Eight Years of Link Rot

Years ago, back when we thought the World Wide Web was new and cool and we actually called it the World Wide Web and you had to have “www” in front of a web address because otherwise somebody might think you wanted Gopher access to their site for Christ’s sake, back then I read an interview with Douglas Engelbart.  Or maybe it was somebody else.  It could have been Ted Nelson.  Or maybe it was a dream.  I have learned that memory is unreliable which is why, in part, I write this blog.  Anyway, Douglas Engelbart is the guy who invented or bundled together the idea of just about everything you take for granted in computing today, only those ideas never quite came across as envisioned.  Basically, we messed it all up along the way.  It is what we do best.

And in this interview, some young reporter, gushing to be interviewing the person who came up with the very idea of Hypertext, asked him if this whole shiny new World Wide Web thing was the wonderful rainbow-streaked living embodiment of all he had foreseen.  Wasn’t this just what he beheld all those years back when he was given a nearly divine vision of the future?

And the response, from whoever it was… and I am paraphrasing here, because I cannot remember his actual withering retort… was approximately “Jesus Fuck No!”

And his objection didn’t even reference GeoCities.

No, he was pissed off that he had envisioned a vast interlinking of information systems that would allow the user to find all he needed smoothly and seamlessly, and what we had created was a mess of hand typed static URIs that would fail to connect the moment something in the path moved or changed.  We had taken his vision of Hypertext and created from it a living hell of link rot.  I don’t think he used the actual term “link rot,” though he might have.

And this was, as I said, during an earlier era of the web, before link rot was a really big deal.  Visionary that he was, he foresaw this as he foresaw so much else.  He could see the linkpocalypse coming.  Actually, it probably was Ted Nelson.  He literally hates HTML.  But it doesn’t matter, we’re still screwed, having been left with this sort of thing now.

Preliminary link rot results are that 25% of bookmarks saved in 2009 are dead, and 17% saved in 2011 are gone. Spreadsheet to follow

— Pinboard (@Pinboard) August 18, 2014

The World Wide Web, as it turns out, is a place where we mostly used to be able to find stuff, but it keeps disappearing.  Often, the happiest result is getting the dread 404 errors, which have become common enough that we have taken to making them cute or pretty or different, so as to make the failure of one link or another more pleasant.

The EVE Online 404 error page

And 404 is good compared to the alternatives.  You are just as likely to get somebody cybersquatting on a URL with ads and malware.  This seems to be the common end for self-hosted blogs.  People stop updating, then stop paying the bill, and then the domain expires and the next day there is a spam page sitting there dispensing shit where once there was something of value.

Some days I hate the internet.

If it were not for the Internet Archive I am sure I would think myself crazy, remembering so many virtual things that have, for one reason or another, shed even their virtual existence and disappeared.

Basically, I am eight years down the road on the whole blogging thing today, and I can really see how annoying the whole link rot thing can be.  I can channel Engelbart’s rage… or whoever that was in the interview I cannot find… because internet.

I go back and look at old posts at least once a month, thanks to my month in review posts, and I end up running into more and more old posts with dead links.  I have always frowned upon posts with supporting arguments available only as links (the awful “go read this and come back” posts), but I am becoming more convinced that I need to quote as much as possible in blog posts, so as to make each post as self-contained as possible, that it might make sense five years down the road when the link to the source material has gone bad.  But I cannot copy things wholesale, as I do not want to steal the works of others.  So there is this middle ground of trying to include enough to support what I am saying, knowing whatever links I include may go away (as an example, SOE has a habit of just changing their web site hierarchy every two years because “fuck the web” I guess, so the data is generally still there, it just has a different URI), without actually stealing the works of other and actually encouraging people to visit other sites.  Community, yo.

All of which is something of an odd intro into my 8 year anniversary post (trivia: Blog created at 17:04 UTC on September 12, 2006), but here we are, eight years in and I am feeling the pain of being on the internet.  For those with more free time than sense, you can go back and look at past anniversary blog posts to see how I have held up over the years.

• A Year of Living Noobishly
• Two Years Below the Masthead
• Three Years We Grew in Virtual Sun and Shower
• Four Years In, No Further From Noobdom
• Heroic Results of the First Five Year Plan
• But Now I am Six, I’m as Clever as Clever
• The Seven Year Kvetch

I had originally thought of going with Self-Portrait at Eight Years Old Wearing a Helm with Giant Horns as a post title, but I thought maybe I might be getting into references too obscure for mere mortals.  Plus I couldn’t come up with an decent image to go with that title, while images of 404 messages are legion.

Anyway, it is at this point I start trotting out various and sundry statistics and other bits of trivia, with some sort of forward looking message at the end.  If you are interested in that sort of thing, you will find it after the cut.  If not, well… there are plenty of happy destinations in the side bar.  And most of those links are still good!

So into the trivia.

Base Statistics

An attempt to quantify what I have done here in the last twelve months.  The change over last years totals are noted in parentheses.

Days since launch: 2,922 (+365)
Posts total: 3,347 (+378)
Average posts per day: 1.15 (-0.01)
Comments: 23,205 (+2,913)
Average comments per post: 6.9 (+0.1)
Average comments per day: 7.9  (+0.0)
Spam comments: 1,173,467 (+181,304)
Average spam comments per day: 401.6 (+12.5)
Comment signal to noise ratio: 1 to 50.6 (+1.6)
Comments written by me: 2,554 or 11%
Images uploaded:  8,015 (+1835)
Space used by images: 1.8 GB of my 3 GB allocation

Demongraphics

The English speaking world continues to dominate traffic on this blog, which is written entirely in some form of English.  The rest tend to be places where knowing English isn’t uncommon (all my distant cousins in Sweden speak English) and where online gaming is a popular thing.

Darker equals more traffic

Over the last year this is how many page views were recorded for the top ten countries.

1. United States    221,373
2. United Kingdom     37,537
3. Canada             25,003
4. Germany             22,525
5. Australia         16,582
6. France             11,432
7. Netherlands          9,158
8. Sweden              7,595
9. Poland              4,777
10. Brazil              4,439

These numbers probably under count the actual results, as all the country numbers don’t add up to the total page views for the last twelve months.  I suspect there is a bucket labelled “unknown” not listed on the chart catching all the extras.  Unknown would likely be in second place if I added up on my fingers and toes correctly, which is probably why it gets hidden.

There are swaths of the globe that send no traffic, but I find the list of countries that sent me exactly one page view in the last year more interesting.

1. Papua New Guinea
2. Mozambique
3. Bhutan
4. Cape Verde
5. Samoa
6. Federated States of Micronesia
7. Mayotte
8. Antigua and Barbuda
9. Cuba
10. Vatican City
11. Falkland Islands
12. Saint Lucia
13. Martinique
14. Cameroon
15. Sudan
16. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
17. British Virgin Islands

Incoming!

Who sends me traffic.  Search engines rank first, with Google on top, so I decided to take them off of the list this year.  I am sure they don’t mind.  Instead, my lists will be the top ten sites other than Google that send me traffic.

Over the Last Year

1. Blessing of Kings
2. EVE News 24
3. Greedy Goblin
4. Keen and Graev
5. Jester’s Trek
   
6. VirginWorlds
7. Popehat
8. EVE Bloggers
9. Low Sec Lifestyle
10. Twitter

Some of these are old favorites.  Blessing of Kings, a popular blog with that Blogger blog roll in the side bar.  The surprise entry is Twitter.  I would have been pretty sure that my Twitter traffic was negligible, but I do get a few clicks from it a day.  That adds up.  The same for Popehat, where I enjoy an alphabetically advantageous position on the blog roll.  Never a huge traffic source on any given day, but always some traffic every single day.

Jester’s Trek stopped back at the end of May and traffic from there tapered off rapidly.  However, Sugar Kyle added me to the list over at Low Sec Lifestyle which has picked up the slack and is now one of the top sources of blog roll based traffic for the site.  Both sites are on the Blogger platform and use the blog roll side bar.

All Time (Or who has been playing the long game)

1. VirginWorlds
2. Blessing of Kings
3. EVE News 24
4. Jester’s Trek
5. Google Reader
6. WordPress.com Reader
7. Keen and Graev
8. Popehat
9. Player versus Developer
10. EQ2 Daily

VirginWorlds contines to hold the all time crown… so long as Google is out of the way.  Google has sent me many times traffic than the top ten combined.   Also, by removing Google from the list, EQ2 Daily recaptured the spot it lost last year.  You can also see what a blow the death of Google Reader meant.  The surprise entry is WordPress.com reader.  That cannot be right, can it?.  I think they are inflating their own stats there.

Outgoing!

Where people go from here, or who actually gets some traffic from me.

Over the Last Year

1. Wikipedia (Castle Wolfenstein being the most popular click)
2. Civ Fanatics (Running Civ II on Windows 7 64-bit)
3. Battle.net (April Fools stuff)
4. The Mittani dot com (Battle reports)
5. Hardcore Casual
6. Inventory Full
7. Player versus Developer
8. Keen and Graev
9. Bio Break
10. Tobold’s Blog

I link out to Wikipedia all the time for source material and definitions.  People do click on those links it seems.  As for positions 5 through 10, I am not sure.  SynCaine, Bhagpuss, and Green Armadillo do comment here and link here at times, and I link to them as well.  But I barely exist in the world of the last three, as none of them ever link to me or visit here to comment, at least not in the last year or so, and I don’t link any of them all that often either.  So how they get traffic from me is a bit of a guess.

All Time

1. Pokemon.com and various sub sites
2. Civ Fanatics
3. Wikipedia (Pokemon Black & White being the most popular click)
4. EVE Online official sites
5. Battle.net
6. Hardcore Casual
7. Keen and Graev
8. Blessing of Kings
9. Kill Ten Rats
10. Tobold’s Blog

The longer view shows the influence of Google.  I write about Pokemon and Google brings some people here who then click on the link to the official Pokemon site I am referencing and that is that.  Everybody on the list I have linked to quite a bit over time, except Tobold there on the end.  I think that must be entirely based on his prediction about CCP going bankrupt in 2012.  Good times.

Most Viewed Posts

These two lists are driven by Google.  Something can be interesting to me fellow bloggers and MMO players for a couple of days, but Google will latch onto something and send traffic day in and day out for ages, slowly building up a preponderance of page views.

Over the last year

1. Running Civilization II on Windows 7 64-bit
2. The Mighty Insta-90 Question – Which Class to Boost?
3. Considering Star Wars Galaxies Emulation? Better Grab a Disk!
4. BlizzCon – Warlords of Draenor Features Announced!
5. Level 85 in EverQuest… Now What?
6. Blizzard Isn’t Giving You a Free Copy of Warlords of Draenor
7. April Fools at Blizzard – 2014
8. Type 59 Being Pulled from the World of Tanks Store
9. 20 Games that Defined the Apple II
10. Going Bombing in War Thunder

All time most viewed

1. Play On: Guild Name Generator
2. Running Civilization II on Windows 7 64-bit
3. How To Find An Agent in EVE Online
4. How to Catch Zorua and Zoroark
5. First Pokemon Black and White Download Event – Victini
6. April Fools at Blizzard – 2013
7. Diablo III vs. Torchlight II – A Matter of Details
8. EVE Online – The Tutorial
9. World of Warcraft Magazine – Issue 2
10. Considering Star Wars Galaxies Emulation? Better Grab a Disk!

Categories and Tags

This is something of a good measure of what I write about.

Ten Most Used Categories

Out of 79 total.  Categories are a staple.  I attach one to each post, and they tend to reflect what I am playing.  Over the last year I was playing World of Warcraft and EVE Online, and guess who tops the list?

1. World of Warcraft  (898, +111)
2. EVE Online (792, +128)
3. EverQuest II (542, +15)
4. EverQuest (441, +24)
5. Lord of the Rings Online (337, +19)
6. Sony Online Entertainment (321, +30)
7. Instance Group (263, +20)
8. Blizzard (258, +24)
9. Humor (224, +7)
10. Misc MMOs (174, +4)

Pokemon, for all my gushing of late and all the traffic I send to Pokemon.com, is in 14th place behind Rift and Vanguard, with 122 uses.

I did remove the category “Entertainment” from the list, and I am considering deleting that category from the site, as I did over at EVE Online Pictures.  Back in the day, WordPress.com used to push blog posts that used certain tags to their front page.  I made it there a few times back in the day.

This was to encourage people to use some standard categories.  However, they have grown such that they pretty much stopped doing that.  Now they go find blog posts that make them look socially concerned and highlight those in batches.  Blogs about trivia or things that are not socially concerned… and video games are only played by bad people… need not apply.  So I am not sure I need a category that basically means “this was a post” in the context of the blog.

Ten Most Used Tags

Out of 2,596 total.  Tags, on the other hand, are much more chaotic.  I use them to indicate what aspect of a particular game I am writing about.  There are a lot of tags I have used just once, and a number I use for humorous purposes.  Some of them overlap, like “Fippy Darkpaw” and “Progression Server.”  I rarely use one without the other, so perhaps I should have just used one or the other.  Using both seemed to make sense at the time, and yet somehow they don’t match up.  When did I use one without the other?

1. null sec (166, +44)
2. Fippy Darkpaw (80, +4)
3. Progression Server (74, +4)
4. YouTube (63, +9)
5. Quote of the Day (60, +28)
6. Nostalgia (58, +2)
7. Free-to-Play (48, +4)
8. contest (41, +4)
9. Cataclysm (40, +6)
10. Kickstarter (40, new to list)

Clearly, some tags should probably become categories.  The tag “null sec” should probably just be changed to a category, something like “Null Sec in EVE Online” or some such.  “YouTube,” “Kickstarter,” and “Quote of the Day” are candidates for that as well.  And the “Nostalgia” tag… I think I just use that to emphasize posts that are more nostalgic than the average, and the average post tends to be chock full of nostalgia.

The biggest problem is consistency in usage.  I bet Douglas Engelbart would have something to say about that.

The Search for Something

I keep talking about Google.  What search terms did people use to get here?  Well, these are the ones that came through in the clear.  If you are logged into Google your search terms are hidden, so over the last year “unknown” rules the roost.  Still, some people just use Google to search, and this is what they typed in.

Over the last year

1. tagn
2. warlords of draenor
3. amx 40
4. ancient gaming noob
5. civilization 2 windows 7
6. uss iowa
7. blizzard april fools 2014
8. arl 44
9. test alliance local
10. next wow expansion

All Time

1. ancient gaming noob
2. wow guild names
3. onyxia
4. arceus event
5. world of warcraft
6. tagn
7. guild name generator
8. guild names
9. heroic deadmines
10. blood elf porn

Guild name generators, running Civilization II on Windows 7 64-bit, obscure French tanks, and whatever the next WoW expansion is.  That is what people want.

A Peek into Page Views

I have decided to make it a yearly tradition to let people see the raw numbers.  WordPress.com mostly just tracks page views.  They track unique visitors as well, but they don’t put that data into any nice charts.  But over time it looks like 1 page view is about .75 unique visitors, so you can use that as a rule of thumb to estimate uniques.

TAGN Page Views per Month

TAGN Avg. Page Views per Day

The blog is dying!  Look at how the traffic is dipping!

Actually, what I would call “regular traffic,” which is visits from other blogs and by regulars, has held pretty much steady for the last five years.  I get about as many comments on posts about a given topic as I did back then.  What has changed is Google.  But I will get to that in the next section.

As an side, since it isn’t indicated on the charts, my best traffic day ever for page views was April 1, 2013, which garnered 15,426 page views for the site.   Oddly, it was the year that Blizzard did very little for April Fools, choosing to just go with some re-runs.  Explain that.  And, of course, it was all Google driven traffic.  About 10K showed up from Google, and half of them clicked on one of the links in post that lead to another post on the site.

And while you’re explaining that, how did April 2012 become the biggest month for page views?  April 1, 2012 only got 3,000 page views for the day.  I am sure Google was involved somehow.

What Can You Learn From All This?

My opinions, based on a modest amount of data, both from here and places like Alexa.

Google rules traffic.  If you want traffic, you must pray to the mighty in Mountain View.  On any given day traffic from Google Search alone eclipses all other traffic sources, often doubling everything else combined.  The other search engines barely register.  For the sake of trivia, the other engines stack up in order of traffic as:

1. Bing
2. Yahoo
3. Ask.com
4. Duck Duck Go
5. Yandex
6. AOL.com
7. Comcast Search
8. Conduit
9. Babylon
10. Dogpile

The page view numbers runs from about 3,000 at Bing to 30 from Dogpile over the last 12 months.  After that you start getting into single digits.  Google clocks in at about 200K for the same time frame.

Because of this, changes at Google change dramatically impact traffic to your site.  The death of Google Reader, changes to the way they handle image search, the heavy emphasis on Google+, and random changes in their search algorithms have all caused noticeable decreases in traffic here.

On the flip site, Google traffic tends to be very superficial.  Very few people who arrive via Google stay and become regulars.  Regulars tend to come from other gaming sites.  Changes at Google do not impact the regulars.

If you want to get a lot of Google traffic over time, go write a post with the title Running Civilization II on Windows 8 64-bit.  Or just have a post with “Porn” in the title.  Trust me.

As for other MMO Blogs, commenting and linking back and forth with another blog will generate traffic, regular traffic, over time.

Sites that collect links to MMO posts like VirginWorlds and EVE Bloggers do generate a steady stream of traffic over time from people predisposed towards related topics.

Gamer community sites, on the other hand, generate almost no traffic.  I have posted links to Raptr… until they turned that feature off… Anook, and a few other such sites over the years.  Such sites tend to be inwardly focused and want people to stay on their site.  Some become openly hostile to off-site links.  You can find friends and share experiences, but the moment such sites start generating outbound traffic, that is viewed as a problem to be fixed.

The Blogger blog roll side bar widget rules.  Tobold is a bad person for not using it. (And it is even odds that he will take that personally, with a 5% chance that he’ll turn it into a blog post in which he will mention how he doesn’t see things in black and white.)  Basically, a static blog roll doesn’t generate much traffic, but an active one that shows new posts does.  I keep trying to create something like that here, but I haven’t been able to come up with anything as good.  Probably makes me a bad person too.

All in all, if you’re not making any money on page views and getting a few decent comments, stats are just trivia, fun numbers to look at, but not very meaningful.  Clearly, if I was in it for the page views, I wouldn’t be cranking out 2,000 words about how I played Pokemon last week.  That stuff is death on page views.  But it is important to me… and Jenks apparently.

Finally, if you use Internet Explorer 9, you are a bad person.  If you use it in compatibility mode, you probably support terrorism.  This has nothing to do with the blog and everything to do with having to work on browser compatibility for a web based tool interface.  Stop it.

That Forward Looking Statement I Promised

This is where, every year, I say something about spending less time blogging and more time actually playing games.  There are plenty of weeks where writing about playing has taken up more time than actual playing.  But I like the routine, and writing about playing makes me think about what I played, what I enjoyed and what I did not.  It basically enhances the experience and makes every hour played that much more enjoyable.

So I will probably carry on as before.

Still, this cannot go on forever.

My current plan is to get to the 10 year mark, write one last anniversary blog post, and then go into semi-retirement on the blogging front, just keeping the month in review posts going.  I will be able to add in “Ten Years Ago” as part of each post and then summarize my gaming for the month by game, though probably with a bit more detail.  I just hope it won’t become a 5,000 word unreadable monthly tome.  And then throughout the month I will maybe post some screen shots.  I will need an outlet for that.

The blog should be good for another twelve years with that plan, assuming that WordPress.com doesn’t just shut down and throw all my stuff away.  But, barring that, at some point what I wrote this month might be in a “Ten Years Ago” section, which is frankly a bit unsettling.  The march of time is relentless.

So that is the big plan.  It is doable and is a couple years out so I have plenty of time to change my mind or whatever.  And, after that 10 years I will likely be dead or retired and living in a tiny shack outside of Boise, unable to afford internet access or even able understand what the internet has become.

In the near term, I need to work on the post title for the nine year anniversary.  I am currently leaning towards something with the German word “Nein.”

Until then, I will  carry on.  Thank you for visiting.

And remember, every comment on a little blog like this is worth a hundred page views when it comes to motivating a blogger.

Go comment on some blogs today.