Heck Of A Guy 2006: Reflections

Filed under: HOAG Site | By DrHGuy | January 9, 2007 at 11:13 am

Obligatory Blog Numbers

Posts

This is the 374th¹ Heck Of A Guy blog post.

Viewing all of those entries in their full-length glory, one after another, creates a stirring procession that marches across 38 blog-pages, each of which requires (on my machine) 16 screens to scan for a grand total of 608 screenfuls of fun, philosophy, and folderol – as well as the occasional alliteration – that lacks only Boing Boing and kottke.org balloons to morph into a Macy’s Christmas Parade bloggelganger and is only a wardrobe mishap away from evoking the color and pageantry of a Super Bowl halftime show.

Riding shotgun with these posts are 241 comments, the overwhelming majority of which were contributed by a half-dozen or so readers.

Theoretically, there are 31 categories and subcategories of Heck Of A Guy posts, but both the criteria of and the assignment of posts to these groups are so capricious as to render this organizational scheme roughly as practical as classifying cars by the ratio of chrome to engine displacement. A nascent alternative list of categories that more accurately reflects the Heck Of A Guy recurrent motifs follows:

Posts that are funny/clever as heck
Incredibly snarky posts
Kinkier than thou posts
Go read the AlignMap blog post posts
Pretty good four-paragraph posts that are, alas, four pages long
Posts inspired by something I might or might not have seen elsewhere but certainly didn’t plagiarize
Posts that boldly express unconventional opinions
Posts that apologize for the preceding posts
Posts surreptitiously organized around sesquipedalian demonstrations rather than their ostensible theme – not unlike this line
Posts reviewing (usually deservedly) obscure movies and books
How-to posts that would benefit from a “why-to” section
Sweeps Week Posts that are blatantly voyeuristic appeals to sentimentality, perversity, sensationalism, prejudices, …
Posts that I’ve spent too much time writing not to use & anyway some parts are kinda funny & in any case they’re worth every penny you paid for them so what are you complaining about
Why I really am a Heck Of A Guy posts (AKA Thank God Julie found me posts)

But Heck Of A Guy is not just a batch of posts. Nosireebob, Heck Of A Guy also includes not-posts called [prepare yourself] Pages,² including pages with Julie’s stories for viewing or downloading,³ pages with galleries of pictures,⁴ informational pages,⁵ and media pages with video viewers.⁶

Heck Of A Guy Blog Fun Fact:
If all the computer monitors necessary to display every post & page of the Heck Of A Guy blog were stacked atop each other, the resulting tower would be

well, a heck of a Jenga game

Heck Of A Guy Meta-Data

Publishing History

The first Heck Of A Guy post, Opening Statement was published on March 3, 2006. At least one post has been published every day since then except a 7-day stretch of vacation last June during which only one post came online.

[The space below is provided for insertion of the reader’s
preferred version of the “someone has too much free time” tag line.]

The Most Frequently Asked Question About The Heck Of A Guy Blog

Inexplicably, The Most Frequently Asked Question About The Heck Of A Guy Blog is not

How do you write such incredible posts?
Can I be one of your disciples?
Would you prefer I send the massive amounts of money I owe you in compensation for the unequalled entertainment your blog has afforded me as a check or in cash?

Nope, the Most Frequently Asked Question About The Heck Of A Guy Blog is some variation of

Where are the photos of DrHGuy?

For the record, DrHGuy pix are featured on the following posts:

In a serendipitous instance of efficiency and economy, those same photos also answer the Second Most Frequently Asked Question About The Heck Of A Guy Blog:

Why aren’t photos of DrHGuy prominently displayed as are other bloggers?

Hits & Visits & Visitors

From a careful analysis of every statistical package available (for free), I can declare that the Heck Of A Guy blog had 349662 hits in December 2006. Moreover, I am confident that at least 18 of those were legitimate.

My lack of certainty, of course, is because [ahem]

My site gets a lot of hits
That come from a lot of — spammers

Those 349662 hits in December 2006 came from 1054 Unique User Agents (computer addresses that visited the site once or more in a 30 day period). Obviously, a single Unique User Agent may be responsible for multiple hits. A charming fellow (a Heck Of A Guy, as it were) from the exurbs of Chicago with satellite access is a quite faithful visitor, checking in every day. Mr. Science, the Duke of Derm, and the usual suspects are frequent lurkers, if for no other reason than to note which lies I’ve told about them. But again, the spammers, who have yet to land a single comment on this blog, are the pigs at the trough. One source had six visits in December for a total of 30058 hits. For the arithmetically-impaired, that would resolve into 0.1% of all visitors accounting for 1% of all visits and 10% of all hits.

Oink, Oink

There are benign confounders as well. The search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN send out their own bots to scour the internet and thus trigger hits (although some systems eliminate those from the count). And, the feeds and tags chip in for hits as well.

Nonetheless, there are methods of cutting through the confusion that do not require scanning the list of computer addresses one by one to determine who they are and why they landed here and provide answers that are substantially more accurate than guessing how many jellybeans are in a jar.

And, that’s the next installment of this saga.

Footnotes

Auspiciously, “374″ is not only a sphenic number (a positive integer which is the product of three distinct prime numbers, in this case, 2, 11, and 17), but also the year in which Spearthrower Owl became emperor of Teotihuacan ~back~
Blog “posts” look like journal entries and, by convention, appear in reverse chronological order (i.e. the most recent posts appear at the top of the blog). At Heck Of A Guy, as at most blogs, the large column on the index page contains posts. “Pages” don’t show up in the posts lineup but are often seen in sidebars such as those listed on this site at the l under “Info.” The underlying notion was that blogs were ephemeral. As Gadgetopia explains, posts are time-based, and items get essentially dropped into a stampede that tramples down the front page. What if you want something to rise above the stampede? The answer to that query led to the creation of pages that are more or less static. At Heck Of A Guy, this distinction is not rigorously maintained. ~back~
E.g., View Breeding Turkeys; Download PDF of Breeding Turkeys ~back~
E.g., The Book Of Max; The Book Of Sam; Julie’s Birthday Slide Show ~back~
E.g., Why; What ; Anjani & DrHGuy FAQ ~back~
E.g., Media: Incoming! Airborne Carp; Thinking Outside The Unbox ~back~