All posts by kleucht

Some interesting stats about leucht.com

July 19, 2013 kleucht Leave a comment

Computer nerds and statistics nerds unite! Here are some interesting stats and facts about my website, courtesy of Google Analytics:

After nearly 6 years of collecting site visitor data (68 months, actually), there were nearly 80,500 site visitors. These are not page hits … these are unique visits to the site, each of which may include multiple page views. There are actually an average of 1.94 page views per visit. (The site has been around since 1999, but I didn’t hook up Google Analytics till late in 2007.)

That’s about 1,200 site visitors per month
or about 300 per week
or about 40 per day

The website leucht.com is just a little unassuming no-frills family website, so I wouldn’t expect much more daily traffic than this. And most of this traffic is probably just search engines crawling the site. You can see by the 6 year data plots above that the traffic is pretty stable over that 6 year period. It’s not growing significantly and it’s not falling significantly over the long term.

So which portions of this little family website have been the most popular over these 6 years? I’m glad you asked. Here are the top 10 pages of all time on the leucht.com website:

	Page	Views
1	My Yard Shed Plans	18,180
2	Our Dr Seuss Room	15,741
3	Superman Comic Book PhotoChop	9,437
4	Annie Musical at CVP	9,047
5	Make Your Own Gravity Boots	5,640
6	Swing Musical at CVP	4,647
7	Main leucht.com landing page	4,387
8	History of the Leucht Family	3,862
9	Curtains Musical at CVP	3,026
10	Children of Eden Musical at CVP	2,678

So why are these particular pages the most popular on my site? More than 85 percent of my traffic comes from web searches like google, yahoo, and bing. So it looks like my yard shed page is scoring high enough on those search engines to get people to click on it. Surprising, I know. This sort of do it yourself content is exactly what I had hoped this website would be good for when I envisioned it way back in 1999. So I am really stoked to see that page at the top of the list.

I just performed a google search for the phrase “dr seuss room” and my Dr Seuss room page was at the top of page 9 which makes it the 81st google result, I believe. So my Seuss Room page ranks among the top 100 Seuss Room pages in the entire google-verse! That’s fairly exciting for a small time family website developer like me!

As for the Superman comic book cover photo-chop page, I’m assuming that those people are really looking for Superman comic books or something and are probably sadly disappointed when they click over to my photo-chop contest page.

Similarly, nearly half of my top pages are personal photo albums and archives from Cocoa Village Playhouse musicals that I’ve been in. I’m guessing that just a few of my CVP friends are looking at those, but the rest are probably people who are looking for the broadway musicals or productions in their own towns or something. Sorry, folks.

One more dataset and then I’ll end this. The table above shows the top 10 pages of all time over the total 6 year period. But I have some newer content that hasn’t been around for that long that may be just as popular. So here are the top 10 pages over just the past year:

	Page	Views
1	Make Your Own Gravity Boots	2,910
2	Superman Comic Book PhotoChop	1,724
3	Annie Musical at CVP	1,415
4	My Yard Shed Plans	1,153
5	Our Dr Seuss Room	1,014
6	My Folding Workbench	1,009
7	Replace a Windowsill on Block Wall	896
8	Main leucht.com landing page	636
9	History of the Leucht Family	622
10	Curtains Musical at CVP	566

It’s nice to see my gravity boot blog post up at the top. That must be a popular thing these days. There are two pages on this top 10 list that were not on the all time top 10 list. A blog post about my folding workbench and a blog post about how to replace a windowsill on a concrete block wall. I’m happy to see both of these posts in the top 10 and it will be exciting to see other similar do-it-yourself posts rise to the top over time.

Thanks for your support of this website and blog,
Kurt

Activities, Travel, Vacations, Health, Home, Property, Safety, Miscellaneous

Acme Catapult is for sale!

July 19, 2013 kleucht Leave a comment

Are you or someone you know looking for a fun hobby for yourself and a few buddies?

Acme Catapult is officially for sale!

After 18 years of catapulting adventures, Bob and Doug have decided to retire from chuckin. The ACME Catapult, Bambulance, and all equipment and spare parts are for sale. It was a tough year long decision, but its time to let fresh blood carry on and even set new records.

Please note: this is an extreme hobby, but one that can pay for itself if you promote the machine and are willing to travel a little. They have done many “For Hire” events in addition to several TV appearances. What sets this machine apart is its awesome strength. It can easily hurl objects up to 200 pounds and can set, fire and reset every 15 minutes all day long.

They are selling the entire package; all spare parts, including over 80 springs, two throwing arms, two complete hydraulic power units, hyd. hoses, extra cables, numerous bags and slings, ladders, tool boxes, and tools, etc.

Please call Bob 309-202-0676 or Doug 309-712-2278 for more information.

http://www.acmecatapult.com/

[The ACME Catapult is the tandem axle monster pumpkin catapult machine that was seen on national television throwing lawn equipment high into the air on ABC’s “My Kind of Town” and also hurling large appliances on NBC’s “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno”. You may have also seen it tossing pumpkins on the TLC Special “Punkin Chunkin”, which was filmed at the 2002 World Championship Punkin Chunkin competition in Delaware. The ACME Catapult team started in 1996 with a much smaller catapult designed to throw pumpkins at a local Pumpkin Festival Contest. Since then the catapult has grown into a tandem axle monster capable of hurling refrigerators and lawn tractors high into the air, or throwing a ten-pound pumpkin 2000 feet!]

Thanks,

Kurt

Health, Home, Property, Safety, Miscellaneous

Chain swing installed into tree limb

July 7, 2013 kleucht Leave a comment

A while back I installed a standard hanging chain swing from a nice big limb in the oak tree in my front yard. I found these nice heavy duty swiveling swing hangers at WalMart. They just screw right into the tree limb or into a wooden swing set.

My problem became how do I close the loop on this swing hanger after I have inserted the chain from the swing? I suppose I could just keep the loop open, but that would risk kids flying off and hurting themselves while swinging. Probably not too likely, but still a risk. The solution was sitting on my drill press in my shop. It’s my handy dandy portable drill press vice.

To get leverage and close the small portable vice onto the hanger’s loop, I used a piece of pipe.

Perfect!

Activities, Travel, Vacations, Miscellaneous

For Sale: 2 very nice nearly brand new full wetsuits

July 7, 2013 kleucht Leave a comment

We have two very nice long wetsuits for sale. They are both very close to brand new. Both have been worn SCUBA diving only a couple of times and both have been carefully stored indoors for a number of years.

Click on any photo to see that photo in full size.

The IST Proline wetsuit is a size small. It is black with blue accents. It is a very nice quality and very nice looking wetsuit. It is neoprine and has really nice rubber kneepads built in. The tag does not say, but it feels close to the same or maybe just a bit thinner than the other wetsuit below, which says it is 3.0 mm on the tag. You can see in the photos that there is no wear on it at all. I will sell this nearly new wetsuit for $100 which is quite a discount from the original price.

The second wetsuit is a size 10-12. It is very close to the same size as the size small IST wetsuit above. It is black and blue and flourescent yellow. This is a bright nice looking wetsuit. It is a 3.0 mm wetsuit also neoprine. You can see in the photos that there is very little or no wear on it at all. I will sell this one for $80 since it is not a name brand like the IST Proline above.

Thanks for looking!

Kurt

Art, Graphics, Woodworking, Miscellaneous, Science, Space, Technology

Photos from Star Wars exhibit

July 3, 2013 kleucht Leave a comment

Back in April, the Star Wars traveling exhibit titled “Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination” was at the Orlando Science Center. It was pretty amazing. The exhibit is now in Indianapolis and will complete it’s 20 city tour in San Jose California later this year (2013).

They had lots of great props, costumes, and models from various movies. Plus, they had some nice interactive stations and learning stations for the kids.

Here are a number of photos that I took of the exhibit. Click below to see the entire collection of photos that I took. Flash photography was not allowed and I was just using my iPhone, so the quality of these photos is not the greatest.

http://www.leucht.com/photos-new/index.php/starwars

Kurt