Final Exams
Putting Ten Ton Hammer to
the Test
By Ralsu
The university in my city is gearing up for final exams. If you're in
semester-based college right now, you're probably approaching your
finals as well. You know, you stay up all night munching on days-old
pizza and cramming your brain with anatomy terms or calculus formulas.
For those of us who have finished the college days, we have new,
similar time frames. As we work our way through the "real world," we're
faced with job interviews, major projects, and deadlines.
As the metaphor of final exams bounced around in my head, I continued
to apply it to my life now. Two years ago, my wife and I successfully
potty-trained our daughter. The timing wasn't as compressed as finals
week in college, but the challenge was just as intense: we read books
from all the parenting expects and reviewed our "notes" in order to
apply them when dealing with her.
In the summer of 2005, I flew across the state for a job interview the
resulted in my family moving to an unfamiliar city. The interview was
one exam, the move another test, and the city another assessment. Then
there are my jobs: one is running a computer lab and advising college
students while the other is writing about Dungeons & Dragons Online.
Performance Appraisal
The measure of my performance at the university comes in the form of an
annual review with my supervisor. I know clearly where I stand. Come to
work on time? Check. Dress appropriately? Check. Bite my tongue instead
sexually harassing my coworkers? Check. I can also evaluate the impact
of my work at the university each time one of "my" students earns a
degree.
Tracking the impact I have at Ten Ton Hammer is a little different. Oh,
I get feedback from Ten Ton Hammer about my job, and we have goals for
the DDO site in terms of the amount of content we put out each week.
That stuff amounts to the "appropriate attire" column on my performance
appraisal at the university. I get no chances to watch a DDO @ Ten Ton
Hammer reader "walk across the aisle" to get a diploma. I have to find
a different way to know that I have reached and helped people.
One way I know that subscribers find DDO @ Ten Ton Hammer useful is via
reader feedback, such as the kind found in the
href="http://ddo.tentonhammer.com/index.php?meid=5#Mailbag">DDO Mailbag.
Or maybe I'll see a post in our
href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/forumdisplay.php?f=17">forums
commenting on how helpful a guide was. On a rare day, I will be honored
to see that a player will use one of my
href="http://ddo.tentonhammer.com/#Builds">DDO Builds as his
own--just as Ten Ton Hammer guild member Cloudburst did (with some wise
modifications). Our sites record page views as well, but I can only
compare that sort of empirical data with other sites on the Ten Ton
Hammer network. I don't know if my site is the most popular DDO site on
the web or the 10th most popular.
Google Existentialism
href="http://ddo.tentonhammer.com/modules.php?set_albumName=album15&id=MKT_SS31_28&op=modload&name=Gallery&file=index&include=view_photo.php">
alt="ugly"
src="http://ddo.tentonhammer.com/files/gallery/albums/album15/MKT_SS31_28.sized.jpg"
style="border: 2px solid ; width: 250px; height: 188px;" align="right">
Friend and fellow Ten Ton Hammer Community Manager Karen "Shayalyn"
Hertzberg has a theory she calls Google
Existentialism. For those of you who don't know what Google is,
please replace whatever items you took from the Internet and leave now.
The rest of us will wait.
Well, go on.
OK, for those of you who didn't minor in philosophy like me, a really
simplified explanation of Existentialism says that the essence of an
item precedes its being. That is, the quality of blueness existed
before anyone identified blue. Way oversimplified, but there you go.
Take that concept and combine it with your knowledge of Google (and if
any of you who were supposed to leave stuck around, I ain't gonna tell
you what Google is) and you get a philosophy that says, "If you can't
find it on Google, it does not exist."
Bingo! Now I have a way to check my progress with DDO @ Ten Ton Hammer.
I'm about to share my results below, but I want to throw out some
disclaimers first:
- Ten Ton Hammer does not employ any spurious methods to increase
our hits on a search engine. We write, we publish, we promote. The rest
is up to you, the readers. - The search engine I used for the data below was Google. Mileage
may vary by search engine. - The results listed here come from the evening of December 2,
2006. The Internet is a fickle place, and all of my data could change
in mere hours. - I search for each term in the table on Google and noted the
ordinal position of the first Ten Ton Hammer hit in the results.
- Monkeys are funny.
searched
Guide
hits in top 10
of the other 3 were links to another DDO site that then linked to us
for the editorial
Poll
hits in top 10
Interview
hits in top 10; top 2 hits are official DDO links to interviews with
Ten Ton Hammer; 1 other hit points to a Ten Ton Hammer interview
Quest
hits in top 10
Walk-through
hits in top 10
Arcane Spells
hits in top 10
Alignments
hits in top 10
Articles
hits in top 10
our guild is a modest, casual guild on Sarlona
Feature
hits in top 10
Barbarian
hits in top 10
our full guide
to barbarian Feats is scheduled for December 2006
Bard
hits in top 10; only the class description on the official DDO site
beats Ten Ton Hammer
our full guide
to bard Feats is scheduled for early 2007
Bard Spells
hits in top 10
Cleric Feats
hits in top 10; our full guide to cleric Feats is scheduled for early
2007
Fighter
hits in top 10
Paladin
hits in top 10
Paladin Spells
hits in top 10
Ranger Feats
hits in top 10
Rogue
hits in top 10; 6th place hit was a link to one of our rogue articles
from another DDO site
our full guide
to cleric Feats is scheduled for early 2007
Sorcerer
hits in top 10
Wizard
hit in top 10
Metamagic Feats
hits in top 10
That's huge list! I tried to search every logical thing I could think
of concerning DDO. I'm sure readers will think of others. I didn't just
show you that as a way to brag. I was trying to evaluate the reach of
DDO @ Ten Ton Hammer, and I wanted to share the results with our loyal
readers and community members. For the DDO search terms I used, DDO @
Ten Ton Hammer averaged a hit rating of 3rd! We were the top hit for 15
keyword searches and accounted for 41% of all the hits on the first
page (and who really looks at the 2nd page?) for these searches!
Finishing in the top 3 of the class with the perfect rating on 37% of
assignments (1st hit on a search) must equate to an A, right? A man can
only hope.
What Next?
Well, at my other job, the goals for the next year are to improve any
categories that were not scored as perfect. In the case of DDO @ Ten
Ton Hammer, I would like to see Internet search results put our site in
the top 3 for each DDO search term in the table above. For some
classes, we need to put out so more work. For others, we need to do a
better job of making you realized how much information we have. In a
sense, we'll keep doing what we've been doing: cranking out more useful
DDO content more often than any other place on the web. As long as you
readers enjoy DDO as much as we do, we want to be your number 1 source
for all things DDO!
To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our Dungeons & Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited Game Page.