So I’m looking at all the other sites on the web where people post rants all the time…

www.suck.com
www.eod.com
www.endquote.com
www.fray.com
www.cacophony.com
www.soundbitten.com
www.theobvious.com
www.prehensile.com
www.kia.net/colors
www.afterdinner.com

…and they’re all really good and well designed and most of them update their pages really often, so I’m feeling quite a bit of penis envy toward them right now.

I haven’t posted a rant in over a month, and I haven’t written one in even longer than that. I’m very depressed about my lack of creativity. You know, I’ve always said that the one thing I miss about being in school is that my unhappiness there forced me to write. Writing was my escape, and it was beautiful. Now life is too easy, I’ve been out of school over two years now, and I don’t have that spark in me anymore. I don’t need to write to relieve myself of stress because frankly I live a stress-free life.

Meanwhile, I still haven’t gotten a job, and it’s bothering me. I want to be a web designer. But my sites just aren’t good enough yet. I need to find my niche on the web. I need to figure out what I can do better than anyone else.

You know what my most popular web page is? Quote of the Moment. It’s one page. It has a random quote on it. That’s it. The page averages just under a thousand hits a day. Meanwhile, Clip Art is lucky to get above fifty hits a day, and most of my other pages average out to about one hit per day. How lame is that? The one thing I ever did right was something for which I did very little. Simplicity triumphed. But web designers don’t get hired for their simple sites. They get hired for their sophisticated sites–sites that are full of vibrant images and lengthy content.

Actually, while writing this, I received a letter from a delighted fan of Clip Art. Of course, she found it through the link on Quote of the Moment. Maybe there’s a market in that.

I’m prob’ly going to overhaul Igno-Rant and Clip Art. I’m tired of the lack of interest. The public has spoken. They’ve told me I’m not giving them what they want, so I’m going to turn around and give them what they want. I just need a little time to work on it. I need to know what I’m doing before I start. I need to build the site that people want to see.

Right now I’m going to sleep. Hopefully I’ll dream of the perfect web site. Even so, it might always be a dream.

The company that hosts randomness.com sent me an email last week to inform me that they would have to cancel my account because I had received almost forty thousand hits to my site in the past two weeks, which is more traffic than they can handle.

Of course, it came as somewhat of a shock that I had received forty thousand hits in two weeks. I knew that forty thousand people hadn’t visited Igno-Rant or Thenestor, or else I would have seen more votes in the Igno-Rant survey and more emails from the contact form on Thenestor.

Side note: For those of you unfamiliar with randomness.com, it contains four “pieces”: Igno-Rant, which you are looking at currently, Clip Art, which is sort of an online distraction, WebTips, which is a web design tutorial, and Thenestor, which is my autobiographical piece.

So I looked at my web site stats.

Apparently, the most requested single page within randomness.com was a page within Clip Art called “Naughty Pictures.” It’s a parody of adult web sites. It’s not actually an adult web site. It’s a joke. Trust me. Mom, if you’re reading this, I promise I’ve never actually been to an adult site. My friends told me about them. Yes, I’ll stop hanging out with that rotten crowd.

Incidentally, that didn’t explain where the hits were coming from. I’m still not sure. If I had a better web host, I would have access to a referrer log that would tell me exactly what sites are linking to my site. Alas, I had to search for links to my site via AltaVista and InfoSeek, and the only site they could find linking to mine was some guy on GeoCities. I have a theory, though, that my “Naughty Pictures” page might be showing up near the top in searches for some common adult keywords. I recall that back in April, a search on AltaVista for the words “naughty pictures” always resulted with my page in the number two position.

Anyhow, I was quite disappointed that my most requested page was in the middle of my site, instead of, say, the main page of randomness.com, or even the main page of one of the four pieces of randomness.com. What does that say about the world? In particular, what does that say about Internet users?

As I mentioned, my web host was threatening to shut down randomness.com if I didn’t do something about the situation. So I did the best thing I could think of. I moved the “Naughty Pictures” page to my old account on GeoCities. I just can’t wait to hear what they have to say about that.