InstaRoyalty – King for a Day..
This past Tuesday, I was puzzled by the several visits to this Site I had received from The Truth Laid Bear (“TTLB”). I popped over to TTLB to see what was going on, as I had just registered to participate in the “Blogosphere Ecosystem” the night before. (For those of you even less geeky than I, the “Blogoshpere Ecosystem” is a list that ranks blogs, using an algorithm that presumably is based on the number of inbound links …blah, blah, blah.)

I scrolled through the long, long list of the “Blogosphere Ecosystem” and was unable to find my site (I had forgotten to use the “find” function on the browser – duh). I, therefore, chalked the whole thing up to some sort of techno-accident, well beyond my ability to understand. This kind of thing happened to me once before when I received dozens and dozens of hits from Blogger, even though my recently updated site had appeared for a couple minutes in the “Fresh Blogs” Section of the Blogger Page but had long since disappeared.

I figured…Go figure.

A while later, I took another look at my hit counter, and there were dozens more hits from TTLB. Huh?? I returned to TTLB and scrolled again – no sign of my site. I was then convinced that the hits I was receiving must have been somehow misdirected to my site. (If that was a stooopid assumption, you must remember that this stuff is all magic to me.) Then it dawned on me, as my cursor sat somewhere in the middle of the list of a couple thousand sites, to use the “find” feature. However, even that failed to find my site. Aha! I realized that the “find” feature had searched down the list from the middle. I set it search up the list, and it found my site.

I damned near fainted.

No wonder I didn’t find my site while scrolling around in the Crawly Amphibians, Flippery Fish or Slimy Molluscs. No wonder I didn’t find my site by searching from the middle of the list to the bottom of the list.

I was number one.

I stared at the screen, not believing what I was seeing. There it was — “Parkway Rest Stop” appearing above InstaPundit. I must have fixated on the screen for a full minute. Remember, I was brand new to this list and the whole blog-ranking thing.

I drifted out of my stupor and clicked the “details” link next to my site and a couple other sites (Did I mention that I was new to this?). Even Mr. Computer Doofus figured out that somehow I was being credited with EVERYONE’S links, and that’s what accounted for my InstaRoyalty status..

Yikes!!

Not wanting to look like a con artist or some kind of hacker (Me? A hacker? What a ridiculous notion that is), I immediately e-mailed the site owner, pointing out the mistake, and silently hoping that I did not somehow inadvertently mess up someone’s site, or, worse yet, derail the entire farookin’ “Blogosphere Ecosystem.”. After the e-mail shot into cyberspace, I wondered What should I do now??

I decided that, having advised the site owner that I was aware of the screw up, I should immediately post the same kind of information for those most-certainly incredulous bloggers who were popping into my site in droves to see what the heck was up.

Of course, Blogger picked that very moment to not come up on my screen. Damn. The frustration was akin to the agony one feels when stuck in traffic thinking that you will miss an important appointment. It was damned near put-fist-through-screen-time.

Finally, Blogger came up, and I dashed off this post. Blogger, of course, then took forever to publish the damned thing. After a few more aggravating minutes, the post finally appeared. I thought the problem would be fixed right away, but the list stayed the same for the rest of the day, although the hits quieted down, as the word spread that my reign as King was the result of a techno-fart of some kind. Of course, the experience TTLB users must have figured out immediately what had happened and never even bothered to visit my site.

Well, a few days have passed and now the dust has settled. I checked today, and I find myself among the Slithering Reptiles in the Ecosystem. Quite a plunge. That’s O.K. I’m in good company here.

But it sure was nice being King while it lasted.