Rick’s Rants and Raves

I’m always interested to see how people come to find my site. Of course, nearly anyone who blogs is a link whore. I also like to monitor how people found me via search engines. The Wordpress plugin Firestats does a very nice job of showing me the search terms used. But I want to brag to the world how other people are finding me.

My web host allows me to enable AWStats on my sub-domains. I have it enabled on journal.nearbennett.com, and I check all the stats periodically. For example, it was really fascinating to see a bunch of hits come from Stumble Upon for my hard drive clock post. AWStats has a lot of good information that I’m not sure I want to share with the whole world, so I have the whole directory structure protected. But I want people to be able to see what search terms are leading people to my site. So I created a very small PHP script to by-pass the protection, and allow someone to view My Influence on the World.

Here is that PHP code for you to enjoy.
#!/usr/local/bin/php4.cli
< ?php
include_once("../../awstats/journal/awstats.journal.nearbennett.com.keyphrases.html");

?>

Yeah, I know its not much to be proud of, but hey, it works. And its like the third thing I’ve ever done with PHP (the first was of course ‘hello world‘).

I’m pleased to report that if you search Google for hard drive clock, my post is the third on the list behind Make. Yes, I did that a while ago, but please allow me to bask in my glory a little while longer.

Oh, and now people are selling hard drive clocks on eBay. I particularly like this quote:

There are very few of these in existence, probably less than 20.

Yeah, right. I’ve made three my self. And considering this place sold out, I’m pretty sure there are more than 20 of these things out there.