problems paying $5-10 for a decent template, which would give the creators about the same amount of money as they get now. I have no wish, however, to be unable to edit my template easily and to have stupid links at the bottom.S

I’d almost forgotten that this happened, but here we go…

About ten, fifteen years ago, my mother, brother and I lived in a tiny apartment complex. There were all of six units. The apartments were laid out in a U shape, so that four of them faced inwards towards the driveway and the two at the end of the U faced… the street, more or less. We lived in the middle one on one side, so that we faced the driveway.

This is where it gets tricky to describe… When you entered our apartment, from the door you could see into the dining area (just a vague ‘arch’ there, no real door) and then the sliding glass door into the backyard. The majority of the living room/dining room was to the left of the front door as you entered. The living room was small, so you had to take a detour around the television and turn right to get to the hallway. There was a bathroom to the right, and a bedroom to the left, almost at the end of this 10-15 foot long hallway. At the end of the hallway was the second bedroom. This bedroom had a large window that faced into the ‘backyard’, about four and a half to five feet off the ground. I was somewhere between 4th and 6th grade when we lived there and I couldn’t see out without standing on something.

As for the ‘backyard’, it was little more than a back porch. Every apartment had its own carport (the ones facing each other shared with the apartment next door). So there were wooden gates that led from the carport into the backyard. One side of the gate connected to the apartment wall, the other to a storage area that was outside. So you go through the gate, you’re standing on the back porch, right next to the sliding glass door. It’s not more than 3 feet from the door to the end of the concrete slab. Then another foot or so and then the six foot tall wooden fence that surrounded the backyard. The horizontal slats for the fence were all on the other side, so that there were none on the ‘inside’ where we were.

If you stepped past the sliding glass door (on the other side of the door from the entrance gate), just beside it were the washer and dryer side by side. They barely fit on the ‘porch’. Stepping beyond the dryer, you were now on dirt with a few stepping stones placed (got horribly muddy when it rained) ending at the square clothesline. This thing sat right beneath the second bedroom window and spun so that you could stand in one spot and get all the clothes on the line; or hang them up. The bedroom window was even higher from the outside than the inside.

Now that all those boring details are out of the way…

One evening, we’re watching TV in the living room (from which there’s a clear view of the porch, remember?) and my younger brother wandered off for some reason. Suddenly, he comes back from down the hall and reports that he just saw ‘an alien’ in the back bedroom window! My mom scoffs and sends me to investigate. As my brother seemed genuinely scared, I’m not exactly thrilled with this task. But I eventually go look and see… nothing.

Now there was a neighbor kid who lived across the street and didn’t like us. He did various things, including stealing something from us at one point; I think it was one of our bikes. So my mother said it was probably him, playing a joke on us, wearing a Halloween mask. With the two of us being somewhere between 7 and 13 (I don’t remember the exact date…) this explanation satisfied us.

But, thinking over it now, there are a few things that don’t add up.

1. If it was the neighbor kid, he had to get in the backyard somehow. The gate was not at all quiet. It creaked and banged whenever anyone used it. It creaked and banged whenever there was a storm, too, even if it was fastened shut.
2. Assuming that someone went in that way, they’d have to go past the large sliding glass door. The curtains were sheer, as nobody could see into the backyard in the first place and nobody was supposed to be there besides us, so we should’ve seen… something.
3. There was absolutely nothing to stand on back there that wouldn’t have made a loud racket from being dragged about. The neighbor kid was a year or so younger and slightly shorter than I was. If I couldn’t see into the window, neither could he. Nor could he have hung from the clothesline. Not only did my brother only see ‘a face’, but the clothesline spun and was generally unstable. True, he could’ve held a mask up to the window, but then he wouldn’t have been able to tell when my brother saw it and left.
4. A burglar, “casing” the place? My brother was adamant that it was ‘an alien’ with big eyes. What would a six foot tall man be doing wearing an alien Halloween mask? And, again, how did he get into and out of the backyard without anyone seeing or hearing? The fence surrounding the backyard area was certainly not new and not in the best of shape, had anyone tried to climb it.

My brother couldn’t have gotten the idea of ‘aliens’ from TV, since my mother absolutely forbid any ‘scary’ shows. Shows about aliens, ghosts and magic were all out. She let us watch the original Star Trek, but that was about it. And the ‘monsters’ on there don’t resemble what my brother claimed to see. I don’t even remember seeing any alien Halloween masks at that period of time. We lived there for several years, through several Halloweens, and I don’t remember seeing any of the numerous trick or treaters wearing an alien costume. Nor do I remember seeing any in the store before Halloween, though I’ve seen alien masks for sale in the past two or three years.

Whatever it was; prank, burglar, alien or simply an overactive imagination… My brother never saw it again. I never saw it.

And my mother? She never said anything about seeing anyone leave the backyard when my brother and I went to ‘investigate’. Even though the sliding glass door curtains were sheer and the back porch light was on.

Now that I’m writing it out, over a decade later, it gives me the creeps again. I severely doubt it was a kid and, if it was a grown-up, were we about to get robbed when my brother scared him off by spotting him?

Or was it… something else?

Install a blog. Seriously.

You don’t even have to update it daily. Google and other search engines honestly do not care that much. How do I know this?

I have a certain domain that I’ve held for… hmmm… about 6 years, give or take. If you go look at Archive.org, it’s gone through many iterations. Some are now rather embarrassing; for awhile the site was hosted for free on ‘Marhost’, though I don’t remember details. ‘Wigloo’ and Tripod have also been used before finally moving to a ‘semi-paid’ host and then finally here.

Anyway, I finally moved it to the current host about 2 years ago. Since then, it didn’t get much traffic. Some, but not much. 10-20 visitors a MONTH average, 60 for a high point. So not much traffic at all. At least, not until I decided to scrap the way things were and install WordPress for my own ease of updating. I added a few posts and then forgot about it, having other important things come up.

That was 6 months ago. I remembered a few days ago to check the webstats and found that I’ve been getting 130-180 visitors a month since then. This may seem like very little, but remember… I did NOTHING with the site for six months. Zip. Zilch. No new content. NOTHING. And yet I’ve seen a 2-3x increase in visitors.

When my page was pure HTML, I’d get a handful of searches for various keywords; maybe 10 searches a month. Nothing important, mostly just rarer stuff that’s hard to find elsewhere. Now that I have WordPress installed, I have been getting a lot more hits for more general words. Apparently, I rank somewhat highly somewhere for the word ‘boldly’ (and other generic words). Even if it’s buried on the third or fourth page of the search, that’s pretty darn impressive because:

1. I’ve done no search engine optimization. Beyond installing WordPress’s permalinks, I’ve done nothing to try to get search engines to visit.
2. Even if I had done SEO, ‘boldly’ is not a keyword/phrase I would have chosen. Google reports about 9 million results for ‘boldly’. And I’m getting hits for it? How cool is that!
3. I’ve done absolutely no advertising or posting of links for this site anywhere in the past 6 months.
4. The blog had been sitting dormant for nearly six months. No updates, not even automatic ones. Yet I’m still getting way more traffic with it than I ever got with plain HTML pages.

To me, the evidence is irrefutable: search engines love blogs. Before, I was skeptical that it’d do much. But it’s hard to deny 18 months of stats as a plain, irregularly updated, HTML site + 6 months as a never-updated blog.

Now, while you may not see as dramatic an increase as 2-3x your current traffic, it still seems worth giving it a shot.

If I can figure out how to get .HTACCESS to work, I will be moving my blog to http://blog.annelions.com soon. I have not been happy with the /blog subdirectory for some time, but for various reasons I’ve not had to/been able to move the site. But now, well, we’ll see.

The only thing that displeases me is that I will have to upgrade to a newer version of WordPress. I know I should have done it already, but I do not really like the newer version that much. Oh well, progress and all that, I suppose.