Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

It’s time for a little A+B testing. Let’s see how well this theme performs tomorrow and Sunday v.s. the temporary blue one. My sister thinks it works a lot better–I guess we’ll find out.

So far today, hits are good at around 30k across the network to date, and revenue is at 1 PM equal to yesterday’s.  What I am most interested in is whether the CTR for this blog will significantly improve.  If it’s as good as before, I should be seeing around a 2x improvement in CTR, and that means we’ll be stuck on this theme for a while yet…

I got the following cool email today:

I just stumbled on to your blog via someone’s installation of your hashcash plugin. I was wondering what in the world hash cash was and then got distracted by your blog (that I had to read via Google’s cache because your site seems to be unreachable this morning). I just had to email someone who has (almost) the same name as me. And, we also share a similar goal! One of my goals in life is to be known as just “Eliot” without the use of my last name. I love how infrequently I meet other Eliot’s (or Elliot’s or Elliott’s) and I’ve even rarely met someone who knew another Eliot (or Elliot or Elliott). I want to take advantage of that and become like Madonna or Prince or Beck. A one-name wonder, you might say.

Yes, being named Elliott is indeed pretty cool. We’re not named for ET–think T.S. Eliot. And, even cooler, is that any of us can be effectively named E(l+)iot(+) without difficulty. Elllliotttttttttts of the world, unite!

For those of you who don’t know the origin or history of the name Eliot, try this list of people by surname El from wikipedia, or read about how Eliot derives from Hebrew Elijah, meaning “The Lord is my God.”

And, contrary to popular opinion, it’s a statistically significant American name:

Elliot is a common male first name, ranking 582 out of 1219 for males of all ages in the 1990 U.S. Census. Elliot is a very popular surname, ranking 1841 out of 88799 for people of all ages in the 1990 U.S. Census.

Update: Did you know that Elyot is another variant of this name? It’s a rare spelling from the 16^th century!

Most of the important blogs are up, and the theme is finalized here. I’ve added a sidebar, my search terms and tagging plugins, and more. The SEO stuff looks good to go, too. I still need to update the themes on all other blogs and get some of them back up, too, but their databases are already in place, so it won’t be too hard.

Restoring even this small blog network is a major pain in the ass, taking about a week of my spare time.  I had to:

1. Find the databases and move them from 1and1 to dreamhost
2. Run the upgrade script on all the databases
3. Install a theme on all blogs
4. Customize that theme for visual appeal, advertising, and SEO
5. Restore the contents of a dozen wp-content folders
6. Pester 1and1 tech support for access to my files

The theme I used was simple and somewhat terrible.  It had parts in Spanish that I had to remove, didn’t set the content-type properly, etc.  Quite a major hassle, too.