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318,478, to be exact. That’s how many visitors lindsayfincher.com received in 2008. That’s 26,539 visitors per month and 870 per day. Not bad for a blog about nothing.

Yes, it’s Excel. Shutup.

Unfortunately, I’ve never really tracked data from past years so I have no idea whether the number of visitors has risen or declined. I’ve owned this domain since September 2000 and have been using blogging software to update this site since 2001, when I installed NewsPro because I was too lazy to manually edit the HTML and upload it via FTP. Since then, readership has grown from my parents and friends to people who don’t even know me. The most heavily trafficked parts of this site are definitely my travel posts, and I usually get around 4-5 e-mails a week from random people who have travel questions or just wanted to let me know they liked the site. Although it might take me a while to respond to the e-mails, I definitely appreciate them.

I’m going to try and make more of an effort to update this site with actual content, i.e., past travel stories and what not, and hopefully 2009 will bring some international travel.

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Have I ever told you how much I love Google? Yeah, like a million times already. They are currently in the process of uploading all 10 million images from the now defunct LIFE magazine. When I visited the site today, two of the categories that immediately caught my eye were “1930s oil boom” and “Surfing.” Seriously, I love Google. Anyways, check out the site, although I should warn you that you’ll end up wasting too much time on it. I might have to start posting my favorite photo of the day from this archive or something. It’s really an incredible resource. Thanks, Google.

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I’ve just started playing around with Twitter…no strong feelings about it either way yet, for now it’s just another social networking tool to keep up with. Anyways, last night I Twittered “thinks Trader Joe’s carnitas were made by god himself” (they are in the deli section…throw some carnitas in corn tortillas, add avocado and salsa, and you have a delicious and easy to prepare dinner. Trust me on this one).

Nine minutes after Twittering, I received this e-mail:

TJ’s is on top of things. I love you guys.

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Seriously considering ditching my Treo and purchasing the new iPhone when it is released in July. The GPS would be extremely helpful (I get lost easily on these strange Virginia highways), and the price range ($200-300) is ideal. The only downside is switching to AT&T from Verizon. Ugh.

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I’ll be honest, as much as I love reading my Facebook newsfeed to see what group my friends joined, or the political candidate they now support, Scrabulous is really the main reason I login to Facebook every day. I found today’s article on the Scrabulous server upgrade rather amusing. Must have been a slow news day at the Times.

Like most fanatical Scrabble players, devotees of Scrabulous, a Scrabble-like application on Facebook, hate to be interrupted. So players are breathing easier since an upgrade last week intended to ensure that matches load more quickly.

The improvement came in response to the booming popularity of the application, which lets Facebook members to play one another online. According to the site, Scrabulous has upwards of half a million daily users.

[...]

Jayant’s enthusiasm for the online game has not dulled his love of the face-to-face experience of the original. He recently came in first in his age group in a local Scrabble competition.

“Scrabble has a charm of its own because you’re playing with close friends or family members,” he said. “But the thing is, as in everything in the world, people don’t find time to be with their family, to find two hours to play. Most people have Scrabble in their attic gathering dust, so the application helps people play and stay connected.”

[...]

Through Scrabulous, “we have managed to reach a lot of people who have never played the game,” said Rajat, who is 26. “Some even ask us questions about how to play Scrabulous because they’re not familiar with it. Once we’ve explained it to them, they come back and say, ‘It’s a great thing and we have to buy the original version to play with our family offline.’”

Prior to playing Scrabulous on Facebook, I think I played Scrabble maybe once or twice in my life. Pathetic, I know, but when it came time to play a board game, I usually opted for Monopoly or Risk (I don’t care what you think, Rian…alliances are totally acceptable).

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Google is the greatest corporation EVER. They provide me with the best web-based e-mail on the market, a wonderful news site to keep track of my favorite topics, an awesome feed aggregator, analytical tools for this website, an online word processor, and driving directions so that I don’t get lost trying to navigate this region’s bizarre freeway system (still, I usually manage to make a few wrong turns and end up in, like, Pennsylvania). Sometimes, Google even deposits money into my bank account.

And now I can login to my AOL Instant Messenger account (which I haven’t done in like a year) while in GMail and chat with my friends who are using either service. I will now revert to my college habit of keeping AIM and GMail on 24/7 for no real reason whatsoever, other than to support my favorite utility, PEPCO.

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Yeah, that’s right. This bloated website, which is like an SUV on the information superhighway due to my habit of uploading ungodly amounts of images, is officially “carbon neutral.”

Apparently, Dreamhost, the wonderful SoCal based company that hosts this website, is now purchasing offsets for the 2725 tons of CO2 they emit every year.

This means that I can drive the XTerra a bit more, knowing that the carbon produced by lindsayfincher.com is being offset by the good techs over at Dreamhost. Thanks, guys.

When you put a button on, it’s official!!

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As you can see, I decided to change up this website a little bit. I was getting bored of all the white space that was being wasted, and I’ve wanted a three column layout for a while. I built my stylesheet using the Movable Type Style Generator and got the basic three column layout from there as well. It still took me effin’ forever to do this. Well, not really…but it was a pain in the ass to wade through a bunch of code because I ended up changing a lot of it. And this is still a work in progress…

This layout should look fine on a resolution of 1024×768 or higher, which most of you have. I know this because my website stats report tells me this, along with your preferred internet browser, current address, social security number, and the name of your first born child. Kidding, of course…I would have to pay extra for the first born child report.

Anyways, let me know if you come across any errors while you’re browsing. I still need to make a few rotating banners like my last layout had, but for now you are stuck with the boring ol’ “MOCKBA” banner.
(Here’s your Russian lesson for the day: MOCKBA = “Moskva” in Cyrillic, the Russian alphabet. Moskva is what Russians call Moscow. Pretty cool, huh? Now you don’t have to ask, “Lindsay, why does your sweatshirt say ‘mokba’?”)

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