There’s been a lot of hoopla in the news lately about NASA’s probe, Cassini-Huygens, and its visit to Saturn. I grew up reading science fiction novels and I’m fascinated that in our current exploration of Mars and Saturn we could be on the verge of discovering life (albeit of the single-celled variety) on other planets and moons in our solar system. If a discovery like that is verified, I can only hope that the public consciousness will then latch onto what might be out in the near infinity beyond.

Despite working in a department that actually rebroadcasts the NASA channel; I regrettably have very little time to pursue all the latest news of their findings. Still, the bits and pieces that I catch online and on the news are intriguing; what’s more, they sparked a memory I had of doing some research on the Cassini probe back in 1997 while I was still in college.

This is where being an amateur archivist pays off. I was able to dig up an old CD-ROM backup of the screamin’ 90Mhz Pentium (with 16MB of RAM, and an impossible-to-fill 730MB hard drive, baby!) I had throughout my college career. Written for Freshman Comp. (taken in, yes, my senior year), this is an unexciting, compare-and-contrast, research paper, but I thought I’d post it here for nostalgic purposes and for a look back at the NASA hoopla of seven years ago.
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Getting back into the groove at work and then faced with a busy 4th of July weekend hasn’t left me much time to write in my web log. I still want to do a write up on the family reunion, but that will have to wait. Today is July 1st, and it’s time to take a look at my Photoblog statistics again.

Here’s the quick lowdown:

June 2004: 83 visitors, 160 visits
May 2004: 37 visitors, 116 visits
April 2004: 21 visitors, 60 visits

On the surface it looks as though I’ve yet again doubled the number of unique hits on the site, but the straight numbers are a little misleading. About 18 to 20 of those 83 hits are probably from ‘blog indices verifying my site when I initially signed up with them at the beginning of the month. Still, even taking that into account, it looks as though registering was worth the effort as the indices do seem to help boost the overall number of unique visits.

As you can see from the image to the left, most of the incoming visits are still coming from my web log. That makes sense, considering I do these write ups each month (not to mention the link on this page directly to the photoblog.) The big surprise, though, came in the last couple days of the month when I logged almost as many visits from http://www.le-cam.org. I visited their site, but I still have no idea why they linked to me! If you can make heads or tails of that particular French rowing fan site (or more importantly, if you can find the link back to my photoblog), please clue me in!

Interestingly, it doesn’t appear as if anyone arrived at my site this month via the results of a web search query. After last month, I expected to see quite a few more Google hits on the site, but I guess those “Sally Lightfoot Crab” keywords were just a fluke.

For July, I know I should be exploring a new tactic, but I think I’m going to continue as is. Rather than try to rationalize a reason why, I’m just going to admit that I’m feeling lazy. I still want to submit the site to search engines, but I think that should be further down the line. I also have at least three other plans, but they’re going to involve a lot of motivation I don’t currently have. (I want to research and implement automated RSS feeds, create html metatags for each entry, and submit every picture to Photo.net.) All those sound like too much work too soon after my vacation, so I think I’ll just let it ride for another month.

Hey, you know what? Even a falloff in the number of hits would tell me something… Oh, that’s right. I wasn’t going to rationalize. Never mind.

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Two P.S.’s: First: Yes, I know it’s not July 1st anymore (despite what the first paragraph above says). I’m having terrible cable modem troubles and haven’t been able to reliably connect to the web. The good news is that tech support will be here “sometime within 24 to 72 hours.” Second: Props to Mike for helping me figure out why the last three entries are showing up on the front page of my blog — I completely spaced the fact that Greymatter operates by date rather than by entry. (I posted the last three entries on the same day — just before going on vacation — before immediately closing them. When it came time to update the photoblog, I could simply hop online and open each entry again.) Fear not… the photoblog should fix itself with the next update.