I started this on a whim in 2009 more as a way to just post some top of mind items, and whatever tickled my fancy.
11 years later and more than 1,000 posts, and I have yet to go viral even once. No matter, this is for me. If anyone else gets any value from it, then so be it.
That said, I have crept up to about 20 visitors a day. Since I do no promotion, no ads, no special SEO tricks, that seems pretty good. The only traffic generation I do is to have each post sent to my modest Twitter feed. So, I consider 20 visitors a day.
My most popular posts are all found via searches. Ironically, the top read post is from 2013, and was about my road bicycle, the Lemond Buenos Aires, a well loved bike by their owners (it was a steel framed, Ultegra equipped mid range road bike but the frame geometry was very forgiving and versatile.)
Ironically, #2 is a post I made last year, on the replacement to that Lemond (I had ridden it for 18 years, and as I had aged (read: gotten fatter and slower) I needed something more comfortable) the Trek FX-6 Sport. In fact, recently that has become the draw for people that come to my site.
There is another topic that has generated a significant fraction of traffic to my blog, whenever I talk about LinkedIn. I have never been a huge fan, and over the years, LinkedIn has done some scummy things to scrape data you might not want to share (there is no way in hell that I will give them my email password so they can “find” connections for me.) So I write about their lousy practices as they have evolved. My posts on LinkedIn can be found via this search.
Some good has happened on this blog. I spent a significant amount of time converting lousy scans of the original Doc Savage books into clean, consistent ePubs, and documented the process and tool chain. Turns out that there are a LOT of Doc Savage fans out there.
Some other tidbits
This blog started on the .org domain. Way back, like 1998, or maybe earlier, I had ISDN as my only broadband option. The ISP I connected through was called Best Communications (now long gone) and as part of their ISDN package, I got one “free” (aka included) domain.
My dog at the time was a gentle giant, an English Mastiff named Astro (from the Jetsons for those youngsters who don’t recall the 1960’s Saturday morning cartoons. Get off my lawn, dammit.) Astro was adopted by the Jetsons, and his original name was ‘Tralfaz’ and that was what I wanted my domain to be.
Some fucking squatter had the .com, so I took the .org. I looked every couple of years to see if the .com was available, and finally, in 2013, it went dormant (as in the owner stopped renewing) and it went to auction. I had to ‘win’ it, so, $650 later, I had ownership.
But I had been using tralfaz.org for so long, it stayed there. I created and tested a few things on tralfaz.com, but it was really just screwing around. Then in late 2017 (like Christmas break) I moved it all to tralfaz.com, and here we are.
With that change over, I disabled comments across the board. So damn much comment spam, so little real commenting. Facebook has destroyed the interactivity on most blogs, so I just cut the cord.
My email is still hosted (on G-suite for now) as tralfaz.org, but the tralfaz.com will get to me as well. I will be moving off of g-suite in the future, as I am pretty fed up with the Google crap. But, it has plenty of storage, and my wife is pretty lazy about her mail hygiene, so, until she sheds about 80% of the garbage in her imap store, we will be on G-suite.
Well, that meandered long enough, time to wrap it up for now
