Day Seven: I set a trap to lure visitors.
After a few weeks on the Web, I realise that I have no way of telling how many people (if any) have visited my home page. What I need, says Techie Friday, is a hit counter, which registers each time someone lands on Planet Fabulous.
He knows of several places where you can find one, including www.beseen.com. Beseen also offers free Web graphics, and I make a mental note to return there and grab some of their backgrounds and 3D effect buttons - perfect driftwood for the site. Friday also shows me how to obtain a "bounce.to" address. This will save visitors the trouble of typing in my horribly long URL.
Bounce.to (at http://bounce.to) is a free Web redirection service (it's based on the ".to" domain name of the tiny Pacific kingdom of Tonga, believe it or not). All I had to do was key in a password, choose a short name, and voila! I could now be reached at the much easier address of bounce.to/kevo. The bad news is that since I joined, for some reason the Bounce.to crowd have stopped taking on any new subscribers. . . I must have just caught the last boat. Finally, Friday leads me to a place called Superstats (see Computimes, January 26th) - now I'll be able to find out more about the thousands who will surely be flocking to my site.
Day Eight: I see no sign of life approaching on the Web horizon.
It's getting lonely out here on my desert homepage. My hit counter is still in single figures, and Superstats shows that most of those visits have been made from the same domain - in other words the footprints in the sand are almost all mine!
"Have you submitted your site to Yahoo, Hotbot or Alta Vista, Kemo Sabay?" asks my Tech Friday (whom I have renamed Tonto). "You just go to the subdirectory of Yahoo that you want to be placed in, for instance, then click on the `Add URL' button. Then up comes a menu where you give a short description of your site, and they will (eventually) include you in that subdirectory."
Once again, my problem has been solved by a simple, traditional solution. I gleefully start calling up all the major search engines, submitting my site for their consideration. Suddenly, the whole future seems to stretch out in front of me, and I can see ahead to that glorious day when my Planet Fabulous is in everybody's bookmarks.
Day Ten: I wait in vain for signs of life.
No visitors. Not even a "webcrawler" from one of the search engines. I have spent my first Christmas on my desert island homepage, and I am starting to yearn for some companionship, human or otherwise. I haven't seen Tech Friday for days, and my hit counter is still in single figures. I am alone, utterly alone.
Day Eleven: In which I seal my memoirs in a bottle and set them adrift.
My megabytes are running out, my motivation is at an all-time low. I feel weak and ineffectual, I can hardly move my mouse. My homepage hasn't been updated for weeks - it's starting to become a "cobweb". I won't last much longer, yet I don't want to shut down here all alone without anyone ever knowing of my desperate plight. I must leave something for future generations to find after I am gone.
With a shaky hand, I wrap the tattered pages of my diary into a tube, stuff them into a bottle, seal the cork as tightly as I can, and send it floating into empty space. (Well, actually I write last week's article for Computimes).
Day Twelve: In which my prayers are answered.
I am drifting slowly into oblivion, when suddenly I glimpse something on the distant horizon. It's an email, no, a whole fleet of emails from around the world, congratulating me or offering tips for improving my site, and even asking whether I need graphics or other essential provisions. I crawl outside and check the hit counter, and am astonished to find that, while I slept, 138 people had visited my site.
Day Fifteen: In which I prepare my homepage for the influx of visitors.
I've let my homepage get a little slovenly. Now it's time to update it and add more pages. My A-Z of Irish Rock is still more an A-C, and my Pit Of Eternal Stench (where I intend to cast the worst Irish rock bands) hasn't even been dug yet. Time to get shovelling. One email correspondent, Jim Dowling from Trinity College in Dublin, has kindly offered me some planet graphics that look the part. I duly grab a GIF and upload it using something called File Transfer Protocol. I have to be careful when loading GIFs: they keep eating up precious Web space. Tech Friday has returned with news of several free guestbooks - including one from Guestworld (at www.lpage.com). No sooner is it up that the guests are signing the visitor's log. Hi-ho silver lining!
Another progress report from Kevin in a few weeks' time. Next week: a head-to-head comparison of off-the-shelf Web design packages.