Friends, there are many joys to being your own webmaster. There is the joy of feverishly updating the world to your every minor thought and experience, and then listening to the hollow winds of the world ignoring you. There is the rapture of obsessively surfing to your own web page many times a day just to make sure it's up and running. There is the wonder of slapping your own face all over the page so everyone in the world, including crazed stalkers, can know what you look like. Above all of these tender joys, however, are web logs.

If you don't have your own bona-fide web space, you may be unfamiliar with web logs. If you've got one of those free web pages and installed a counter on it, then you secretly lust after web logs (counters are the dumbest thing you can put on your site, IMHO. Fine to set up a counter so you can see how many people showed up, by why why why put it up for all to see? [of course I have a counter up on my Maze web page on Geocities - bad Jeff!]). You see, all web servers collect a stupefying amount of information about every computer that connects to it, and records every connection in a log file, which is a plain-text file which looks something like this:

209.73.164.132 - - [24/Jun/2001:06:22:18 -0400] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 1 "-" "Mercator-v1.2jg"
209.73.164.132 - - [24/Jun/2001:06:22:19 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 24732 "-" "Mercator-v1.2jg"
208.219.77.29 - - [24/Jun/2001:06:58:07 -0400] "HEAD /our404.html HTTP/1.1" 200 0 "-" "Gulliver/1.3"

As you can see, it's a computer-generated file never meant to be read by human eyes, unless you want to go insane. Happily, there are programs out there that will parse a web log for you and produce readable, organized stats about any aspect of the computers surfing to your site: what browser they're using, what page (if any) referred them to you, where they went on your site - lots and lots of information. It also, of course, tells you how many hits you got, but it also shows where those hits went, and how many hits turned into long stays of people reading your site and which hits were split-second moments of horror for people who couldn't click their back button fast enough. So, downloading and parsing my web logs is just one of the many more things I gotta do on a weekly basis. And it's eroding my already-terminal respect for the rest of humanity, because one of the things a web log notes is what people were searching for when they stumbled across your web site.

Here are the top six search engine keywords that led people, somehow, to innerswine.com: 

women+think+of+men+wearing+spandex
phillippines+pigs
dana+plato+nude
naked+drunk+girls+in+albany
fuck+greeting+card
fucking+little+kinders

How these bizarre terms lead to my web site is a different issue, although I will state for the record that nowhere, to my knowledge, does the phrase "fucking little kinders" appear. "Drunk girls in albany", sure. But no kinders.

Now, I search for plenty of strange things on the Internet, sometimes out of prurient interest and sometimes just out of boredom. It's still disturbing to discover that "dana plato nude" will lead people to my web site. Also, it's sobering to consider that if I had 500 hits on the web page last week, easily 150 of them were from strange web searches that make no sense. The fact that so few of my web-search hits contain the words "inner swine" or "jeff somers" is also pretty disturbing. The again, I've often thought of putting things like "dano plato nude" in the META tags on the index page. But I've resisted, so far.

MICROSOFT SMART TAGS are coming, unfortunately, although they've backed off of including them in Internet Explorer 7 for now. What are they? It's a new ‘feature' wherein Microsoft will assign automatically-generated hyperlinks to various words in both HTML pages and MS Office documents. Basically, it's a way of hyperlinking every document you read with the world. A great idea, in theory. The problem? Microsoft getting to decide where those words are hyperlinked. Now, within Office I guess they can do what they want. But I'll be fucked if I'm gonna let Microsoft choose words on my web pages and link them wherever they want. Fuckers. I mean, they could choose the words The Inner Swine and link them somewhere, without my knowledge or approval.

Believe me, they will be turned off by default when you visit innerswine.com.

New column in about two weeks. In the meantime, please feel free to drop me a note.