Lately I’ve been doing a little PR work for old DIYSearch, mostly because of a trend I’ve noticed, something that has really shaken something loose in me, regarding this project.
Back in the good old days, in the late 90’s when I started this site, it had a rather nice surge of visitors and links, so much so that it caught the eye of Wired News, with said publication saying that perhaps it might be too successful and collapse under its own, well, yeah, I suppose that actually did happen. It all started going south a few years ago with lots of script kiddie hacks, site instability and lest I forget about the huge life events that happened to me personally that made updating and maintaining the site almost non-existent.
Well, this caused a huge slide in new users and visitors to the site. Its sad really, but its also the way of things, no one to blame but myself.
What really shook me was the fact that DIYSearch has now slid to the 11th page of results in Google for the “DIY” keyword (we used to be on the first page, within the first 3 or 4 results).
So, why am I sharing all of this. Well first, I am big on transparency. You’ll never find me NOT reporting the bad stuff along with the good stuff. I’m not here to make this site or myself look better than I or it is. Quite frankly I consider this to be a failure on my part.
But, I’m not here to wallow in my stupidity or personal failures, I’m here to say that I am working on fixing these things. One thing is that I’m actually starting to promote the site. It’ll be slow because now, DIYSearch is a nothing site, not even visible on anyone’s radar screen, so it will most certainly be an uphill battle. I think I can do this though, its another project, another thing to figure out.
Why is this so important to me? Why bother? I suppose mostly because I have been doing this for as long as I have (11 years now) but also because, well, I’m a geek. Its a problem. I love solving problems. I love making things (which is what brought me to the DIY world in the first place!) I bother because without this, I would just go and do something else, and this is still interesting for me.
That wikipedia link cant hurt.
November 22nd, 2007, at 5:24 am #joly: yeah true, just want to get things back to where they were years ago and when i look at the google analytics thing, i just want to kick something.
November 22nd, 2007, at 10:25 am #