Many years ago, back in the ‘90s I started a website.

Actually, it started as a Netscape Bookmark File which had little or no formatting.

The original concept of the site was to provide myself, and anyone else with an interest, with a list of researched links.

At the time, I had no idea where it was leading, and if I had been granted foresight, I might have abandoned it there and then.

My bookmark file grew and grew, and soon it became apparent that it needed a multi-page setup.  Not only that, but it needed a name (and domain name).  And so Irish Lynx was born.

Irish Lynx went through quite a few redesigns as the site became larger and larger.  You must appreciate that at this time, there were very few directories on the Web, and soon Irish Lynx became one of the foremost directory sites out there.

At its peak, it was receiving substantial traffic, mostly from America.  It contained somewhere in the region of 30,000 links.  Updating became a nightmare.

This was in the days prior to server side technology, so I developed an Excel Database with a background macro.  Any time a link was added to the database, the macro would regenerate all the relevant pages with interconnecting links, and the new files would then be uploaded to the server.  It was tedious, but it worked.

Irish Lynx was eventually sold, and was taken off the Internet.  However, I retained the links and the data was eventually put back up but this time in proper MySQL format.

Sadly, I never had the time or resources to keep the directory updated and it lapsed into its own little time warp.

Out of a sense of sentiment and loyalty, I left it there.  It still got regular hits but of course the traffic died off with the advent of Google and the like.

Today I took the site down.

I am sad to see it go.  It was my first web site, and the steep learning curve eventually led me to running a successful web design business.

I owe that site a lot.

May it rest in peace.

Alexa ranking is a very strange thing.

I wrote about efforts to improve the ranking of this site a few weeks ago.  So far I have been marginally successful in that the ranking has risen from 1,627,533 to 1,275,521.  It’s not much, but it’s in the right direction.

What is surprising about the above figures is that traffic has not increased at all in the period between then and now.  In fact, it shows a downward trend.

In contrast, traffic to the other site has remained remarkably constant over the same period, yet its ranking has dropped from 195,510 to 203,289.

I am aware that Alexa is not the best yardstick for the measurement of site traffic, as it depends on the viewer having the plugin installed, but I find the above figures somewhat bemusing.

The one unfortunate thing about Alexa though is that it tends to be used by advertising companies to determine a site’s popularity.  As advertising is contained in both sites, Alexa ranking is fairly important to me.

The only thing I can think of is that this site tend to have more technical content, and therefore is more likely to be visited by people with the plugin.

Two of the most ofetn asked questions in the blogging world are “how to I start a blog” and “how do I get people to read it”.

The latter is one question I would like to experiment with.

This site has been ticking over since the beginning of last December. As an eperiment, I would like to see if I can improve its performance from the point of view of visitors and ranking.

Determining a site’s popularity is not easy. Some people go by the number of visitors within a time period [say, a week or a month] while others go by page views. Another method is by ranking.

There are three generally accepted ranking figures – Technorati, Google and Alexa.

Measuring visitors to a site is not easy. On the Head Rambles site, I currently use Ice Rocket, Google Analytics, Woopra and raw log files. These all give wildly different figures for the same period, so effectively, I ignore them and use them for trending purposes only.

Ranking is a different matter.

I have just registered this site with Technorati, and it apparently has a ranking of 13. This is roughly what I would expect for a relatively new and unexciting site. Head Rambles used to have a ranking in excess of 200, but this has dropped off dramatically as the figures are recycled and existing links are discounted and only new links are measured. Head Rambles currently stands at 93.

Google Ranking is deemed to be important if you are interested in search engine ranking. Personally, I have not found this to be the case, as Head Rambles consistently shoots to the top of Google within minutes of a post being published. Head Rambles used to have a ranking of 5 with Google, which was excellent. However that dropped to 3, presumably when they discovered I was advertising with a non-Google affiliate? Ranking for this site is currently 4, which I think is pretty good.

Alexa ranking is a strange one. It is widely used as a benchmark for advertising sales, yet is notoriously difficult to predict as it seems to result from counting the number of visits from people who have the Alexa plug-in installed on their browser. If this is the case [and Alexa is not that popular as a plug-in] then it is an extremely bad method of quantifying a site’s value. However, this is the metric chosen by the industry, and who am I to argue?

The Alexa ranking for this site is currently 1,627,533 and it will be interesting to see if I can improve on this figure.

Over the next while, I am going to try various techniques to improve the traffic to this site. I will of course write about my efforts, and post the corresponding rise or fall in traffic.

It would indeed be nice if I could get this site’s Alexa ranking up close to that of Head Rambles which is currently at 195,510.

We shall see?