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 DDO Mailbag. Or maybe I'll see a post in our 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 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

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.

Term searched	Rank	Notes
DDO Guide	1st	4 hits in top 10
DDO Editorial	1st	7 hits in top 10; 2 of the other 3 were links to another DDO site that then linked to us for the editorial
DDO Poll	1st	8 hits in top 10
DDO Feature	1st	4 hits in top 10
DDO Interview	3rd	3 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
DDO Quest Guide	1st	3 hits in top 10
DDO Quest	6th	4 hits in top 10
DDO Quest Database	4th	3 hits in top 10
DDO Walk-through	9th	2 hits in top 10
DDO Spells	4th	3 hits in top 10
DDO Arcane Spells	1st	3 hits in top 10
DDO Divine Spells	1st	2 hits in top 10
DDO Alignments	1st	3 hits in top 10
DDO Screen Shots	6th	2 hits in top 10
DDO Articles	1st	2 hits in top 10
DDO Guild	2nd	3 hits in top 10; our guild is a modest, casual guild on Sarlona
DDO Feature	1st	4 hits in top 10
DDO Top 10	1st	2 hits in top 10
DDO Barbarian	1st	3 hits in top 10
DDO Barbarian Feats	5th	2 hits in top 10; our full guide to barbarian Feats is scheduled for December 2006
DDO Bard	2nd	5 hits in top 10; only the class description on the official DDO site beats Ten Ton Hammer
DDO Bard Feats	7th	2 hits in top 10; our full guide to bard Feats is scheduled for early 2007
DDO Bard Spells	6th	4 hits in top 10
DDO Cleric	2nd	3 hits in top 10
DDO Cleric Feats	3rd	2 hits in top 10; our full guide to cleric Feats is scheduled for early 2007
DDO Cleric Spells	3rd	3 hits in top 10
DDO Fighter	4th	4 hits in top 10
DDO Fighter Feats	2nd	4 hits in top 10
DDO Paladin	1st	3 hits in top 10
DDO Paladin Feats	5th	2 hits in top 10
DDO Paladin Spells	8th	2 hits in top 10
DDO Ranger	1st	3 hits in top 10
DDO Ranger Feats	5th	4 hits in top 10
DDO Ranger Spells	2nd	3 hits in top 10
DDO Rogue	8th	2 hits in top 10; 6th place hit was a link to one of our rogue articles from another DDO site
DDO Rogue Feats	7th	3 hits in top 10; our full guide to cleric Feats is scheduled for early 2007
DDO Sorcerer	2nd	3 hits in top 10
DDO Sorcerer Spells	2nd	2 hits in top 10
DDO Wizard	5th	1 hit in top 10
DDO Wizard Spells	4th	2 hits in top 10
DDO Metamagic Feats	1st	2 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!

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