Mini-Raving: SC.org’s Irresponsible Prank
I’ve posted a Mini-Raving (on the Ravings of a Zealot page, just click on the “Ravings” menu button) on my take on Starcraft.org’s little April Fools prank, why I think it’s irresponsible, and the respect I’ve lost for them. This one is markedly different from my other Ravings, as I feel they simply went too far with this, and chose something that created some real problems from it (I bet Blizzard Tech Support is just THRILLED with the ORG about now).

UF: Yeah, I Was Right
Looks like I was right (or at least two-thirds right anyway). User Friendly’s notice that the site was closed down due to pending litigation was in fact an April Fools prank. The normal site is up now with a new strip for the day in place. I do so love being right, and I give Iliad his kudoes for staging such a good joke, with all the prior setup on it.

Quarterly Statistics
I ran my web log statistics analyzer today for everything from the beginning of the year. I really wanted the 1st quarter stats but chose the wrong option and didn’t realize until it had all run (and it takes forever to do everything, so I’m just suffering with the slight errors that including today will introduce). For those of you who are interested, yggdrasil.net scored 38089 pageviews (impressions) since the beginning of the year, with 24501 user sessions (uniques). The site has had, thus far this year, an average of 418 impressions per day, and an average of 269 uniques a day. Those numbers are roughly half what I really desire.

An even 10% of all site visitors are international visitors, but there’s 8.05% percent of visitors which are tagged as “unknown” and some of those are likely international as well. AOL still leads in user sessions, but cable modem users (home.com) have pulled ahead in hits and percentage of hits. RoadRunner and MediaOne are also in the top of the pack, with 7th and 5th place spots respectively (UUNet is in the #1 spot, but I don’t know if that’s accurate, or if it’s because UUNet is my local gateway for my primary ISP). The top referrers 5 external to the site are Infoceptor, The StatBox, Tech-Base, SC Legacy, and SimpleCraft (in that order). What’s amusing though is the next-placed referral URL is listed as “c:/WINDOWS/Desktop/starcraft/list.htm” – apparently someone has their bookmarks on their desktop and my site has a proud spot in it.

On the Browser and OS wars front, MS Internet Explorer has 53.93% of all hits, with 36.61% for Netscape. 91.41% of all Netscape users are using version 4 or 4.5, whereas 86.88% of Internet Explorer users are using IE4, and 10.96% are already using IE5. The numbers for the Quarter don’t reflect it, but the graphs for March alone show IE4 in a decline and IE5 taking over. Windows95 shows up with 42.13% of systems used to view the site, Windows98 with 36.2% (98 has been gaining steadily the last few months), NT with 6.55%, and Linux with only 0.58%. There’s a mysterious “other” listing though with 12.9% of the platforms. I wonder what that entails (as I don’t have detailed information on that without digging through the raw logs, which is never fun).

Weird Links Of The Day
I thought long and hard about pulling some sort of April Fools prank with yggdrasil.net, but decided that I’d just cover the more intreresting ones other people are doing, and post other weird stuff, like the two links (unless of course I think up something really brilliant later today, then I’ll probably do it anyway) I have today. The first is The Church of the Gerbil. This site might appeal to all those weirdoes who went nuts over that Hamster Dance page. Speaking of the Hamster Dance, another site that someone mailed me about (I apologize, I forgot your name and don’t have the e-mail any longer.) that I’ve been holding off on posting until the time was “right” (read as: when I bloody well remembered it) is The Penguin Dance. As I just now checked the web site, I noticed that the “pengwins” have been removed (they are now Ex-Penguins!). Doh! Should have posted on it earlier, I guess. Anyway, it had dancing penguins to an annoying little music clip, much like the Hamster Dance.

NVIDIA and 3dfx to Merge
Yes, I know, it’s an April Fools prank. It’s the best one I’ve seen yet today, though. Check out the (entirely fake) press release for all the details. The release itself could be pretty credible looking if it weren’t for the “NV4199” project name.

User Friendly: Down, or April Fools Prank?
I went to check out User Friendly today, and was greeted with a notice they have that the site/strip is discontinued indefinately, pending litigation against Iliad. Now, I don’t know what to think of this. My first impulse is that this is an April Fools prank that Iliad is playing. My second impulse is that maybe it’s not, and maybe it’s real, and the timing is just really ironic. I consider that a possibility because I was reading on some other sites yesterday (Geek Life maybe, I don’t recall exactly where) about an e-mail and followup registered letter from a certain Evil Empire corporation threatening legal action due to “defamatory” humor in the comic strip. My third impulse is that this is all an April Fools prank, but an elaborate one with cooperation of other sites and extensive pre-April 1st setup to make it more believable and carry the whole thing off. I don’t know what to think, but I certainly do NOT want UF to go away.