for those of you on wordpress (hosted at wordpress.com or not), i offer two items of advice, if you are interested in knowing who’s really linking to you, and how many people are visiting your contributions to the general irresponsibility of the world at large:

1. WordPress statistics is very generalistic. they depend entirely upon whether or not the proper tag {wp_footer()} is contained somewhere within your main index page and any other pages that might serve content (author templates, archive templates, category templates, tag templates, single post templates, and wordpress ‘page’ templates). if your theme has all those separate templates, but lacks the proper code, those templates won’t trigger information into your stats. and if you’re on the hosted wordpress.com, you can’t edit the themes. see why i left? well, that was reason # 57, i think.
2. When blogs that link to you directly, as in through a particular post, update their content and that post scrolls to the next page, that link will disappear from your wordpress dashboard. i just saw that happen with links from Jess and Tengrain. so basically, you can ignore that kind of shit too in your dashboard. Also, if someone simply hasn’t clicked a link to you, say in someone’s blogroll, for a while, wordpress drops reporting it as well. this is one of the reasons why i try to take time out every week to click through people’s blogrolls.

in short, the wordpress stats and dashboard information never come close to matching the real stats i get from my server software itself. so, at the risk of pimping something my wife may or may not be working for in the near future, i humbly suggest google analytics. it’s free, for one thing, the stats are far more verbose, and they match succinctly with the actual statistics i get from my server software. it does a lot of other useful things as well.

i also have a sitemeter thingy running from my sidebar. it’s not very verbose, either, for what it’s worth. at least not the free one. my stats from feedburner are absolute crap (they report less than 30% of the hits my server stats say touch my feed. kinda sad, that, and i’m glad i don’t pay for it).

okay, that was your handy tip for the day from Commander Other. carry on!

okay, i get it now. wordpress.com statistics being necessarily generalistic, i failed to understand, back when i had the otherwhirled on wordpress.com, just how many of my visitors were really just spam-whores looking for ways to sell their wares. in fact, as i noted over on Jonestown in the comments the other day, spam-whores still visit the now-defunct otherwhirled at a rate of several hundred per day. now that the otherwhirled has been on its own domain for several months, i begin to perceive:

1. that i generally enjoy somewhere between 20-30 actual visitors per day.
2. that in part this is because i haven’t spent a lot of time getting the domain registered with all the search engines.
3. but also that i alone am not really all that funny. i draw this conclusion both from the visitation numbers and the number of comments.
4. especially when my work-load of late has forced me to not be very consistent with the quantity and frequency of my posts.

i think this is also largely because i’m being a one-hit wonder in that all i do is snark on photos. i’m not that eloquent of a writer, and i frankly spend so much of my life in PhotoShop and Adobe Camera Raw that to a large degree, the last thing I want to do in my free time is manipulate someone else’s photographs.

there are some elements of this that i cannot really change. clients and family have to come first, and so do certain other activities (i’m one of our state’s handful of soccer referee instructors, and am just a few months shy of being expected to start teaching TaeKwonDo classes on my own). the thing is, i don’t want to stop doing what i do here, especially with at least another 9 months on the contract for domain services, and i don’t want to mix it with my personal blog. as for the latter matter, i don’t really have a good reason as to “why” i don’t want to mix the two, i just feel it would be better if i didn’t. and because hardly anyone spells my name right and my personal blog is one of the ‘original’ vanity domains (i got the domain back in 1995).

so, i’m wondering something. i had this idea, for what it’s worth, a long time ago, back during the summer when Tengrain and Dr. Monkey von Monkerstein were kind enough to guest-blog for me, in fact. so at the risk of appearing to rip off an idea from Fairlane, if the 20-30 of you are aware of anyone who’d like to help the otherwhirled provide something other than snarkery on photos, please invite them to contact me at commander[dot]other[at]otherwhirled[dot]com. the types of things i’d like to do here, but lack the time to do consistently myself:

1. Onion-esque rewrites of news articles.
2. Unique snarkographic imagery.
3. Editorials of social, political, religious, and/or other pertinent topics—with the understanding that political and religious matters are generally considered snarky cannon fodder.
4. Snarkery on the entertainment industry and the public’s tendency towards materialism.
5. Pretty much anything else that fits into those modes of thinking.

ultimately, i would really like to have several good bloggers participate here—i don’t currently have an intention on limiting the number of them, provided we can all get along and support each other even when we might share idealogical differences. i am also willing to extend the offer to moderate and conservative bloggers, again, given the caveat that we treat each other respectfully.

thank you for your time and your assistance. and thank you to those few of you who have kept visiting here over the months.