Tue 3.17.09
Really brief as-promised follow-up to “The Gender Question.” I spent the weekend doing the layout for the summer issue, so our contributors are now finalized.
The count: 46 men, 40 women = 46.7%F
Still leaning male, but Rattle #31 is more female than our 45% ten-issue-average, and we’ve bucked the disturbing trend of Gender Climate Change — apparently the recent spike in testosterone was due to random fluctuations in solar iridescence and the earth’s magnetic field, not men-made.
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An even briefer follow-up to last week’s post — three days after “Death and Tacos” went viral, so did Brian Trimboli’s “Things My Son Should Know After I’ve Died.” Thanks to the pair, we’ve been cruising along at 10,000 visitors a day and pushing the MySQL server the limit all the time, to the point where pages aren’t always loading in the middle of the day. Checking Alexa.com, we were the 89,000th most popular website in the world last week, running neck-and-neck with PoetryFoundation.org and Poems.com. Of course, this can’t keep up, but it sure is fun while it lasts.
And the best part is, most of these visitors are not regular consumers of poetry — maybe we’re earning some new converts.
March 19th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
I had the misandry once. But I rubbed some dirt on it and it went away.
March 21st, 2009 at 11:22 am
Congrats on the traffic, Tim. Though, I must say a dedicated MySQL server shouldn’t sneeze at 10k uniques from WP. Maybe time to move rattle.com onto a dedicated VPS instanco, or even a cloud platform, and pay per use. Happy to chat and kick around ideas.
March 26th, 2009 at 11:59 am
Thanks, Robert, I’ll take you up on that if it starts to seem like it’s something we need to do. You’re my on-call computer guy, which is probably an annoying thing for you to always be, but we all really appreciate it!
I think the problem I mentioned, actually, was my fault — I tried to reinstall a plugin and it didn’t work, but I didn’t notice, so it was like half-installed, and clogging things up. As soon as I noticed it (I think a couple hours after I made this post), I reinstalled and everything was running normally again…so it seems like it wasn’t the load after all. Although I’m so ignorant, who really knows:)