Autumnal Musings

So, here we are in the middle of Autumn. Summer's but a memory and the leaves are tumbling from the trees. I love this time of year. I especially like it when its largely dry, as it has been around here, and the fallen leaves stay crisp, crackling underfoot as you walk. There's nothing quite as enjoyable as kicking your way through piles of leaves, hearing that wonderful 'swishing' noise as they scatter. Then there's the smell - I love the scent of Autumn leaves. Even better is that wonderful smell when they burn them on bonfires. Ah, the joys of Autumn. It's also, of course, the time of year when my central heating starts kicking in and, inevitably, malfunctioning. It's always the actuator which plays up. Take my advice, never use those bloody spring return types - the springs go after a few years and they won't switch the valve back to hot water only. This year I've acted swiftly and replaced the old actuator with a fully powered 'motor on/motor off' type. It works perfectly. Not bad for something I got off of Ebay for less than thirty quid.

Leaves and actuators aside, Autumn is also the time of year when we website owners can usually expect an upturn in traffic. However, this October, the slump which has gripped The Sleaze since the beginning of June continues. Every time there seems to be a recovery in traffic, it peters out after a few days and falls to seemingly even lower levels. I've given up trying to analyse what might be wrong with the site - my Google Page Rank (for what it's worth - I don't set much store by it), hasn't changed in over a year, I have more pages than ever correctly listed on Google, Yahoo and other leading search engines, and many of those pages (especially the index page) rank pretty highly for various relevant search terms. In theory, I should be doing a lot better. It could be that people are being distracted by things like the credit crunch and US elections - although that's never been a problem before - or maybe people just aren't interested in satire any more. It has occur ed to me that the collapse of Satire Search might have had an effect. Although I wasn't a member, I used o get a lot of referrals from sites which were on it. With the feed's demise, they've probably lost traffic, which has a knock on effect for me. Anyway, I'm going to press ahead with the site's redesign and relaunch it in the next couple of months, and see if things improve then. If not - God knows what I'll try next.