Thursday April 10 9:7 PM
CoolHomePages.com™ just featured 3232design.com today. Installment 3 in the 'Attempting to Artificially Inflate My Page Hits For No Particular Reason' series. When I was looking for a nice free way to get the word out about Ian's website I turned to that font of internet wisdom, Google. "Cool Web Site Award," I told Google, "I'm feeling lucky." The first response was a place that, well, let's just say they won't take my calls. But the second was Cool Home Pages. Dot com. ™.

I noticed that it was free. That was good. Sure, you could pay for faster review (payment does not guarantee an award) but I figured, hey, I have a few weeks, let's just see if they notice it. Within a week they had Ian's site prominently displayed on their home page. Since then over a thousand visitors have spewed forth from that cool mouth. Ian's site now has 9 out of 10 stars, and is hovering at the top of its categories.

I submitted my site with the knowledge that it wasn't as strong as Ian's. It wasn't as detailed, and I hadn't put as much time into it as I had on Ian's. Honestly, I couldn't afford Ian's site on my budget. Yet this very evening I was informed that Cool Home Pages, Dot Com™, had indeed chosen 3232 Design as worthy of their link.

I knew from Ian's site that the page hits were going to go up a bit. But drunk with power, I wanted more.

I am a registered user of Slashdot and it occurred to me that if I got highly-rated posts and put my address in my signature file, that should generate some traffic. But how much? To really test it, I'd need a +5 first post.

Before I go much further, let me point out that today I have been very, very lucky. Also, if you don't know, Slashdot is a self-moderated forum disguised as a news outlet. Randomly-selected users moderate posts positive or negative, from -1 to +5. This self-policing has the effect of allowing the best comments to rise to the top and the worst to slide down under the radar.

There was a nice little comment I added that (if I say so myself) that got moderated to +5 Funny pretty quickly. I'm a funny guy, what can I say? It was near the second comment, and so far it's brought in about 40 page hits. But I wanted more.

I somehow managed to be extremely witty and post a +5 funny first comment, the most-read of any story. Then I sat back and waited for the hits to roll in.

And waited.

And waited.

Come on, Google Analytics. Why don't you have real-time statistics? It's been twelve minutes, already!

I waited the rest of the afternoon. Several hours later Google finally, grudgingly offered that I might have gotten five hits from my +5 Funny First Post, and would I mind laying off the damn reload button already?

Oh, well. At least I have a few months of Cool Home Pages (Dot Com™) traffic to look forward to.