pelf-ism is contagious

Don’t we all love to check the search terms or keywords that brought our readers to our blogs? Not you? At least I know of some people who do. And yeah, I too, would like to see what people were looking for which landed them here in my blog.

For me, the popular search terms were never sex-related mainly because I never blogged about them. And there were never keywords on how to enlarge a certain organ that I don’t even have in the first place *winks* A lot of search terms in my previous blog were terrapin-related, and then after the entry on the new university in Terengganu, Universiti Darul Iman, UDM was frequently searched for.

So after reading about what she had discovered, I checked my Keyword Analysis too.. And guess what I found..

What do you mean by “gigantic shower cap”?! This is not Watson’s or any other convenience stores, you know. I wonder whether the person who was looking for a “gigantic shower cap” found it in my blog *winks* I doubt it..

But then again, search terms that really bother me are those that spell my (full) name. It could simply mean that I am being stalked, and whoever those people are, they just could not be bothered to save my blog in their Favourites/Bookmarks. I mean, wouldn’t YOU be bothered if there are ALWAYS people who search for you in MSN or Google?! And they NEVER leave you a comment to let you know that they were here? <– I am assuming those people who searched for me were not bloggers because I believe bloggers have very good memory when it comes to remembering URLs

Master Jason told me that my own server has an Awstats programme installed - and I suppose the word “Awstats” was the shortened version of “Awesome Statistics” or something like that. Because I checked it out this morning, and it was really.. Err.. Awesome..! *smiles* It could do much better than “Blog Stat” in Wordpress.com.

Anyway, I am not sure whether Awstats is reliable because I saw something unbelievable, which is this:

Do you believe that I have soo many American readers? I don’t

OK, OK.. Maybe I am interpreting the information wrongly, so I need some experts so explain to me what those figures mean. Any volunteers?

Guess what happens when you cross a tech-UNsavvy person with, err, tech?! Yea, badly structured question, I know, but that is NOT the main point.

Being the stats-obsessed blogger that I was (note the past tense), I tried to install a statistics plugin that could do almost everything that “Blog Stat” in Wordpress.com could. And being very good at following instructions, I did the step-by-step installation according to the attached “Read Me” file. Including modifying the config.php file, which is a prohibited area, at least for people like me.

I clicked SAVE and happily thought that I could now spy on my readers monitor from which corner angle country did my readers come, who referred them here, which were the most-read posts etc.

Bad move.

My template started to act in a very strange way I cannot describe it now. I made more modifications but the more I modified, the more new problems I encountered. I combed through the WordPress website but found nothing that could help me. Maybe I wasn’t looking at the correct corners. Or maybe I didn’t know what I was looking for *sigh*

I left Master Jason some messages over Y! Messenger, and I also left him my username and password, hoping he could help me check my blog the moment he got online. Then I went to bed. But I tossed and turned in bed for so many times I thought maybe I should beep Master Jason to see if he could help me with it. He said he was away but he was willing to help me look into it. So sweet of him.

So this afternoon I met him in Y! Messenger and he asked me what I did to my blog. I forgot what I told him but it was something to the effect of “installing some plugin - erased the database - got a new set of username and password” and then I told him I edited the config.php file. And he was like, “OF ALL THINGS YOU GO TOUCH THAT” and I was like “OMG.”

Anyway, to cut a long story short, Master Jason helped me reset my WordPress database, hence I have officially lost my previous couple of posts AND COMMENTS. I am not so saddened over the lost of those little posts because I could re-write them if I wanted to. But those comments left by my readers, yes, you, are very precious to me :(( *sob*

And I have decided NOT to re-write those posts that I accidentally erased. Maybe they were meant to be erased anyway. Maybe that incident will serve as a reminder to me to NOT mess with files that I am not familiar with. I am lucky to have only lost 4 posts instead of 40 or 400 *shrugs*

A note to other tech-UNsavvy people like me: NEVER EVER edit anything in those .css or .php files if you do not know how they function. Sometimes the computers are too dumb to understand what we actually want.