Category: okierover.com

I’ve made it to 50,000 page views. And just a shade under eleven years! That’s not too bad for a blog with 383 posts and 16 registered followers, six of whom I know for a fact DO NOT EVEN OWN a Land Rover. The counting actually began in July 2007, when I brought all the posts over to Blogger. When I came over I lost all the page views from the original blog. My first real traffic came from OKRovers and they still have a link in the top right hand corner that redirects to my blog page.

Officially, my first post was September 16, 2002. It was a short post about my brakes. The post is so old I don’t even have the pictures for it online any longer. Most of the posts back then had icons describing the “type” of post it was. If it was a post about blogging, I had an old typewriter for an icon. If it was a post about brakes I had an image of an illuminated brake light. You get the gist of that…I thought it was good at the time. It got old fast. Back then I didn’t blog on a site like Blogger. I actually wrote a complete webpage with FROM SCRATCH MIND YOU using HTML! I knew there had to be a better way and a few years later I moved over to Blogger.

I’ve been telling myself I was going to redesign the OkieRover.com website. I haven’t had the energy and quite frankly, my ideas for web page design suck. When I see some of the well designed and written sites like Overland Live, Central Overland, and The Last Great Road Trip, they tell me, I should probably hire it out, at least the design portion any way.

My most popular post continues to be the Cool Vehicle Wrap page. If you do a Google image search for “Cool Vehicle Wrap” I’m number one. I had burned out of blogging and was trying to get things rolling again. I saw the picture on Jalopnik and posted it up. It does pretty good.

In August of 2008, I reposted the picture of Marilyn Monroe getting out of a Land Rover circa 1957. That post used to be number one.

The “Wish me luck next week” post is number two. If you look at it, it should come as no surprise as it is about acquiring a trailer. Lots of people are looking for a trailer. I finally bought a trailer and coincidentally sold it last week to a Jeeper who was going to use it for disaster relief efforts in our state. His daughter, who is currently serving in the Navy on the USS Sullivan, bought it for her dad. It was a great prank/gift that was fun to watch unfold. This fellow has some pretty good mates who found the trailer and orchestrated the whole event.

I get an email at least once a month from someone asking for help. Jarod recently emailed me about seat switches. I’ll share you a quote from the email….

This 2003 I just bought is awwwwwesome….but holy crap this thing has a lot of switches and a lot ofactuators/electrical crap.  I can’t wait for when all these things start wearing out!!  hahahahaha.

I know what you mean Jarod. I’m fighting the same things on my twenty year old 1993 Range Rover Classic. I’ve thought about buying a newer Range Rover, but after hearing the nightmares my sister-in-law has had with hers…I’m probably going to pass.

Once again, thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.

It’s time to put a cap on 2010. This will be my compilation post for the year. I’m going to post the top stories at the end of this year. In May I turned on the stat tracker and these are the top posts for my site to date.

I was very tempted to title this post…

Naked Farm Girls Racing Maverick Grabbers Going to the Prom in Land Rovers Pulling Sankey Trailers and the Tires They Prefer

Although that basically describes the key words that generated most of the traffic for the blog this year, I thought that was too obvious.

Tires….again, 725 Pageviews
This post is an obvious one. Way back in March of 2009 I put up a post about tires. All Land Rover owners agree on one thing, the tires they are running are the best. Tire debates litter the message boards of many Land Rover sites. If you follow any site it will only take a month or two before someone posts a “What tires do I buy?” post. Instead of reading the 20 posts already posted on the subject they would prefer a new post.

That’s just fine though, because if people update their opinions. You should begin to see a pattern of which tires work, which tires are adequate, and the strong brand loyalty out there.

For the record…As of this post, I am firmly convinced the Bridgestone Dueler AT Revo 2 is the best tire hands down.

Wish me luck next week, 407 Pageviews
This is the post where I have a buddy of mine bid on a military trailer at a Govliquidation.com auction. For the record we won and I picked up a great trailer.

I think this post speaks to the adventuresome nature of Land Rover owners. We use these vehicles for adventure and to have a proper adventure you need lots of crap gear. In any event you all liked it a lot. This is 2010’s most popular post.

Yep! Brake cylinder was leakin’, 248 Pageviews
At first glance you may think this post is popular because people like to stop. Nothing is more exciting than pressing on the brake peddle and it dropping to the floor. But if one dug a little further it’s likely that this post is popular because of my 1973 Ford Maverick Grabber. I had quite a few searches that came to my site with that “1973 Maverick Grabber” in the criteria. When I was in high school I bought a used Maverick. It was a hideous color of orange but it had factory mags and it looked pretty cool.

My good friend Jack bought a Maverick a few years later and together we were, The Midnight Maverick Marauders. We had a good time tearing around the south side of Oklahoma City and Moore in our Mavericks. Good Times, good times. Jack and I are more famous for getting stuck on a cold late night in December 1986 or was it 1987? I don’t remember, I used to drink…a lot.

What does that mean…really?, 221 Pageviews
This is an easy one. My readers like hot chicks. I thought I could derive some traffic from some pin-up art in the side banner. But a single picture of a very pretty girl and a Land Rover beats that all to hell. The details in the article about Tata buying Land Rover are totally lost.

Traler Project a Bust for Now, 205 Pageviews
Another trailer post. This makes me wonder if I should just put “SANKEY” in all my post’s metadata, to generate traffic.

How Old is your Rover in Car Years?, 129 Pageviews
This post’s popularity is a mystery to me. A link to a car age calculator on Jalopnik.com is listed.

“THE” Rover V8, 89 Pageviews
If tires stir the debate pot, then what powers our Land Rovers is the soup. Land Rover owners love to read about motors, power plants, and anything that will move a Land Rover. A Jalopnik.com link couldn’t have hurt this post’s popularity any.

Garage clean up, moving spare parts, adjusting the door, 71 Pageviews
I’m going out on a limb here and am going to say the popularity of this post is…a messy garage. I guess either you all are really curious as about where I work on my Land Rover or you were hoping I had a secret about how to keep a clean garage.

My Farm Girl is Wearing a Prom Dress, 49 Pageviews
I’m afraid the popularity of this post was due to the key words, “prom dress” and “farm girl”. I have to say I thought it was a clever analogy. Hopefully you came for the analogy and left with some good information about models and utilitarianism.

The one where I catch myself on fire in the furtherance of Land Rovering, 46 Pageviews
I can promise you this one was the name of the title that drew you in. The fact that I caught myself on fire is comically amusing and that I could do it AND still finish the project makes me freakin’ awesome.

Sometime just before this post I turned on links to Networked Blogs and Facebook. I know a fair amount of traffic came from Facebook because of the messages I received from friends taunting me and questioning my intelligence.

It was good to see the Marilyn Monroe post drop off the top ten. I was beginning to think everyone who visited my blog was a fan of hot chicks and Land Rovers. As much as I’d like to drive my traffic, which I get absolutely nothing in the form of monetary compensation for, I’d like to be the go to site for clever writing about Land Rovers, not just hot chicks and Land Rovers. You have Google and it’s infinite power for that.

Well there you have it, that’s the top 10 posts all time on the OkieRover.com Blog. Next year I’ll limit it to the top posts of 2011.

I recently had a couple of visitors to the site from some very remote places. I just had to send out a thank you to my recent visitors from Juneau, Alaska and Vila, Efate, Vanuatu. I hope each of you are enjoying the site.

I’ve never been to either place but I really would like to visit Alaska and for the island life, I lived on Guam for 5 years and I miss that too.

Happy Rovering.