Surprise bump in blog hits

Several weeks ago I noticed that I was suddenly getting a lot more hits on my blog, directed to this page, where I talk about eating Pop-Tarts as a kid, with butter on them. Occasionally people have stopped by and a couple commented. But in the last few months I'm getting 30 or 40 hits a day on that page.  Finally today I did a Google search and found that an episode of Family Guy had featured a song about putting butter on Pop-Tarts. Guess that explains it.

Why having a blog is kind of cool sometimes

Because sometimes you write something that results in your birthday being the #1 Google result when people search for "great things in history" (But without the quotes).

Blogging on the back seat

If any of you follow this blog closely, you might have noticed that I haven't written about my last two weekends. I just haven't been really motivated to talk about them. Maybe I need to just make the posts shorter. I'll admit that a big reason why I haven't blogged so much lately is that all day I sit and think about writing that I have to do for my dissertation and that makes the mere idea of writing not that exciting sometimes. Even when its for fun.

So I'm not saying I'm not going to keep on blogging, but I'm taking a break from some of the regularly scheduled stuff.

Old Book, New Book #8: No Country for Old Men

I finished "Get Shorty" about a week ago, and it was certainly a nice change from slogging through "Godel, Escher, Bach". Not to say I loved it, but it was just nice to read a novel instead of a textbook, at least for a while. As the first thing I've read by Elmore Leonard, I was kind of underwhelmed, seeing as how several of his books have been made into movies. Could be that "Get Shorty" was made into a movie, because it was a book about the movie business, and if there's one thing Hollywood loves, its itself.

Anyway, as I was done with "Get Shorty" and the books I've got holds out on haven't come in yet, I picked up another Cormac McCarthy book while I was at the library. "No Country for Old Men" was the basis for this last year's Best Picture winning Oscar, and as I just "The Road" and found it enjoyable, when I saw it on the shelf, I decided to give it a shot.

On another OBNB-related note, I noticed that I started tracking the books I was reading on the sidebar hear about a year ago, and I read 17 books in the last year. Not sure if that's a lot or not, but it was interesting to look back and see what all I'd read and to once again realize how long a year is.

Google search terms that may have led you to this blog

As culled from Google Analytics:

1. mcdonalds characters -- by far my most popular post.
2. 11 kfc -- not sure what people want at KFC that has an 11 in it.
3. big digital *name removed* -- hey some loyal customers
4. discontinued foods -- who knew there was such an interest
5. mcdonald's characters -- not just the regulars, but the ones that that McDonalds actually possesses.
6. discontinued mcdonalds food -- a perfect storm of search terms
7. *name removed* -- hey you found me. Of course I am all five of the top Google results
8. milk keeps going bad -- sorry I don't have any answers for these people
9. old mcdonalds characters -- I hope they weren't looking for the animals from the song
10. 11.kfc -- for those who like their 11 kfc with more punctuation

Other interesting search terms outside the top 10:

19. poptarts with butter - is there any other way, really?
25. "spaghetti bowl" pelicans - although if they had the same experience I did, I'm surprised they didn't leave me a comment
49. arbys magic trick toys directions -- I'm not even sure which post this search would take you to.

Three Years of The Big Digital

Hard to believe, but I've been blogging for 3 years now. 2 years ago I celebrated the one year anniversary of the blog, but last year, the day came and went without notice. If you want some stats, here you go:

Since I started blogging, I've published 302 posts (303 counting this one). I didn't have any kind of visitor tracking for the first 8 months or so, but in the 28 months since I started tracking there have been 41,613 visits to the site, and 61,186 page views. Early this year, I peaked with 4,722 visits to the site in the month of April.

Nearly all of the visits come from referrals from Google Images searches, especially for McDonalds characters, but also for album cover art for Garth Brook's The Hits, Counting Crows' August and Everything After, and Mana's Suenos Liquidos. There are also a few people who I'll call regulars, even though I don't know who they are. I just see their locations show up repeatedly in the visit log. I sometimes wonder if they are people I know or not, but mostly I just think of them as their location and usual time of the day, as in, "oh, there's Franklin Covey's daily visit."

As far as I can tell from Google Reader there are 9 people besides myself who subscribe to the feed of my blog in Google Reader. I just changed the blog template yesterday for the very first time in 3 years, and the only change was to make it fill up the width of the screen which I've wanted to do for some time, but wasn't sure how to do and keep the same color scheme.

As far as the blog goes after 3 years, I would have to say that I enjoy blogging. Having some structure helps me do it more regularly, so I tend to pick things that I want to write about and then do recurring weekly features about those things. I've cycled through a few lists and lately have settled in pretty good to blogging on Mondays about my weekend, and then on Wednesday finding a video to share, and then just whatever else comes to mind. Its nice for me to have somewhere to just type up my thoughts, and since people comment pretty rarely, it mostly just feels like I'm typing them for myself, which is fine. Its always kind of exciting when someone does comment though, so feel free to post a comment. I promise its really easy, and you don't have to set up an account or anything.

In the time I've been blogging, I've finished 3 years of graduate school, and really hope to be graduating in the next 3 months or so, and find a job, and I'll also be turning 30 in the next few months as well, so I may have to change the description of the blog soon. (Can I count 30 as part of the late 20s? I've been counting everything else as mid-20s) I've been on numerous dates, and even briefly seen the relationship threat level meter teeter around orange for a week or two. :) I've had lots of great experiences in my singles ward, serving in two EQ presidencies, and a year as our ward executive secretary. I've lived in 3 different apartments. I've acquired two new nieces, and seen lots of people I know pick up blogging, although some are more faithful than others. And while I've always been a pretty terrible journal writer, and while most of my blog posts aren't really of that nature either, I at least am glad to have some collected thoughts about the trips I've been on, and other random things that I've experienced.

I think the saddest thing about the blog is that I can no longer find the watch style that the blog was named after. I've been making do with an Armitron that I picked up at Walmart that is functional, but not nearly as enjoyable as the original Big Digital.

More Meta

I'm playing around with my template today. I figured it was finally time I got something that would stretch to fill the width of the window that its viewed in. No more 400 pixel limits on the width of photos and videos. Unfortunately, there was no stretch template with the same color scheme I had before, so I'm working with the colors to get it back looking the way it did before. Bear with me until I get that worked out.

A new friend on the sidebar

Metablogging: I just added a sidebar widget showing the most recent of my "shared items" from my Google Reader feeds. They're just articles or other blog posts or whatever that I liked enough to share with the generic public. If you aren't familiar with the concept of Feed Readers, let me know and I'll set you straight.

Old Book, New Book #2

Just finished up "Armageddon's Children" and started right into the next book in the trilogy, "Elves of Cintra". I have to say that I enjoyed the first book, and suspect I will enjoy the next one.

Here's my beef with Terry Brooks though. There was a time when his books were fully contained stories and came in around 500 pages or so. Then at some point, maybe starting with the Knight of the Word trilogy or maybe a little bit after that, he started writing "trilogies" that felt more like single books broken up into three parts, and started putting out one book of the series every year and ending them with cliffhanger endings. Its so much this way, that once the entire "trilogy" is finished they the put out an edition with all three in one book. Is that really a "trilogy"? I submit that it is not. Which just feels a little bit lazy for some reason. I don't know if he's trying to milk each book for three rounds of paychecks or what, but it also means that if you like a story, you have to wait until the next book comes out to find out how it ends. What is this, Lost?

Anyway, I feel glad that I didn't start reading this current "Trilogy" until now, because at least the first two books are out and the third one comes out this fall. Honestly, though, am I supposed to care enough about these characters to remember exactly what was going on in the last book a year ago, to pick up the next book and jump right in?

Anyway, I'm just griping and I do still like the stories. I just wouldn't rank them up there with the original Shanarra series or even the Heritage of Shannara series.

Old Book, New Book

I figured I ought to at least start mentioning the books I'm reading. Since I started listing what I'm reading on the sidebar, I feel like I should at least make mention of it in the blog when I finish one and move on to the next. Yesterday I finished reading "High Fidelity" by Nick Hornby. I've pretty much seen the whole movie, but maybe not in one sitting and figured I should give the book a shot, as I've heard of quite a few Hornby books, but never actually read any. Also, usually I find that if I like a movie, then the book is definitely worth checking out. The opposite is sadly not as likely. For some reason I have a sense of loyalty to the book that makes me upset when they change things in the movie, especially when there doesn't seem to be any apparent reason. Anyway, tangent over, its turns out that "High Fidelity" the movie is a shockingly faithful adaptation of "High Fidelity" the book. So much so that a) it was like I was reading the script of the movie, b) I kept wondering if it wasn't one of those books thats written after the movie, like when the Star Wars people hire Terry Brooks to write "Phantom Menace: The Book", and c) there really wasn't much suspense because everything played out exactly the same as in the movie, except that everything was quid and pence instead of dollars.

Not to say that that was overall a bad thing. I liked the movie, so I also liked the book, and would recommend them, with the caveat that there is a considerable amount of adult language and sexual content. Not explicit sexual content, but sexual content nonetheless. Oh, and in case you don't know anything about it, its about a 35-year-old who owns a struggling record shop and his girlfriend breaks up with him.

Next up: Armageddon's Children, the first of a new series from Terry Brooks that, as far as I can tell from the first 13 pages, is going to bridge the gap from the "Knight of the Word" books to the Shannarra books.

Big Digital = Great Things of History

One of the fun things about having a site tracker tool on your blog (I use Sitemeter), is that it lets you see what search terms bring people to your blog. Today someone arrived at The Big Digital by searching for 'great things of history' on Google. I repeated this Google search and found that a link to one of my blog posts was the #2 result. So if you ever feel like my blog isn't particularly great, maybe you just aren't looking at it in the broad historical context.

Meta-Blogging

Quick note, I just added a couple things to the side menu today. First is a list of the the labels that any of my posts have, so you can get to those easily. Second is a list of books that I've read, or am currently reading. Just FYI.