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Yeah, I know, I'm late again this week. I just got home from a bachelor party. My friend, Jade, is getting married -- for the second time -- next week. It was a good time but that's not what I wanted to write about this week.

I'm glad that I finally sat down and figured out how to get statistics for my web-pages. Up until this week, I had no idea which of my pages were being viewed . . . and I must admit that I was surprised by what I found.

A year ago I wanted to read the book "The Jungle," by Upton Sinclair but I couldn't find an html version on the web. All I could find was the Gutenberg text, which is one big file. So I took that and broke it down into individual chapters and created my own html copy of the book.

After I finished reading it I thought about simply deleting the files because space for my web-site is limited to five megabytes. I did, however, spend a considerable amount of time editing and therefore decided instead to donate it to Bibliomania so that it would be available for anyone to read, without taking up space on my site. I contacted the webmaster at Bibliomania and he grabbed the files but I waited to delete the files until the book was up on their site so I could link to it. Well, I am still waiting for it to show up on Bibliomania and even though I'm over the five megabyte limit, I haven't had any problem with disk space so it's still sitting here. Actually, I forgot all about it until this week.

I've been playing with a program called Analog this week. It analyzes the web server logs and provides access statistics for my entire site. Far better than a simple hit counter, I can see how many times each page has been accessed and from where. Looking at the logs for this week, it was immediately evident that my copy of "The Jungle" is being accessed more than my "Thoughts," and from several different distinct hosts. Now that it's drawing attention, I suppose I'll leave it alone even if I can link to it elsewhere -- for now anyway.

Now, I'm considering supplying a weekly statistics report from a link on my home page. I want to monitor the reports for a couple of weeks first, though -- just to make sure that I like the format and the results are to my liking. I'm still toying with some of the options.

And now, I think it's about time for a nap. Jade's brother, Terry, and I were the last too people to get to sleep -- at about 5am! And we had to be out of the hotel room by 10, which came all too quickly, so I'm tired. But I do feel amazingly good considering the amount of beer I consumed over the course of 12 hours.

One last thing, though -- for no other reason than that I thought it funny at 3 or 4am. The bartender at one of the bars we were at earlier in the evening, came to the hotel room with a friend of his to party with us. His nickname, Scoop, I asked if he was a journalism student, and his friend answered: "No, he's a bartender -- we named him after the ice-scoop."

Oh well... I guess you had to be there.