Housekeeping


A matter has been brought to my attention that needs clarification. We announce on page 1 of this site that new articles are posted on Sunday and, with few exceptions, this is done. Keep in mind that the web master has his own business and sometimes he is out of town. I don't think, however, that we have ever posted later than Monday.

Recently, some new statistical information regarding the web site has been made available to me on an on-going basis, and the numbers show that a significant number of viewers access the web site from WebTV. I operate from WebTV and I have come to accept some of the limitations of that system. Oftentimes, the articles that are posted on Sunday don't show up on my screen until well into the following week. I am writing this around noon on Tuesday and the articles that were posted last Sunday have not shown up on my screen yet. My web master assures me that the articles do appear on the screens of persons who access the site with a computer.

This all leads up to me informing those viewers who access the site via WebTV that articles are posted on Sunday but may not show up until several days later. There does not appear to be anything we can do about this. I have had the articles, on occasion, to appear immediately, but that is the exception rather than the rule.

Now about the new statistics. We have had difficulty from the outset getting an accurate count of the number of people who visit the web site. The new stats are accurate but, for some unknown reason, they don't correspond with the counter on the site. Based on three month's experience, I think I can now safely say that approximately 700 people visit the site each week. Whether they are the same 700 or not, I don't know. The highest number of visits in a single day on two separate occasions have been 155, the lowest number of visits has been 50. Traffic is always the heaviest on Mondays and the numbers go steadily downhill each day after that. The busiest hours are 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. which leads me to believe that many viewers are accessing from their work place. I can't tell where the viewers are located but I can tell that most of you utilize AOL with Web TV coming in second. We get quite a few hits from Google and other search engines and not all are UNC oriented. Laurie Dhue, The Confederate White House, and David Brinkley are topics, among others, that have been sought out via search engines. We are linked on most of the UNC message boards. Other than that, knowledge of ramfanatic.com is passed on by word of mouth. I have given some thought to placing a small ad in the Alumni Review but haven't gotten around to it yet. I just can't get "growth" and "numbers"
out of my evaluating system. It was a part of me in my career for too long to discard at this stage of my life.

I'm sure this is more than you ever wanted to know about ramfanatic.com, but I wanted to share this information with you.