For a long time now, I've been getting the stats from the two Orble blogs that I write on (less and less, as it happens, but then there's a lot going on that stops me from writing blog posts each and every day at the moment).
Surprisingly, in spite of the fact that I'm not writing very much on these posts, the two blogs still seem to be getting read regularly. Not sure who's all catching up on them, but someone amongst the millions of blog readers in the world must be.
But the interesting thing is that it's almost always the same two or three blog posts that appear at the top of the lists. On the blog called WorkReport.net there are two posts that vie with each other to appear first time and again. One of these is a piece I wrote when I was in the middle of my pre-prostate operation time, a time I don't look fondly back on except that it provided me with a good deal of material to write about. The other is an oddball post that I only wrote because I was getting paid to include a link in it. It relates to the Titanic Museum in Branson. This has been one of the most popular posts I've ever written, which no doubt speaks of the ongoing enthusiasm people have for the Titanic disaster. Curious.
On the other blog, Webitz.net, one particular post has been in the top spot a great deal since it was written. This is one on what I called the 'Geocities revival.'
Geocities, for those who don't remember, was an enormous site that allowed people to create their own websites on the geocities portal, way back in the dark ages of the Internet. The site I had was the first website I'd ever put together. It wasn't exactly WYSIWYG but it was close enough.
At some point in the geocities history, Yahoo took over the whole caboodle, presumably thinking either they were going to make lots of money out of it, or that it was better to put your rival in a corner and beat him to a pulp in due course. They put him in a corner all right, and then threw him out of the ring completely by closing down geocities, to the horror of thousands of people who'd put hundreds of hours of work into their particular space. The problem was that if you didn't act quickly enough, all your work would be gone for good - according to Yahoo. And of course, thousands of people (including myself) didn't act quickly enough - or didn't know what to do to save their material, especially if there was a lot of it.
The result was that suddenly thousands of virtual documents and photographs and so on vanished. However, the amazing thing about the Internet is that it's not quite so easy to get rid of stuff as all that. Various groups formed to collect all the data and put it back on line in a different format.
At the time I wrote the blog post, one of these was ASCII by Jason Scott. This is still functioning, I think, though the most recent update seems to be 2010. Jason has a lot of other things on his plate. Another group, OOCities also worked on keeping the geocities material. I mentioned them too, but like ASCII, they seemed to have moved onto other things, and their geocities material is only partial.
This wasn't good news for those of us who seemed to have missed out. In particular I was very saddened because two or three short stories that had actually been published elsewhere had gone AWOL in the process.
And then along came reocities. I explain about them here, in another post, called From geocities to reocities. Reocities seems to have managed to rescue practically everything that was on geocities. At least that's the impression I've got. They certainly rescued my old site (which now looks very cluttery by comparison with more recent webpages), and these days, when you click on the link, it comes up very quickly, compared to the sluggish pace you endured when it was first revived.
Thank goodness for their perseverance (it must have been an enormous task).
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