I logged in early this morning to find 23 “Guests” on the directory. Further investigation showed all the Guests were from the same IP just moving fast and all instances were trying to leave comments on listings. IOW a bot, a comment spam bot.
Anyway I banned the IP. It’s not something I like to do because innocents get caught up in bans but this is the kind of stuff that ruins the web for everybody.
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It was no surprise to me that a day or two after signing Indieseek.xyz up for Yandex Metrica, Yandex’s answer to Google Analytics, that Yandexbot showed up and started indexing the site in depth and especially the directory. And Yandexbot keeps coming back for more. Yandex is right up front about their mission, they provide this extensive analytics service because they are a search engine company and this helps them discover new web pages – IOW, same reason as Google.
I’ve used Yandex Metrica on my blog site for several months and have been very pleased. They even have a WordPress plugin.
The reason I don’t use Google Analytics, is Google already knows enough about me and my websites, I don’t trust them and I’m certainly not going to give them inside information on my website traffic. I don’t totally trust any search engine company but I like to break up information about my websites into separate silos. Yandex is free and more powerful than GA and is real time and GA isn’t.
Here is a good article on Yandex Metrica and it’s features.
Google already knows too much about you, give Metrica a try.
Back to the spidering: I get very little traffic from Yandex and I don’t expect much. But when I do a site search on Duckduckgo.com I notice a little logo that says results enhanced by Yandex. While I can’t prove it, my theory is that DDG uses Yandex for really deep site search crawling. So being in Yandex’s index may have benefits unseen. It can’t hurt.
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A few weeks ago I wanted to offer a copy/paste searchbox here on Indieseek.xyz so other webmasters could offer a search box on their site. The problem was I had no idea how to code it. I can edit some HTML but not devise it from scratch.
Then I remembered, I had offered a search box on one of my niche directories back in 2004 and I was using an earlier version of the same directory script.
Would Archive.org‘s Wayback machine have preserved that?
Would the code still work?
I pulled up my old directory on Wayback. Found the link to the ancient “Link to Us” page. Would this work? I clicked on it. After a long delay the page came up. And there was the copy/paste code! I copied it and saved it in a Notebook.
Now would it work? I edited the domain and quick slapped it up on a server page and It Worked! That search box code made by a guy I hired back in the early Aughts was still good.
I won’t bore you with my frantic quest for a HTML guide to learn how to code a textarea and all that, But an hour later I had my new Link to Us page up and running complete with copy paste codes.
I think the ghosts on my long dead site, once my flagship directory, were looking out for me even after all these years. Web 1.0 to the rescue.
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Notes on stuff to add to Indieseek.xyz.
Category: Paranormal (and UFO) – not really my thing but fun to read. Good rabbit hole. Back when I had cable TV it seemed like there were always ghost hunter shows on so it might be popular. That’s the thing, it is one of those topics where people are passionate about – passionate enough to build their own amateur websites. Something to contemplate. Might spice things up and keep the index from being too – dry. Research needed.
Category: I need to find some way to deal with general non-fiction. For example, where would I list a publisher of multi topic non-fiction? With small press, micro press and ebook press publishers rising I need to figure out something. Thought needed.
Wiki – I’m toying with the idea of putting up a wiki on the server. 1. I’ve always wanted to play with a wiki, 2. I want to keep notes on ideas for directory building and and search engine building and stuff. Seems like over the winter is a good time to mess with it.
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Added about 50 new listings in the directory over today and yesterday. Lots of vintage HTML pages.
Made some adjustments in search, switched the default from AND to OR. (keyword1 OR keyword2).
More usability adjustments planned for the near future.
Need to create a widget explaining the “cause”.
Wrote some blog posts.
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This is my bucket list of things I’d like to do on Indieseek.xyz or on subdomains.
None are written in stone or in the very near future. I have to build the blog and directory first.
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