The most common searches in the search engine traffic to my site (from Mint).

I’ve had Mint installed on my website for a while. I like the up-to-the-minute stats, so I can sit there and watch the page refresh every 2 minutes and see the numbers change.

I’ve also known about MintPopularPostsWP for a while, but I’d never used it before. It uses Mint to determine your most popular posts by page views instead of the number of comments. (Way more accurate!) Notice I have the list of popular posts in my sidebar now.

One of the things that has blown my mind about my blog is that second third most popular post being so popular. My Big Nerd Ranch posts get a lot of traffic because they linked to my blog as a review of the class I took, but that doesn’t explain the other post’s abnormal popularity. I didn’t write a lot of iPhone posts after my trip to the Ranch, so it’s not the general focus of my blog anyway; I’m known more for my WordPress stuff. So how does this post pull traffic from any remotely related Google search for this iPhone code?

Well, it happened through the magical algorithms that search engines use to determine ranking. The more hits a page gets, the more reputable it is to a search engine, and the higher it goes on the list. The higher it goes on the list, the more hits it gets. The more hits it gets, the higher it goes… and so on. Somehow my page became the #1 search result on multiple search engines (check out the images below).

I’m not trying to brag or complain here. It’s just really weird that a blog about WordPress programming gets the majority of its search traffic from one little iPhone development post. Don’t get me wrong—traffic is good—but this little quirk is also responsible for my blog’s high bounce rate.

Anyone else have a weird search engine experience to share?

I was then greeted by a folder icon with a question mark on it.

Somehow, my computer had lost the ability to find its own hard drive. My husband and I worked on my computer the rest of the evening—about seven hours that night—and several hours the following day before we could get it to see the drive at all. We still couldn’t boot from it, of course, but at least we could wipe it and reinstall the OS.

We finally succeeded, after three tries. The install kept freezing at 2% or so.

I had a two-day-old backup, so I still have most of my data. Time Machine is a godsend, but I turn it off when I play WoW because it brings my frame rate down to around one frame per seven seconds. That’s quite a problem when you’re healing nine other players while fighting Onyxia. I basically lost a weekend’s worth of work, which sucks, but isn’t horrible.

Running a surface scan revealed that after zeroing out my drive, I still inexplicably had corrupt blocks on the drive. My hard drive is probably going to physically fail for good sometime in the near future.

Until I can afford (in money AND time) to get a new drive for my computer, I might have to lose another day or two here and there, relying on hourly Time Machine backups to save my butt. Development on SimpleMap and all of my other projects has pretty much come to a halt for the next week at least.

Trust me—I don’t like this any more than you SimpleMap users out there do. I’ll do what I can to get 1.2 out of beta soon.