The Empress announced yesterday that we are ready to move ahead with the website.

If you remember all about the website, or do not care, you can skip this paragraph. The store I work for has a website, and I have been in charge of it since last March. I was initially in charge of making sure that our customers found it. When I succeeded with that, we also began getting orders from people in other states and countries, and were overwhelmed by fulfilment issues. The Empress, my boss, had me figure out how to make the website lead our own customers to us without encouraging actual online orders. Now, we have figured out the logistics sufficiently that she is ready to make it work like an actual online store, where complete strangers can shop, regardless of where they live.

Accordingly, I did some keyword study to get my seed list together for this exciting new venture.

I laughed when the machine calculated that “naughty teachers” would be a good choice. I even went and told The Empress so she could laugh about it too.

Then I went and dug in the site meter. Our website, as I am sure is the case with most commercial websites, has its own tracking page, like the xanga footprints. It shows where the visitors were before they came to our page — usually the store blog or a search engine with a fairly predictable search string in the window. I was determining whether people are more likely to search for specific products, for a store, or for a topic. If I couldn’t tell immediately, I would click through to check.

I was not amused to find that one of the referrers was a porn site. There I was, little children piping “Mommy, I want this!” all around me, and I was face to — um — face with an unclothed woman on the screen. I hit the back button without examining it further, but I am fairly sure that I would have noticed a menu offering a choice between “XXX Coeds” and “Interactive Pocket Charts.”

The next few results were the store blog or ordinary searches. A few lines later came another non-obvious one, so I went to examine it further — and met groups of unclothed individuals.

There was a general pinkness to the page that kept me from grasping immediately what was going on, but I hit the back button again as fast as possible, and emailed Arkenboy.

What, I asked him, should I deduce from this result?

Were there links to our page hidden there someplace amid the limbs and whatnot?

Arkenboy suggests that all we can deduce is that some teachers are taking breaks from work at porn sites and then thinking, “Well, I guess I’d better go order some nursery rhyme posters” and typing us in to their browsers from that page.

He thought it unlikely that two different people would go right from porn sites to educational posters. He does not recommend banner ads at those sites.

I’m going to ignore those odd results and forge ahead.

In addition to my flat world ventures, I will be working on the second grade book. The coalescing part. And I have the last meeting of the hymn class. We will be discussing hymns as music, but I hope to remember to tell them about something funny from Monday’s rehearsal.

We are singing “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” the song with the mystic line, “Here I raise my Ebeneezer,” and someone had asked what an Ebeneezer might be. It means “stone of help,” and we had a bit of a discussion about that, and then the pianist chimed in.

He’s one of those boys whose name is also the name of a tree, not because his parents were hippies, but because they were southerners.

“What’s a fetter?” he asked. He went on to say that he thought it must be like a ferret, except that didn’t make sense in the line. The line in question is, “Let thy goodness like a fetter bind my wandering heart to thee.” Not, perhaps, a readily comprehensible line, but the presence of a mental image of a ferret can’t have made it easier to comprehend.