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.