The one time I had a blog program that had RSS, I disabled the feature. WordPress has it built in as well, and this time I haven’t disabled it. Interestingly, it seems when you post a blog entry, WP tries to tell Techorati (and other blog-finder sites), and Techorati then sends a crawler over here. This means that for a while, I was being rated on Techorati without even realizing it. Yes, I’m that internet savvy. Haha. One day I looked at my server’s web-stats, and there was a link from there…I went to check it out, and there it was: my blog being rated by Techorati’s rating system. Oooooo, ahhhhh. Whoopie.

Techorati uses a ranking system where it rates sites by how many other sites/blogs link to your specific articles. Now, 99.9% of the time, no one’s linking to my blog except me - when I post on forums or whatever. It doesn’t help that sites can’t easily hotlink my pictures, either. But apparently, since I’ve been writing American Idol entries and posting them fairly quickly after the show is aired, I still get “found” by the occasional bot-crawler that’s hunting for recent AI articles to link to.

I wouldn’t normally find any of this worth writing about, except that today, I noticed my Techorati rank went up from 3 to 4 (low numbers mean you’re almost invisible on the web)…yet no new links to my site have been registered there. In fact, I’ve lost a link or two, since it’s been more than 90 days for some of the past links. And I didn’t write about AI this week, so no new linkage. So why has my “rank” gone up? Some other mysterious automatic/default WordPress thingie? It’s a mystery….one that will remain unsolved, since while it’s kinda interesting to watch the process, I don’t care enough to try to find out how it works. In another 90 days my rating will most likely drop to 0 again, as the AI linkage falls off the radar. But it is strange.

My blogs have always been small, personal sites. They aren’t meant to attract or have lots of viewers - nor do I care about having such. If I cared about that, I’d create a very specific subject or outrageous/potentially offensive site and watch the net haters come in droves…or something. Occasionally there’s a tiny burst of new visitors for some reason, then it drops back down again. I don’t think any of the previous versions of my blogs over the years have ever had more than, oh, say, 30-35 “unique visitors” per day, and half of those were probably bots. *rolls eyes*
I just post things, and if someone besides family and friends eventually sees it, that’s cool. I’m not a pro blogger or news article writer, I’m not famous, and the internet isn’t a grade-school playground of youthful peer pressure. Not to me, anyway.