Ok, so I'm almost at 3,000 "hits" since I started the web site about 2 months ago, which equates to about 100 a day. I had a few huge days of upwards of 300 hits - after my mentions on Aaron's Baseball Blog and the progressive "We hate Bush" site This is Not Over. But most of my hits continue to come from (a) people I know and (b) Google searches for topics that I mention frequently. This has mainly been "John Gulager", "Matt Pond Champagne Supernova", and "Boston Rob". While I haven't actually altered my content to try to get searched more or get another link from a more popular website, I certainly am interested in increasing my traffic. I'm just not sure how to do so. Certainly a difficulty I'm facing is the disparity of topics that I'm writing about. There's the sports articles, there's the television articles, there's the posts about poker tournaments and softball games and other things specific to my life which is going to be difficult to get onto search engines, and there's the more esoteric indie rock/iPod stuff - which no one seems to have much interest in but me. So I'm not sure where to take this blog. I'm continuing to write exclusively what is of interest to me - and since I have such a wide disparity of interests, the topics are going in those directions. I'm trying to be funny, but it's tough to be funny in a record review, so it won't always work. I don't know. This is certainly a work in progress. But thank you to all the readers who have sent me encouraging e-mails and those that have made comments. It is appreciated. If no one was reading this, I probably would have stopped writing it a month ago.
Anyway, in my attempts to see whether I could increase my hits I typed "Vague Space" into Google and the first hit that came up was vaguespace.com - which is not me! (I'm .net) The next bunch of hits refer to "Vague Space", the song by Stephen Malkmus (of "Pavement"), which is where I got the title of the blog from. Then there's a link to a website of a British band named "Vague Space", which I checked out but their server was too slow for me to figure out if they were any good. Anyway, this web site didn't come up until #20 on the hit list, which is pretty fucking sad. In fact, the now empty page on Blogspot that I started out this blog on before I switched to Typepad was higher on the list than this page. I don't understand.
Then I tried typing in my own name to see if that got Vague Space higher on the list, but that failed as well. Of course, I don't think I've published my own name until now (Internet anonymity and all), but my e-mail address which is readily available includes my name, so I've now added "Bill Elenbark" to the About page. Maybe that will increase the hits. I do suggest to everybody to type their own name (in quotes if the first name is common) into Google and see what you get. It's pretty neat. My list includes links to a couple of articles I wrote for work that are on the Internet, my performance in last fall's Dunellen 5k, and the rest are referring to my dad. So it's a little disappointing. Perhaps after this post, "Vague Space" could be mentioned. That would be better.
By the way, the Phillies and Mariners both suck, my fantasy pitchers have dropped to sucking levels, and the Sixers got killed by Detroit. On the bright side, the Yankees might get swept by Texas tomorrow, so at least Jan is happy. And alongside here are the pictures of the Raiders two new cornerbacks, Fabian Washington (of Nebraska) and Stanford Routt (of Houston). Both have speed to burn (Washington had the second fastest 40 time in NFL combine history - 4.27, while Routt was a 200-M track star at Houston), but are either raw or question marks in the size/ball skills department. They are definitely "Al Davis" type picks. Hopefully one of them will turn out better than the suck-ass Charles Woodson.
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