I have news to share but I'm taking a roundabout way of getting there so just bear with me. I feel a background story is called for. The term 'Macadactyl' was coined by a good friend of mine when we were in college and I used to use it as my login for stuff because surprisingly it was never taken :) Later on I used it for my personal website because oddly enough it wasn't registered. I added the 'lilbit' blog as a way to keep our family informed about Noah when Jenna became pregnant. When Noah was born I blogged the entire day and it was a huge success. Some people I knew would read but a lot of people I didn't expect really got into it. The day was so stressful to me, I told my mother later that I really think it was therapeutic for me to write everything down. When your son's heartbeat keeps falling off a cliff the stress can build up. A man needs a release. As Jenna's surgery date approached, a lot of family and friends asked me to do the same thing during Jenna's surgery. I obliged for 3 reasons. 1- Obviously I wanted to keep family and friends who couldn't be here informed 2-I had to fill up 10 hours doing something & 3- I knew it would help me cope with the day and I can't ever remember myself being so nervous for an approaching day in my life.
Flash forward to today and I've had time to reflect on how many stories there are of people who spread the word of this site to keep tabs on Jenna. I checked my webmaster on Wednesday to see how many people were logging on (just to make sure someone was listening). I can't see who they are but I can see the traffic on the site. A moment ago, while Jenna slept, I did the same thing. My webmaster is reporting 77 unique IP addresses have been on the site in the past 72 hours. That means 77 different computers have logged onto the site and read about Jenna's fight. Of those 77 computers the page has been visited an unbelievable 3319 times. That's amazing. I know some of those people are logging in from 1 computer during the day and 1 computer at night but I know a lot more people are sharing 1 computer to check in during the day. I've even been told a couple of stories from family members checking in and co-workers inquiring and then bookmarking the page. People who don't even know Jenna personally have logged in to see how she's doing because they either love someone who loves Jenna (ouch at the tongue twister) or they have been personally affected by cancer and just want to make sure this stays a success story. To say that I'm stunned would be a gross oversimplification.
The point of all of this is to tell you I know 'macadactyl' is hard to spell when you are sharing the site with people. I bet I heard Weldon (Jenna's Dad) spell 'M-A-C-A-D-A-C-T-Y-L' about 20 times the past 2 days. I myself wrote it down about 15 times for people who visited and didn't know about the site. Late last night I figured I'd check into a new name for the site. Macadactyl.com/lilbit will still work and I'll make sure it always does but I went ahead and registered http://thesullivanblog.com last night. The DNS servers cleared this morning and I routed traffic there to here. The skinny of this means if you type in http://thesullivanblog.com then your browser will open http://macadactyl.com/lilbit.
Both links will work from here on out but the next time someone says "Hey what's that stupid name for the site keeping us up-to-date on Jenna" you can say "thesullivanblog.com" and you won't have to spell a thing.
Wow that was a roundabout.
Flash forward to today and I've had time to reflect on how many stories there are of people who spread the word of this site to keep tabs on Jenna. I checked my webmaster on Wednesday to see how many people were logging on (just to make sure someone was listening). I can't see who they are but I can see the traffic on the site. A moment ago, while Jenna slept, I did the same thing. My webmaster is reporting 77 unique IP addresses have been on the site in the past 72 hours. That means 77 different computers have logged onto the site and read about Jenna's fight. Of those 77 computers the page has been visited an unbelievable 3319 times. That's amazing. I know some of those people are logging in from 1 computer during the day and 1 computer at night but I know a lot more people are sharing 1 computer to check in during the day. I've even been told a couple of stories from family members checking in and co-workers inquiring and then bookmarking the page. People who don't even know Jenna personally have logged in to see how she's doing because they either love someone who loves Jenna (ouch at the tongue twister) or they have been personally affected by cancer and just want to make sure this stays a success story. To say that I'm stunned would be a gross oversimplification.
The point of all of this is to tell you I know 'macadactyl' is hard to spell when you are sharing the site with people. I bet I heard Weldon (Jenna's Dad) spell 'M-A-C-A-D-A-C-T-Y-L' about 20 times the past 2 days. I myself wrote it down about 15 times for people who visited and didn't know about the site. Late last night I figured I'd check into a new name for the site. Macadactyl.com/lilbit will still work and I'll make sure it always does but I went ahead and registered http://thesullivanblog.com last night. The DNS servers cleared this morning and I routed traffic there to here. The skinny of this means if you type in http://thesullivanblog.com then your browser will open http://macadactyl.com/lilbit.
Both links will work from here on out but the next time someone says "Hey what's that stupid name for the site keeping us up-to-date on Jenna" you can say "thesullivanblog.com" and you won't have to spell a thing.
Wow that was a roundabout.
