Popularity Contests and New Friends

March 17, 1998 -- Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Lately in the journalers' mailing list I'm on, some people have been discussing the Website Garage, a place that is supposed to rate and help you tune up your website. Just for fun, I gave it a spin. One of the ratings is a popularity index, and I received a "poor" rating. No surprise, since it is based on the number of pages Infoseek finds linking to your page, and there were a whopping 3 listings there, compared to Yahoo's 300,000 or so (their standard of excellence), so I thought I'd have a little fun and submit my site to some of the search engines.

This afternoon I was bored and started searching around for my name on the web. Came up with lots of listings in Finnish, so apparently Lisana (Lisänä, actually) means something in Finland, though Research-It couldn't tell me what. There is someone from Finland in the newsgroup I hang out in and I'm tempted to ask. I found out Lisana is also a character in Andre Norton's WitchWorld series, and I wonder if that's where my friend Brian came up with the name; I thought it was something he'd thought up himself. Actually, I found a few different Lisanas, one of the equine variety even. *chuckle*, but very few entries pointing back to my pages on the various search engines.

What I found odd though, was that Jevim did a search for Lisana under English language entries at Alta Vista, and one of my pages came up as the #1 entry. I did the same search -- even went so far as to borrow the URL that was returned to him after his search -- and there were no listings for my page when I got the results back. I'm still puzzling over that one. Jev thought maybe it was because I was using Internet Exploder and he was using Netscrape, but I switched over to Netscrape with the same results. Weird... Oh well, I seriously doubt that many people (if any) are hunting for me in AltaVista.

Actually, what got me started on the search engine thing was a mailing I got from Geocities today, saying because I was a featured page, if I wanted it, and if I had the geoguide at the *top* of every page (I prefer it at the bottom, myself), they would automatically submit me to Yahoo. I didn't want to go through and move the geoguides around just to make them happy (their link is there, and I'd rather people find it at the bottom of the page instead of clicking away before reading an entry), so I submitted myself to Yahoo... not like it was all that hard or anything. ;)

On another note, it seems I've made a friend now through my pages here. Sunday night when Mom and I got back from taking Jevim to the airport, I found a message in my mail-box from a Gillian Skywalker. She wrote and mentioned that we had a few things in common, and told me a bit about herself. I followed the link to her webpages and read a little more about her, and wrote her back yesterday morning. Yesterday afternoon, I woke up from a much-needed nap and found a reply in my box. I wrote back again this morning, and she wrote back again this evening.

I've mentioned her letters to Jevim, and he just went to my guestbook to get her URL and read some of her entries too. Right off, he said, "now I see why you two get along" and quoted her line about how she loves horses, but hasn't ridden in years. Saturday, when Mom was taking us to the movie theater, she had to detour and take me out to this little farm where she'd seen some horses that morning when she was heading to a rummage sale (my mom is nuts about rummage sales), and so she told Jevim all about me and how I love horses. He got that 'planning-something' look in his eye and said he'd have to see if he could arrange something sometime, mentioning rental horses and his family's farm property. I can't wait, though I'm not sure what my body would think of riding these days; it's probably been about ten years since I've been on a horse.

He went on to quote Gillian's lines about finding mistakes in science books, and correcting the grammar of poor English teachers, two more things that sound rather like me. Anyway, Gillian and I seem to have a few more things than that in common, and it's nice to have someone new to write to and get to know.

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