ABOUT THIS AND THAT ..An explanation and brief history of where this site came from.

THIS AND THAT started in 1998 as a small, six-page site designed to provide public access to a Star Trek Deep Space Nine novel (Dreadnought) and three X-Files novels (Player, Mirrors, and Dreamer) I had written. I used the free 10 MB that came with my Earthlink Internet access account and wrote the site using an excellent, and sadly no longer available, software package called Webpage Construction Kite 5.0 by MacMillian. (This package works just like a good word processor in that you simply type what you want and the software takes care of all the HTML coding.) After comparing many background/font color combinations I discovered that on the monitors common back then, white letters on a black background provided the sharpest contrast. The black background also went well with the dark themes of the X-Files stories and the in-space context of the Deep Space Nine novel.

In those early days I counted myself lucky to get ten visitors a month. Little did I know that was soon to change.

While setting up a link exchange to promote Dreadnought, I noticed that there wasn't a comprehensive listing of sites with DS9 fan fiction. I decided to put one together as a service to other people interested in that fandom. Three months later I had amassed 200 links. The list became very popular and attracted ten times as many visitors as all the other pages on the site put together. This suggested that the more pages the site had to attract people, the more people would be attracted to the site. I began adding pages about many of my hobbies. It worked.

Every time a new page went on-line the number of visitors increased. Before long the site had grown to 40 pages covering a dozen subjects. Then two things happened that catapulted the site to higher levels of popularity than I'd ever imagined.

First, I became interested in breeding and raising bettas (Siamese fighting fish.) When I added several pages on this subject the visitor count tripled overnight. The reason was that millions of people are interested in bettas and many of them use the Internet to learn more about these fish. Since there were comparatively few sites with in-depth information about them, This and That started showing up on search engines, resulting in many more people learning about the site.

The second event was that I purchased website promotion software titled Addweb 5.0 and used it to submit the site to thousands of search engines and link lists across the world.

Together, the above two events resulted in the site jumping from a few dozen visitors a month to several hundred. But things were about to get even better.

From 1999 to 2002 I continued to add topics to the site on a regular basis until it had grown to 150 pages. At that point the site had outgrown the original 10 MB of free space so I purchased a larger ".com" address. In 2003 I continued to add more pages until it reached 180 covering 70 topics. By that time the monthly visitor rate had increased to five thousand.

Then one fateful day I received an email from someone who stated they really enjoyed the site but wondered if I knew that I was discouraging many people from visiting it because I hadn't filled out the HTML header statements on the pages. Many of these pages were being listed as "untitled" by search engines and had poor descriptions. After I fixed this problem the number of people logging onto the site went into orbit. Within 11 months it had increased nine-fold to 45,000 visitors each and every month. That's over 500,000 people a year; pretty good for a non-commercial site that doesn't sell anything.

In 2004 the site passed a threshold in that it was getting enough visitors that it began moving up in search engine listings. This caused more people to visit it which in turn pushed its ranking up even higher. The process appears to be snowballing and it'll be interesting if it levels off or continues to climb.

Here are the annual visitor counts:

1998 - ......1,000

1999 - ......3,000

2000 -...... 6,000

2001 -..... 55,000

2002 -..... 70,000

2003 - ...130,000

2004 - ...416,000

2005 -... 896,585

2006 - 1,384,404

2007 - 1,541,259

2008 - 1,761,377

2009 - 2,258,060

2010 - 2,890,811

2011 - 2,200,000

 
FAILED CIRCULATION-BOOSTING EXPERIMENT:

I have read that one of the ways search engines decide on how high a web page is placed on search lists is by counting how many other pages link to that page. The more pages that link to it the higher it gets positioned. This and That is an oddity because it consists of over 400 separate and distinct pages. I got to wondering what would happen if I placed a copy of the main index page, with links to every page in the site, at the bottom of each and every page. This would mean that the next time the search engine spiders crawled the site they'd register that each page has 400 other pages linked to it. In theory this should help move each page up the search engine ladder.

There are several problems with this, not the least of which is whether the spider will cancel all the links out since they have the same prime address. The only way to find out is to try it and see if the traffic to the site increases.

The result was a complete disaster.

The visitation rate dropped by one-third and my earnings were more than cut in half. Fortunately, removing all the end-of-page links fixed this.

The chart above shows how the pageview rate had a sudden drop just days after loading all the pages with the links. The return to normal was equally rapid, though it took two weeks to happen after the links were removed. The search engine spiders may have registered the links as mass keyword lists and penalized the site for attempting to employ this forbidden practice.

I believe the reason the earnings dropped even more than the visitation rate is that the Adsense spiders used these links to increase the keyword reference for selecting what ads were shown on which pages. This would explain why the site started to have ads for bettas placed on pages about metal detectors. Because they were so far removed from the subject of the page such ads weren't likely to be clicked on. This effect combined with the reduced visitor rate was a double whammy causing earnings to crash.

2011 END-OF-YEAR UPDATE!!!

2011 was a nightmare year for THIS AND THAT. The first disaster struck in January when Google Adsense cancelled my advertising account. They discovered a mistake on one of the over 400 pages that make up the the site and gave me three days to fix it. The problem was that I was out of town over the period and never got to read the email until after the time limit expired. My explanation fell on deaf years so that was that. The site was only earning $150.00 a month so it's not that great a loss. Still, the fact that they are so unresponsive to the realities of the limitations of their clients left a sour taste. As bad as that was things were about to get much, much worse.

In February Google changed it's search listing algorithm to exclude low-content, high-advertising "content farms." Unfortunately, the formula they developed spelled disaster for hobby information sites like mine. Within one month the number of people visiting the site dropped by a third. This decline continued through the rest of the year until by December the visitor rate had dropped by 50-percent. Google's action wiped out over three years of growth. Worse still, while some content farms were successfully blocked from getting high rankings, many others got around it by increasing the number of links to them on other sites. Some of these typically have one picture and one or two sentences about the topic of interest surrounded by dozens of ads. To get all the information they offer you have to click through a dozen pages, each with a brief morsel of information boxed in by tons of ads. Sites like THIS AND THAT , on the other hand, with no ads and thousands of words of content rich information on a single page are listed much lower.

The next blow came in July when Earthlink rewrote it's entire webhosting software. The new system is much more difficult to use. Worst of all was their change to the Urchin website statistics page. First of all, it didn't work. It took Earthlink until late December to get it to accurately report how many people are visiting sites. As if that's wasn't bad enough, in October most of their site owners got emails stating that they had gone over their bandwidth quota by 300-percent and were going to be charged for the overage. In my case that would have come to $6,000.00 for a single month. And this happened at the same time Urchin was telling me my site hadn't had a single visitor on two weeks. Three times I contacted them about these problems and got the same result: "We're sorry for the problem and we assure our engineers are working on it." There'd be a short improvement then the whole system would go down again. Needless to say I am less than enchanted with Earthlink.

I considered changing webhosts but the problem is that because THIS AND THAT has over 400 pages, 1,000,000 words and in excess of 4,000 images, changing to a different server would involve several weeks of work. On top of that I'd have no assurance that the new server would be any better than Earthlink.

The end result of all of the problems with Earthlink is that I don't have good statistics for the site's performance in 2011 The following is the best estimate I could come up with:

The total number of people who visited THIS AND THAT in 2011 was approximately 2,205,000, down 24-percent from 2010. This is the first time in the 13 years of its existence that there has been a decline in the number of people visiting the site. Based on previous trends, the site was predicted to have 3,700,000 for 2011 but the Google change killed that. The ten most popular pages of the 432 that make up the site were:

Greatest Quotes of all Time (274,000 visitors, a 66-percent decrease over last year.)

Crystal Growing (124,000, a 20-percent decrease.)

Lost Art of Knitting Nancies (80,000)

Christmas Movie Reviews (74,000)

Kaleidoscopes (32,000)

Victorian Servant Wages (30,000)

How to Write Fan Fiction (29,000)

Bubbles (28,000)

Hernia 101 (25,000)

Triangle Looms (24,000)

 
Frequent visitors to this page will note that the Google change not only affected the number of people visiting the site but also the makeup of the most popular pages. Half of the pages that consistently made it into the top ten have been replaced by others that previously had been ranked much lower. It'll be interesting to see if the old winners reassert themselves in 2012.

The big mystery is why the Quotes page should remain so popular. After all, there are thousands of similar and much more comprehensive pages on the Internet. Google searches using the extremely general keywords greatest quotes or greatest quotes of all time has it consistently listed in the number one spot... at least until before the change. Now it averages down around 5th.

 
And what about the stories that started it all off? Here's how they did in 2011:

 
How to Write Fan Fiction 29,000 readers

Retief of the CDT 1,150

Dreadnought 1,800

Melvin Cogsworth 5,400

Mirrors 1,150

Dreamer 1,200

Player 1,100

Devil's Food 780

Life 760

...for a total of 41,140 people reading the stories. Over the last 13 years 265,000 people have read my stories; not too bad for a guy who's never been published.

 
2011 was a slow year for changes to the website. Only 14 pages were updated and only one new page was added.

 
By far the most controversial page continues to be The Most Popular Entertainer of the 20th Century. Many Elvis Presley fans take offense that it's not him. I'm afraid that they may be even more upset because the page titled The Most Popular Music Performers of All Time suggests that musically not only wasn't he number one, he actually only rates tenth place among all the performers of the 20th century.

Building and maintaining the site takes an average of one hour a day every day of the year. That's just the time to add material onto the site and doesn't include time needed to perform the many tests and experiments chronicled on it. If those were added in the average would come up to over three hours a day. Regrettably, one downside to the site's rapid growth in popularity is that I was receiving so many emails I was having to spend as much as 5 hours a day answering them. This forced me to remove my email address from all but a few pages of unique interest. I deeply regret having to do this because I truely enjoyed hearing from people and exchanging ideas about the various subjects on the site.

Using historical statistics I was able to add up the visitors for all the years the site has been on the Internet. Based on that number and the daily rate of people logging onto the site, THIS AND THAT got its one-millionth visitor around 3 PM on Wednesday, 9 February, 2005. It took it seven years to get to the million mark. On February 11, 2006 at 10 PM it reached its second million in just over a year. It's amazing how fast the site is growing in popularity, excepting 2011. As of the end of 2011 over 13.8 million people have visited the site.

A bar chart of the daily number of visitors to the site shows several interesting patterns.

The most intriguing feature is the single day on the left of the chart on which 9,000 people logged on, almost four times the average rate. Looking into this date I discovered that the vast majority of those visitors opened the Insane Projects page, a page that typically only receives a few hundred visitors a month. I have no idea why this should happen, except perhaps that a major search engine hiccupped and temporarily listed that page very high in the rankings. There are half a dozen days with similar, though much smaller, surges in the visitor rate.

The second interesting feature is that the chart has a scalloped appearance. This is the result of weekly fluctuations in the daily visitor rate. The busiest days are Monday through Thursday with the peak usually on Wednesday. Fridays and weekends are slower.

Another detail is that the average visitor rate is steadily increasing, as evidenced by the upward slope of the graph. It's almost doubled over the five months depicted by this chart.

Finally, there are several, subtle slow periods of two or three days in length. These correspond to holidays. The most notable is the three-day slump one inch in on the right hand side. This slump occurred during Thanksgiving.

In Spring of 2005 the number of people logging onto the site reached such a high number that I had to upgrade to a professional-level package to get enough bandwidth to keep it on-line. This increased the annual cost of running the site to over $1,000. To offset this expense, I decided to use Google's Adsense advertising program to help pay for the site. The ads, such as the that on the bottom of this page, are earning the site an average of $200 per month, enough to pay for the site and some of the costs associated with creating pages for it. Everytime someone clicks on one of the ads the site earns a few cents. Hopefully as the number of people visiting the site grows so will its earnings. If these earnings seem small, remember that many of my pages cover topics for which Adsense can't find a matching advertisement. For example, the page VICTORIAN DOMESTIC SERVANT HIERARCHY AND WAGES discusses the order of importance of the servant classes in 1900 England and how much each type of servant would have earned. The closest advertising matches are ads for house cleaning and the like. People logging onto this page are looking for information about Victorian servants and are therefore unlikely to click on one of these ads. Consequently, since I only earn money when someone clicks on an ad, that page doesn't earn much money. Most of THIS AND THAT's page are like this.

This and That was no more immune to the 2008 economic crash as any other business in the United States. In less than one month the number of people clicking on the ads plummeted to 1/3 what they'd been, and consequently so did the site's earnings. Of course, all that came to crashing end in January of 2011.

As of July, 2010, waynesthisandthat.com was the 41,959th most popular site out of the 87,000,000 active sites in the entire world.

That brings the evolution of the site up to date as of the end of 2011. In size and popularity THIS AND THAT has grown to the point where I think of it more as a public service than a hobby or vehicle to promote my stories. I'm always working on additions to existing pages and creating new ones. You can find updates almost every month. In many ways the site has become a way for me to record and maintain notes on the many projects in which I get interested. I use it myself regularly to recall the details of one topic or another.

Although every article on the site was written by me, over the years I've received many emails with suggestions and corrections to typographical errors on the site. No one has been more helpful than Mr. Mark Thorson. I can't begin to express my appreciation for all the help he's provided. (Thanks, Mark!)

In the future expect to see many new pages. I hope you'll enjoy them and check back often.

 
(Click on main site to browse 70 other topics ranging from exotic kaleidoscope designs to the strange world of lucid dreaming.)