Nicolai noticed my previous post and noted that his own blog seemed to get plenty of interest from web browsers, and that for him pimping is probably not required.
I used to be in that boat, but as I've indicated I haven't been entirely happy with the amount of feedback I had been getting[1]. I'm looking for less in the way of quantity and more in the way of a focused technical set reading what I write. Otherwise for me it's like writing software that only I use. I know the quality won't be what I really want, but my care factor and self-editing are reduced when my ramblings are only for myself :)
As I recall, it was Andrae who put me on to it, but for actual non-feed readers of my blog I do keep track using an icon down the left side of the page. It currently sits just below my blosxom credit and if you click on it you can get quite an interesting traffic breakdown. Thanks Extreme Tracking.
Presently, it shows that over the lifetime of my blog I have averaged eight (8) apparently-unique hits per day, or two hundred and twenty two (222) per month. It hardly puts me on the "A" list shared by folk like Tim Bray or Miguel de Icaza, but it does give me some encouragement to keep putting pen to paper.
Interesting statistics:
- My best day for hits is a Wednesday at 17.43%. The numbers drop off sharply on the weekend, which for myself are the only two days I actually read blogs :)
- The first time my hit count exceeded 250 per month was February. I put this spike down to a friendly discussion about exceptions with the well-syndicated Adrian Sutton. Since then I've been consistently reaching the 400 hits per month mark. We'll see how long that trend continues.
- The time of day doesn't seem to be an indicator for hits at all. My best and worst times are only two hours apart, between the hours of 1700 and 1800 and between the hours of 1900 and 2000 respectively. This may be a sign that I'm not getting enough consistent hits at this stage to really develop a useful pattern.
- Like Nikolai, I get most of my hits from search engines: 77%. Google is by far the biggest drawer of traffic, bringing in almost 95% of that pie. Yahoo makes up most of the remainder.
It seems that search engine users aren't actually getting good mileage out of my blog. The most common search engine terms are "sound" and "synergy". The last 5 hits from Google were:
- "CM Synergy" Linux /etc/services,
- Differences between CDDL and GPL,
- hungarian notation python,
- ant tar task symlink, and
- "return code checking" c tool detection price
I would be confident in labelling the content of my blog useless for answering the queries behind those searches in at least three cases, probably five. It seems that the merging of multiple entries into a single web page is seriously detrimental to the algorithms involved with a full-text search of the Internet.
- My boss learned I have a blog when his boss came across it while googling, and asked him about it
- The only person I know for sure reads my blog religiously is one of my team members in the work environment
- Neither technorati or google have found Nikolai's in-link to my blog, possibly because it is indirected back through his server
Benjamin
[1] zero :)