For the sake of simplicity and easy navigation I broke each sub-section of the site into its own sub-domain.

For instance, the poetry archive is at, poetry.poetryx.com, the articles are at articles.poetryx.com, and so on.

This is great for users who can look at their address bar and know immediately exactly where they are in the site. And it's easier to remember links and find pages again without even having to surf the site much. Many sites do this already and I'm hoping it becomes a standard, like putting the logo in the upper left-hand corner, so that people just expect to be able to navigate sites more easily.

Anyway, I was looking through the Poetry X server statistics to see which pages were bandwidth-heavy, and if any search engines have spidered the site after I, using poor judgement, mentioned Poetry X in my personal site, Jough.com, just before that site was spidered by Google.

It's not that I don't want Google knowing about Poetry X - of course I do - Google is the #1 traffic-driver on the web.

But I don't want Google to know about Poetry X... YET. It's not done yet, and a lot of the pages that are done have no links to them other than the search engine, which Google of course won't index.

And once Google indexes a site for the first time, it usually tends to not come back for awhile. So you want it to get all of your pages the first time.

So to keep a short story long, I blocked Google from spidering the site. May God be with me.

I hope to remedy this before the end of the weekend, when the main pages of the site should be done.

I also took down the defunct and bad-business-model OpenPoetry.com.

It's been wallowing in unfinishedness since last July, and I don't see it ever getting finished, especially now that I'm putting all of my eggs in Poetry X.

So I've folded the Open Poetry Project into Poetry X. Right now the OpenPoetry.com site just points to the front page of Poetry X.

But eventually the part of the site that lets people contribute information about a poem may be called the "Open Poetry Project," and the domain will simply link to that sub-section. So there.

Another problem I'm having with the sub-domains (something.poetryx.com) is that each one gets its own server stats through AWStats, the programme I use to view statistics about traffic, bandwidth, site visits, etc.

It's actually pretty good that you can view each sub-section individually, but I wish there was an overall catch-all statistics page where I could see all of the pages and their stats. Is that too much to ask?

Maybe. But I'm sending an e-mail to the makers of AWStats anyway.

So far I've told only 14 people about the site, 15 different publishing companies, agents, and 6 poets whose e-mail addresses I know.

Somehow those 35 people/companies are driving about 500 page views a day. Do the math and that's about fifteen pages apiece, average.

Which is exactly the average number of pages a Plagiarist.com visitor views per session. Spooky.