The Great Geek Manual

This is it! My two thousandth post here on The Great Geek Manual! I’ve been posting steadily to this blog for nearly three years years now, since November 2006, and I’m happy to say, traffic is better than ever.

Just Thursday, I hit an all-time record of seven thousand visits in a single day, and while I don’t maintain that kind of traffic every day, it has been gratifying to see my Google Analytics charts angling ever upward from the two hits a day I used to get from bullying my fellow guild members to nearly two thousand daily hits today.

I want to thank all of you who’ve visited for giving my rambling collection of trivia a purpose. I watch my stats closely enough to know there’s a small core of you who’ve been stopping with regularity, and I really do appreciate your time and traffic!

Sincerely,
Pipedreamergrey

The Great Geek Manual is proud to be sponsored by
HostColor Shared Multi-Domain Hosting!

It’s been two years since my first post! Man, the time flies. I can’t even guess at the number of hours I’ve spent vegging out in front of the television, typing away at this thing.

As of this morning, The Great Geek Manual has 1,185 posts and 17 pages in 39 categories.

I’m certainly no Neatorama, but, in the past two years, I’ve received 575 comments and deleted over twenty thousandth spam messages. I’ve been hovering at around one hundred fifty RSS subscribers and five hundred daily visitors for the past year for a whopping average of two cents of AdSense earnings per day.

It doesn’t seem like much, the “This Day in Geek History” feature that’s now the center of this blog used to be nothing more than a slightly neurotic list I compulsively compiled to kill to kill time when I was bored. Now that I have an audience to share it with, it’s a boring list I compulsively keep as a part of my neurotic but mainstream hobby, and that’s progress that I can take straight to my therapist!

I have to thank my benefactor, HostColor, which continues to support my effort with its stupendous hosting service, which I would honestly recommend to anyone interested in setting up a WordPress blog even if I weren’t being hosted for free. The folks over at HostColor have been nothing but helpful, so much so that I almost feel guilty that I’m not paying sometimes.

I also want to thank everyone who reads The Great Geek Manual. A few of you have gone above and beyond simple readership to befriend me in the electronic universe I inhabit, MMORPGs and all, but every single one of you are appreciated.

Thanks!

Crowds assemble! Milling throngs converge! Spectators attend! The Great Geek Manual is back online and updating after more than a week! All three of you may now resume your daily consumption of my Geekiness!

What happened? I’m glad you asked. No, scratch that. In all reality, I was utterly shocked when, Saturday night, Larry asked what had happened to my content. True, I somewhat suspect that “Larry” may actually be my mother attempting to make me feel good about my blogging or my younger brother attempting to reinforce the delusion that legions of imaginary fans hang on every word of my blog in order to prevent me from hanging with him in the virtual world. (It turns out that stories about his bobble-headed babyhood are just as embarrassing in the presence of his WoW guild members as when retold in a loud voice at the counter of the local comic book shop in a ploy to curtail his hours of perusing.) However, in this one case, I think that “Larry” may, in fact, be a real person, because:

1.) While my mother did receive a computer for Christmas, she still shakes it like an Etch-a-Sketch when she wants to start over and…
2.) My brother peppered out last conversation with broad praise for my recent posts, despite the fact I haven’t posted anything recently, in an attempt to hide the fact that he hasn’t visited my blog in several weeks. Violence ensued.

As such, I have concluded that Larry is a real person or a highly sophisticated bot with truly excellent taste, and, in either case, I will regale you with the explanation.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

So, twenty days into the GGM experience, I ask myself, “Why is nobody commenting? I’m funny as hell!” And suddenly it hits me – I never did check to see if my comment system actually works. Lo and behold! There are three shiny new comments waiting for me when I go in and check, trapped in digital limbo by my Did you Pass Math? anti-bot plug-in.

Starting today, this blog is officially open to comments! *Hint, hint*

Welcome to the The Great Geek Manual! I’m your host, Pipedreamergrey, and this is the obligatory first post. What better way is there to end Halloween night than by launching a new blog?

By way of introduction, I’ll just say that I’m in my mid-twenties, I live in the United States, and my lifelong goal is to see closely I can fit myself into the Geek stereotype. My hobbies are exactly what you’d expect: a lot of surfing the net and playing video games, very little face to face interaction. One of my favorite hobbies is collecting “Geek History.”

What is Geek History, you say? It’s the study of the evolution of technology, that technology’s impact on culture, and culture’s impact on the evolution of technology itself. You’ll be seeing a lot of Geek History on this blog. I’ll be posting my own (original) “This Day in Geek History” entries everyday alongside other content of interest to Geeks.

In the coming months, I plan to deliver heaps of original content, including my own brand of Geeky humor, the latest in “Sci-Fi” science news, reviews of recent media releases, trivia, and much more. Each week, I’ll also be serving up a short directory of useful sites you may not have heard about. The list will have a different theme each week, such as: webcomics, legal torrents, free auctions, etc.

So tune in and enjoy!