Last week I was in Las Vegas for DevConnections and the launch of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. Normally you won’t catch me dead in Las Vegas along The Strip due to all of the tourists, the constant cigarette smoke and the pervasive heat.

This trip did not turn out so bad. I went in the early part of the year where the temperature is the mid-sixties, beginning of the week so there are few tourists, and of course, with that, very little cigarette smoke.

What was great about this trip was not having to work too hard. I did not need to talk to clients, I was not having to go out every day and sell the services of my company, and I did not have to cover a huge conference as a member of the press. Just a nice, quiet, relaxing little conference talking to vendors and software developers and other business people.

It was the most relaxing time I have spent in the past three months, anywhere. Almost like a mini-vacation. Plus I got a huge amount of time to think and write about personal development. But no gambling. I refrained from playing Blackjack this trip, though I did lose about forty bucks on the penny slots whilst waiting for my girlfriend.

The last day of my trip I was able to make it over to visit a friend’s house and take a look at the architect’s plans for the new house they are building. What was fun about that was discussing all of the ideas they had for the literal castle in the air that they are building.

One thing i did realise though was that you can take the geek out of the ghetto but not the ghetto out of the geek.

My friends live on a double-gated country club community where everything is planned and not a blade of grass is out of place. I found it very depressing actually and the whole area set my teeth on edge. But what I found most amusing was that these two wonderful people still lived like traditional sci-fi/technology geeks with stacks of books just haphazardly piled up wherever they would go and a toilet cistern that didn’t quite work.

During a walk across the casino floor of the Bellagio I had a particularly interesting philosophical conversation that I really need to write up in to a post. But what was most striking about this conversation was that I did not record it in any way, shape or fashion. Every recording device I had on me at the time decided to pick that exact moment to stop working. My little SONY voice recorder, my SenseCam, my cell phone.

Everything.

I had this sudden mental disconnection of “should I talk about this if I’m not recording it? What if I forget something I said? What if I don’t talk about it now but then forget to talk about it later?”

I was struck dumb (but only for a brief moment) by this quandary of suddenly being completely disconnected from the world and recording nothing at all.

Will future generations suffer angst at not recording, at not being connected, at being isolated from the world? I wrote about this in a post-singularity short story years ago but I experienced it first-hand for myself in a very real sense, right there, on the casino floor, in the most mundane of settings I could imagine.

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So that I do not bore everyone with mindless statistics on a too regular basis, here is the bi-monthly round up of my traffic since this website started in the middle of February. This article covers website traffic for May and June.

I intended to post information at the end of May, but as I did not change my strategy in May from what I was doing in March and April, i.e. write content, talk one-on-one about this website with people, and share the occasional link through a social bookmarking website, I did not feel that any great insight would be gleaned from just a few updated numbers.

I now have traffic data for four complete months, ignoring the two weeks in February when the website was live but had very little audience. With four months of data I have the ability to sketch out a real graph and begin to draw some inferences from it.

I wrote back at the end of April that each month’s traffic had grown by 300%, well it is very easy to grow by 300%, month on month, when you only have a few dozen visitors to your page per sample period. Now that the website is becoming a little more established, I expect the growth rate to actually slow down if the growth rules of this website work like every other commercial website my company has ever created for clients.

There has been a steady month on month increase in traffic, both due to some small marketing efforts through social media such as Twitter, Facebook and the major social bookmarking websites.

There has also been the steady flow of traffic from search engines, many of the search terms are the standard affair.

In the web server logs there are the usual personal development searches, along with an increase of searches for "treadmill desks," "sensecam" and "World of Warcraft."

The number of people searching specifically for “Microsoft word draft mode” or "Microsoft word get rid of green and red squiggles" surprises me too. Perhaps Microsoft need to make that a knowledgebase topic because there appear to be a lot of people looking for the solution.

Looking at the traffic statistics of both StatPress and Webalizer, the growth is around 30% for the past two months. By the 21st or 22nd of each month I have surpassed the previous month’s visitors and page views.

I have had a few anomalous spikes in my traffic, which after analysis I was able to account for and remove from the traffic log. Sometime around the 15th of June a number of Made-for-AdSense (MFA) websites started using a modified WordPress plug-in called "Related Websites" which can perform a keyword search of your blog articles and link to related WordPress blogs within the network.

I had heard “good things” about Related Websites and thought I would give the plug-in a shot, using it to show related pages within my own blog that were pertinent to the article being read. Prior to switching to Related Websites, I was using Yet-Another-Related-Posts-Plug-in (YARPP) and wanted to experiment with different options whilst my traffic numbers are still reasonably low. Low traffic, lots of experimentation, not too much disruption to my readers.

I had started to see pollution of inbound and outbound spam links for close to two months, and they were just a minor annoyance at first, but as the month of June proceeded I began receiving more and more spam links, both coming to and linking out from this blog.

Unfortunately there is always a few complete assholes in any group who completely screw it up for everybody else. The owners and operators of MFA blogs, which are on the rise within the Related Websites network, are those assholes this time.

Unfortunately, just disabling the "related websites" part of the Related Websites plug-in, and making use of the "related pages" to show relevant pages within my own blog, keeps the website within the Related Websites network and hence, sending and receiving traffic from the spam blogs.

I would not mind the inbound traffic so much, but if your posts contain images, the Related Websites plug-in displays that image on the spam blog. This hit counts in your tracking statistics, consumes your bandwidth (no different to image leeching), pollutes your referrer log, and a bunch of other administrative nonsense I do not have the personal bandwidth for, taking time away from more important things.

I would like for legitimate blogs to get the image attached to the article in the excerpt being displayed, so I cannot really turn on the leech protect functionality in the web server control panel, but prevent the spam and MFA blogs from receiving the images. Right now, I don’t see any viable way of achieving this.

Once I cleaned out my statistics-tracking database and blocked the spam blogs using the web server software, the traffic began to settle down again to normal levels. Yes, it was great seeing all those “unique visitors” coming to my blog, but they were not. The hits were just false web traffic skewing my results. So out goes the Related Websites plug-in and I return to YARPP (for now).

When I wrote out the traffic statistics for the month of April, I made a mistake due to a bug in StatsPressCN that misreports data at the end of the day due to some issues with time zones. I fixed the numbers in that blog entry shortly after posting it but it is also a “feature” I need to be aware of in the future.

A friend asked me, shortly after I posted my website traffic update at the end of April, whether this website is going to be monetized heavily? And also, do I feel the usage of Google AdSense is somehow devaluing what I have to say?

The reality and intention is that I do intend to make money from this website, but mostly in indirect ways; selling services for my company, for my coaching and consulting, for products my company creates, and so on. So yes, there will be monetization in that regard. But, I also do not feel that Google AdSense, or any other advertising programme, that I run on this website will devalue it. It comes down to carefully monitoring what advertisements appear on this website.

Out of all of the websites I have been involved with creating and promoting, and there have been many, I have not run and marketed a purely personal website that is advertising supported before, so for me this is a good learning experience. I cannot very well attempt to educate clients with regard to how they can create revenue through advertising, sponsorship or affiliate sales, if I myself have not done it too.

I have never liked to bullshit clients on what they should or should not do, based purely on something I have read about or watched others do. If I have no direct experience with the subject matter myself, I have no business telling you your business. I laugh loudly, maniacally and most definitely disparagingly at much of the "self-help/self-improvement" industry, marketing and PR firms, and internet "gurus" telling you how to make money.

Much of what gets published by “people in the know” is regurgitated garbage they have read about, but never actually done. There are very few authentic people out there doing this stuff for real, and you can generally count the best on one hand.

You cannot be a criminal mastermind, or any kind of mastermind, if you take the well intentioned advice of people who have not been there and done that themselves. I am constantly asking of would-be advisors and well-intentioned people "from what authority do you speak?"

Face it, would you take advice on how to run a marathon from a 300lb couch potato who had never moved very far from their games console in their entire life?

Here are my traffic statistics for the period March 1^st to July 1^st.

Even though the month column shows the date as the beginning of the month, the statistics for each month are actually from the end of the month. I have yet to figure out how to make Google Docs spreadsheet just show the month and year in the formatting.

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