Articles by admin

Looking at web site statistics, I noticed traffic to Aircondition.Com dropped off sharply two months ahead of schedule. Still down from earlier years, traffic to the site looked like it was on track to make some gains on the one year chart.

I cobbled together a graph that represents traffic estimates from a third party analytics company just to get a better idea of what was going on. The actual visitor numbers are much higher than what is shown on the chart, but estimates are consistent and are probably more accurate (err… relative) than my own numbers (especially since I can’t sort bots and the like from my logs). This chart shows traffic in a one year span. The red line on the bottom of the chart represents a twelve month gas price trend based on U.S. averages for regular unleaded.

Gas prices compared to web traffic

On the next chart I plotted gas price averages the best that I could. The two charts compared shows a sharp decrease in web traffic just as gas prices hit their peak levels. If you put X and Y together they look like they travel together from November on, but, that’s simply coincidence, as raising gas prices don’t increase web queries for a/c repair. I do however, think the opposite is true. High fuel prices are bad for A/C business.

One Year Gas Price Chart

If fuel prices really caused the traffic decrease, I should easily find more data that supports that theory.

It’s possible that weather, rebate checks, bad luck, or any number of things could have caused this. It’s a good mystery that I’ll enjoy spending more time with.

So here it is… An Automotive A/C Blog. Crazy, I know!

A blog (for those that do not know (and don’t worry, there’s quite a few of us)) is just a short way of saying web log. Some blogs are very professional and resemble traditional online media like magazines and news sites, while others are a few random thoughts published whenever the urge strikes. Chances are you’ve already visited a blog or two. In fact, as of two years ago, Technorati had already counted it’s 50 millionth blog on the net. It’s estimated that 200,000 new blogs are created each day. That’s hard to imagine.  Millions are one thing, but Last week, Google announced (on their blog) that they had hit a milestone by finding one trillion unique URL’s.   Heck, even John Battelle’s wife has a blog now.  I figured I better get on board.

Blogs tend to look just like any other web site on the Internet. The real difference is how the blogs are published. With old fashioned web sites, the author opens up the html file and edits his work. He then has to use an FTP (short for file transfer protocol) program and upload the file back to the server. Not difficult, but after you do that a few thousand times, you start to look for something better. CMS solves that, but many are either expensive or hard to set-up or both. That’s where a blog comes in. It’s still a web site, it’s just easier to update and add content. Most blogs also have commenting systems in place, which means you have the ability as a blog owner/author to accept comments on the work you publish.

( I just learned all of that in the last five minutes by looking it up in Wikipedia.)

So, why start an A/C blog anyway?

It’s a long answer. This should sum it up.