During the first week of my website, Clay Mentality, being online I have been monitoring its logs closely. I have watched as the expected visitors (my friends), welcome suprise visitors (search bots) and some unwelcome suprise visitors (unknown IPs, which have already started SPAMing email on the new domain).
Last week when I was preparing to unviel the site, the blog entry had been written for days, but it wasn’t until the last minute (literally, no more than 5 minutes before live) that I decided to register the ClayMentality.org domain. I was going to use a subdomain of one of my other domains for this purpose originally. ClayMentality.org is the first domain that I have registered AFTER the content was written, so it was destined to be a unique experience.
In the first day of the site, most of the visitors were friends who had recieved notification of the site via the blog. In the second day I was visited by a few friendly bots (new domain names attract attention). Throughout the last 5 days the traffic pattern has been mostly stable with return visitors (yes, you Oscar), as well as new visitors as news of the site spreads across my network of friends, and with the help of the bots, the Internet.
During the first few days of operation the site had a critical bug, the code used for protecting some of my administrative scipts from illegitimate use was accidentally being used to protect the proccessing code for the “Contact Me” form, oops. That issue is now corrected and the form is functioning normally.
The site was launched without 2 standard files in place, the robots exclusion file (for bots) and the favorite icon file; I have now implemented both, so the bots are happy and people using FireFox with too many tabs open should also be happy.
The bots that have checked the site so far include: Googlebot (Google’s crawler), SLURP (Yahoo’s bot), Internet Archive (archive.org). Websense (a bot looking for porn), and NetCraft (checking the server for its software and uptime).
So far no one has registered for the gallery, which suprises me, since I installed the new gallery system specificly for the purpose of allowing comments, rating and an overall more interacting image viewing experience.
The first week hasn’t been very eventful, but the site does feel alive, which makes me feel like throwing something 🙂