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No Elvis Week for Me This Year: I’ve tried not to dwell on it, but I sure did miss going to Elvis Week 2008. There are mementos from last year still pinned on the wall and the bulletin board near my computer, and looking at them makes me sigh with regret. I couldn’t even bring myself to write a blog column to commemorate the 31st Anniversary. The closest I came was considering a possible diatribe about the lack of Elvis movies on cable TV this year, but that was too negative. What happened at TCM, Nickelodeon, Disney Channel and others who ran them in the past? I hope the absence of Elvis movies wasn’t because of bad ratings in previous years. If you made it to Elvis Week 2008, I know you had a great time. If you’ve never been, you need to do it some year. It is a totally unique experience. But, plan to spend a bunch of money.
A Quarter of a Million Hits: Somehow, when ElvisBlog passed 200,000 hits, I failed to mention it in ElvisBlog News. I had some bad karma about the date it occurred – April 1. Well, nothing bad has happened.
I’m not going to miss announcing the next milestone. As of August 7, Elvisblog has achieved 250,000 hits since it began in January 2005. My blogware provider calls these “Distinct Hosts Served.” I understand that other blog platforms report “HTML Requests,” and by that measure, ElvisBlog’s accumulative total is over 600,000.
August is the biggest month every year for traffic to the blog. During the 30th Anniversary celebration last year, tons of folks looked for Elvis information on Google. Lots of them ended up at ElvisBlog. This August had a little increase, but nothing like the big jump generated by the 30th Anniversary.
HotLinking: Have you ever heard of HotLinking? It is also called Sourcing, but that sounds too legit. HotLinking is when other websites use your bandwidth. I won’t bore you with technical stuff about bandwidth, but I had to buy more last February, so I could continue blogging. Some folks had basically been streaming photos from my site (not using their own bandwidth). I had to fork out another $40 dollars a year, but I did get a ton of additional bandwidth. Three months later, I noticed something strange in the daily Referer file. The count for an Asian website showed that more people had linked from that site than ElvisBlog’s total hits for the day.
That couldn’t be, so I contacted the tech support for my blog platform (by e-mail only, of course), and learned about hotlinking. The bad news was very clear. I was paying for the bandwidth that some other pirate site was using. It was happening only with pictures, not text. Good news: there is a way to stop it. With tech guidance, I navigated deep into Security Settings. The next-to-last one was a check box called Allow Sourcing of Photos, and I unclicked it.
3-Column Format: Despite my best attempts, I can’t seem to keep this blog simple. The articles are longer, there are many photos in most of them, and a ton of content is piling up. There are 231 articles posted now, and that is a lot for new readers to dig through. So, some reorganization is needed. There will be a few new categories coming up soon.
First, there is ElvisBlog News. There have been three or four ElvisBlog News reports every year, and they really shouldn’t have been in there with the Elvis Presley stories. For those who care, this link will provide a chronological time-line for the evolution of ElvisBlog.
Next is Elvis Commentary Mini-Nuggets. No other Elvis website or blog does commentary mini-nuggets, so it is time to show them off. This is one of my favorite column themes. When you string them all together, it totals a pretty impressive list, one that deserves its own link.
Finally, there is Odd Elvis Websites. I keep running into these things on the internet, so I save the URLs and post a column about them when I have enough. This is getting to be a pretty sizable list, also.
Down the road a bit, I want to add another chapter to my “Elvis Claus Trilogy,” and make it a continuing novel. Maybe each year, I can come up with another surprise Christmas romance for Elvis Claus and Judy.
All these new categories require a format change. ElvisBlog will be going to 3-column in a few weeks. In the right column will be links to ElvisBlog News, Elvis Commentary Mini-Nuggets, Odd Elvis websites, and, someday, “Elvis Claus, the Book.”
Phil Arnold
Original Elvis Blogmeister
© 2008 Philip R Arnold All Rights Reserved www.ElvisBlog.net