Brian Whitaker waits to see if anyone wants to come to the party
The Guardian, 28 May, 1998
NOW THAT my Web site is live, I have been delving into it constantly to check the number of visitors. Each time I do so, the counter on my home page clocks up an extra visit.
This has given me an idea for turning Yemen Gateway into the world's most popular Web site overnight. All I need is a bit of software that automatically calls up my pages a million times a day.
In the meantime, the score for a whole week stands at 35. This is highly classified information and I don't want the whole world to know. In any case, I've always thought it naff to have a mileometer thing saying: "You are visitor number [0|0|8|9|6|5|, please sign our guest book."
Of course, there are more sophisticated ways of tracking visits to a Web site - essential if you intend to sell advertising space - but I shall make do with the mileometer, which is a line of code supplied by my Internet service provider. This will at least indicate whether the search engines have begun pointing people towards my site.
To conceal my embarrassing statistics, I have placed the counter where it will not be seen - except by people who know where to look. This was achieved very simply, by inserting a lot of space at the bottom of the home page between the end of the text and the counter (you type "
" - repeatedly). Readers normally stop scrolling a page when they reach blank space so they won't see the counter, but I can view it by scrolling through the space to the bottom.
I designed and tested the entire Web site on Internet Explorer, but since it went live I have looked at it on another computer, using Netscape. This has led to the discovery of a new computer term: WYSINWYM (What You See Is Not What You Meant).
Oddly, the two leading browsers do not treat my HTML in quite the same way. Headlines that comfortably fill one line in Explorer spill over into an ugly second line, and round black bullets in lists have turned square in Netscape. From now on, I shall have to use both browsers for testing, unless I can persuade the US Department of Justice to drop its case against Microsoft.
There's an exciting moment as two e-mails arrive from Yemen. "Congratulation for new Yemeni homepage," the first one says. "It is incridable. It has full of information and many things. I have not visited all the pages. Because it is very big site. I will give your site address for some people needs information."
The second is from the Yemeni Ministry of Information. "Hi there!" they begin, imagining this is how you should talk on the Internet. They go on, not very subtly, to demand a link to their own Web site. In a moment of overconfidence, I tell them their site is too clever by half. It's packed with Javascript and freezes constantly. They just don't deserve a link.
I should not have been so rude. Now a friend complains about the colours on Yemen Gateway. Apparently virgin.net has done a lot of psychological research into Web site colours. Trust Richard Branson to think of that. Anyway, the upshot is that people like some colours more than others and the one they absolutely hate is yellow.
That leaves me with 192 HTML files, all fatally tinged with
FEEDBACK:
- Phil Barnett- amending multiple files; web counters. 28 May 1998
- Edward Gummett- amending multiple files with HotDog Pro. 28 May 1998
- Graham Head- frames, links and search engines. 28 May 1998
- UberPope Okapi Ombadeng "Long Time" Raptor Ramjet KSC- cheating with web counters. 28 May 1998
- Simon Bains- frames; indexing; useles web statistics. 28 May 1998
- K Nandi- tea-bags. 30 May 1998
© Copyright Guardian Newspapers Ltd 1998
