Alistair Lattimore » Blogging

2011 Blogging Statistics

Al — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 08:35:31 +0000

At the beginning of 2011, I wrote about how my 2010 blogging efforts and in keeping with that trend – below are my 2011 blogging statistics.

	POSTS	AVG. POST LENGTH	TOTAL POST LENGTH	COMMENTS	AVG. COMMENTS
2004	1	478	487	0	0.0
2005	82	1949	159835	511	12.9
2006	103	1837	189259	865	4.5
2007	127	1977	251150	229	1.3
2008	68	1597	108623	78	0.8
2009	77	2114	162804	104	0.9
2010	81	2147	173969	105	1.4
2011	58	1737	100779	144	1.5

In 2009 I had aimed for between seven and eight posts per month, which I didn’t quite make and in 2010 I thought if I had pushed myself I could average slightly over eight and break through the magic 100 posts per year marker but I still haven’t managed it yet. While my number of posts is down, along with my average post length – I am happy that the number of comments has increased slightly over previous years.

For those that are interested in doing the same, I’ve made the blogging statistics SQL script available for you to use.

Caught Out By International Date Formats

Al — Mon, 09 May 2011 13:36:25 +0000

When I first registered lattimore.id.au in the early part of the 2000′s, I registered it via namescout who operated namescout.com.au at the time and had the best pricing for .id.au domain names by a reasonable amount. The nice thing about dealing with namescout back then was that everything was localised, as I was dealing with an Australian business.

Fast forward to 2011 and they no longer bother having a .com.au website and service everyone via namescout.com; same basic service just all via the one website. One significant change that appears to have happened with that is that they are no longer providing localised versions of their email notices, such as a domain renewal notice.

Last week I received an email stating that my domain was going to expire on 5/7/2011, fantastic. I dismissed it at the time and figured I’d deal with it next week – which sounded great until Belinda SMS’d Claire & I asking if we knew why her blog was down. After beginning to check a few things, I couldn’t see anything obviously wrong so emailed my Australian web hosting company to see if they could see anything and they let me know the domain had expired – didn’t I feel like a complete idiot.

This could have been avoided if they’d used my personal contact information to provide an domain expiry notice that provided an Australian date format of 7/5/2011, if they’d said 7 May 2011 or that somewhere in the email it said in 7 days time.

After a few hiccups getting it the domain renewed, everything eventually sorted itself out. However, it resulted in over 24 hours of website and email outage – which is frustrating.

No related posts.

WordPress 3.1

Al — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 12:09:06 +0000

WordPress 3.1 was released during the week, which is the next major release of the worlds most popular personal publishing and blogging platform. There were over 820 enhancements or support tickets closed during this release, spread over more than 2000 commits to their source code by over 180 developers spread around the world!

Like I’ve become accustomed to and so many others around the world, the upgrade from WordPress 3.0.x was seamless, fast and error free. I was impressed that all of the plugins that I’ve got installed, which while not all were tested with enough volume against the pre-releases of WordPres 3.1 – all seem to be working without a hitch.

Now I just need to learn to grapple with all of the new functionality, to see how I can leverage it moving forward!

2010 Traffic Statistics

Al — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 13:14:37 +0000

Following on from my 2009 web statistics, below is a summary of what traffic the site took in 2009.

In 2009 the site took 106,930 visitors over the entire year which resulted in 136,525 pageviews. During 2010, the site generated 97,509 visits and 132,068 pageviews. That figure is down from my two biggest years of approximately 145,000 and 135,000 during 2007 and 2008 when I was posting less frequently but the posts were of a more technical nature and also pop culture related such as Australian Idol. It’ll come as no surprise that from a traffic driving potential, a lot fewer people are interested in reading about my personal ramblings compared to technical style posts that I used to post.

During 2008 and 2009, I wrote a couple of posts each year that grabbed a moderate amount of traffic and were clear standouts with respect to the number of pageviews. During 2010, none of my posts really caught the attention of the internet; which per above can be attributed to the topics that I’m writing about.

The traffic breakdown by source shows a considerable decrease in the reliance of search engines, with their traffic percentage falling from around 85% in 2008-2009 down to only 74% in 2010. Within the search engine space, Google are completely dominating with 94% of the search engine traffic. During 2009, Yahoo! were the first non-Google search engine with about 2.5% & Microsoft Bing was the new kid on the block. Fast forward a year and the tides have turned with Bing now accounting for 2.6% and Yahoo! 2.4% of the search engine traffic.

The most popular posts for the year were nearly identical to 2009, with four of five remaining and one newcomer:

Removing those posts from the top of the list since they clearly dominate:

It is probably worth noting that nine out of ten of the highest traffic web pages on my site are not about anything to do with myself or our family but are in fact to do with helping others. This makes a lot of sense, especially when you see the meteoric traffic growth question and answer sites Stack Overflow and Quora have seen in the last two years.

That being said, still nothing from 2010 were showing up in the list. Isolating the posts written in 2010 and the landscape is vastly different:

Onward and upward for 2011!

2010 Blogging Statistics

Al — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 12:07:51 +0000

At the end of last year, I posted the 2009 blogging statistics for my site including the previous years. In keeping with that trend, below is the amended table which now includes 2010 as well.

	POSTS	AVG. POST LENGTH	TOTAL POST LENGTH	COMMENTS	AVG. COMMENTS
2004	1	478	487	0	0.0
2005	82	1949	159835	511	12.7
2006	103	1837	189259	865	4.5
2007	127	1977	251150	229	1.0
2008	68	1597	108623	78	0.6
2009	77	2114	162804	104	0.8
2010	81	2147	173969	105	1.0

I still didn’t manage to reach my peak of 2007 in the total number of posts, I’m happy that I’ve managed to increase it slightly over last year. In 2009, I said I was going to try and post between 7-8 times per month but I only managed a shade under 7. I’m going up the ante slightly, 8 or more per month and try and break through the 100 per year barrier again. To do that, I think I’ll be writing about a different topics and throwing up cute photos of the kids more regularly.

For those that are interested in doing the same, I’ve made the blogging statistics SQL script available for you to use.

WordPress 3.0 Upgrade

Al — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 11:27:34 +0000

WordPress, the popular open source blogging software that powers this site and literally millions of others around the internet, has been updated to version 3.0. Version 3.0 has been some six months in the making, has seen contributions from 218 developers around the world and has resulted in a lot of new features and over 1217 enhancements and bug fixes.

I’ve gone through and updated all of the sites I own with the latest version, which is why my site looks different at the moment as I haven’t installed my old theme or bothered to make any changes to the new default Twenty Ten theme that ships with WordPress 3.0.

As predictable as the sun rising, the upgrade from the 2.9.x series of WordPress was simple, fast and no fuss. Back up your database and site contents in case something goes wrong as a precaution & then hit the go button. By the time you’ve depressed your mouse button, the upgrade is nearly complete.

I now just have to go through the paces of installing and checking all of the WordPress plugins that I use work with version 3.0, which should only take about half an hour or so.

DoFollow No Longer

Al — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:03:47 +0000

In 2005 Google decided they were going to attempt to unsettle the online spam ecosystem by recommending that web sites add an additional attribute to a link from site A to site B if they were not verified to be trustworthy. For instance, if someone left a comment on my site who I didn’t know or couldn’t vouch for – I would add a rel=”nofollow” to the link to their site.

While it sounds like a small change, the longer term plans were for search engines to not include those links when ranking a given web sites content. It was common place for spammers to comment spam thousand or millions of blogs, leaving a link to their preferred sites. Before the rel=”nofollow” attribute was introduced, the search engines had no way of knowing if a web site owner trusted that site and as such had to use other methods of measuring trustworthiness.

The intention is clear, by removing the incentive for a spammer by using rel=”nofollow” in the links – it was hoped it would have an impact on the insidious and incredibly aggressive spam ecosystem online. Unfortunately, spammers aren’t the kind of people that just roll over at the first sign of a battle and the war on spam raged on. As the rel=”nofollow’ attribute gained momentum over the years, spammers have subsequently sought out web sites which were considered dofollow – in that they have clean links that the search engines will count when ranking a web site.

As I’ve upgraded WordPress over the years, I’ve been carrying the same set of themes or templates forward through the upgrades and hadn’t bothered to upgrade to a newer base theme. Of course this meant that links from my site were dofollow links and were valuable to the spammers. So valuable in fact that my site has been listed countless times on different forums as being a dofollow blog – essentially proclaiming to the spammers of the world that they should target my site for high quality backlinks.

I’m happy to say that after a recent upgrade to WordPress 2.9.x, I ported my current theme over to a new base theme provided in the 2.9.x code base which uses rel=”nofollow” links by default. In fact, if I want to allow people to have clean links – I’ll need to specifically allow them by use of a plugin – which is fine by me.

This will no doubt upset the spammers out there that thought they’d be getting easy, free dofollow links from my site. While I understand why they want my clean links, I also hate having to deal with comment spam – so I’m going to leave my comments rel=”nofollow” from now on.

WordPress Upgrade

Al — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:06:51 +0000

The WordPress development team released the next major update for the popular blogging platform, version 2.9 on the 19th December 2009 – code named Carmen. With it came over 500 bug fixes and enhacements from version 2.8.6 which was the previous latest build available.

When the WordPress team release a minor revision, moving from 2.8 into the 2.9 version space I like to wait until the next point release has been made before upgrading. Normally a raft of very subtle issues will arise when it hits the community and millions of people are using it instead of only tens of thousands.

On the 4th January 2010, WordPress devlopment team released version 2.91. after going through a beta and a release candidate which included about 25 bug fixes and enhancements over the initial 2.9 release.

Instead of doing a standard upgrade, which involves me taking a databae backup, unpacking the WordPress source and uploading it – I instead opted for a completely clean installation. This time around, I still took the backup (good practice) but instead of just uploading the source code – I deleted everything first and then uploaded a fresh copy of WordPress – which mean no extraneous files laying around.

At the same time I’ve gone back to the standard WordPress theme for a short period of time and installed a raft of very popular WordPress plugins to make things run a little more smoothly. In the next few days, I’ll be moving back to my old theme and will update my own WordPress plugins to make sure they work with the latest version of WordPress.

2009 Traffic Statistics

Al — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:42:07 +0000

Following on from my 2008 web statistics, below is a summary of what traffic the site took in 2009.

In 2006 the site took about 95,000 visitors, increasing to 145,000 and declining to 135,000 respectively in 2007 and 2008. In 2009 the site took 106,930 visitors over the entire year which resulted in 136,525 pageviews. It’ll come as no surprise that from a traffic driving potential, a lot fewer people are interested in reading about my personal ramblings compared to technical style posts that I used to post.

While last year saw a couple posts catch a moderate amount of attention and punch through the metronomic rise and fall in traffic each day, in 2009 none of my posts really got any traction within the greater internet. Not surprisingly traffic did start to decline towards the end of the year, however I’m happy that it wasn’t obliterated like it was last year when I moved web servers within the same host.

The traffic breakdown, just like in 2008 shows the complete dominance that Google has within the web search market. Yahoo! are still the first non-Google search engine and is still delivering approximately 2.5% of the traffic the they were in 2008. The latest addition to the web search ecosystem is Microsoft’s Bing, which sits at position five. Of course, that isn’t a fair comparison since they haven’t been around for the entire year. If you count Bing, Live and MSN together they drove about 1750 visits for the year putting them in at fourth however by the end of May 2010 I expect Bing to have delivered 2000 visits – narrowing the gap against Yahoo!.

The most popular posts for the year were similar to 2006, 2007 and 2008 but with a few newcomers:

Removing those posts from the top of the list since they clearly dominate, changes things a little:

However still none from 2009 were showing up in the list. Isolating the posts written in 2009 and the landscape is vastly different:

I find it telling that my two gripes about the quality of the Applie iTunes account sign up process are within the list. You’d assume a company with a market capitalisation of nearly USD$200 billion would have such a visible component of their business highly polished but it just goes to show everyone has their problems. Having a home phone plan comparison post residing at position three is just more evidence that the consumer is becoming more savvy by researching online, even when purchasing offline.

Onward and upward for 2010!

2009 Blogging Statistics

Al — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 14:04:31 +0000

At the end of last year, I posted the 2008 blogging statistics for my site including the previous years. In keeping with that trend, below is the amended table which now includes 2009 as well.

	POSTS	AVG. POST LENGTH	TOTAL POST LENGTH	COMMENTS	AVG. COMMENTS
2004	1	478	487	0	0.0
2005	82	1949	159835	511	12.7
2006	103	1837	189259	865	4.5
2007	127	1977	251150	229	1.0
2008	68	1597	108623	78	0.6
2009	77	2114	162804	104	0.8

While I haven’t managed to get back to my peak of 2007 in the total number of posts, I’m happy that I’ve managed to increase it slightly over last year. In 2010, I’m going to try and increase it again to between seven and eight posts per month. While that doesn’t seem like that many, it can be difficult to write at least one post every four days – I challenge you to try it yourself.

For those that are interested in doing the same, I’ve made the blogging statistics SQL script available for you to use.