8 December 2005 in Blogging | Comments enabled

Lately I’ve been trying to blog a bit more – I want to see if I can actually create any value for people who do take the time to read my blog.

So I thought I’d share some stats so far about how my blog performs.

Generally my traffic is broken up as:

33% are hits to my RSS feed
33% are hits from people actually coming and reading the site
33% are hits from search engine spiders (GoogleBot etc)

Interestingly the main feature attraction of my site so far seems to be my entry about the Consolas font. That’s not such a great thing as it’s not something I can expand much more on really.

Making things better

In order to try and attract people more often I’ve tried to focus on more specific topics. By my very nature I tend to jump from one technology to another all the time, I rarely will post on a single technology more than once or twice. However lately I’ve been posting more entries relating to search technology – so far this hasn’t made too much of an impact in improving readership but that could be because there are so many blogs out there on the subject (by people who work for Google and the likes – people with more inside information).

I’ve also looked at becoming a little more social amongst others in the local blogging community. Generally if somebody takes the time to comment and I like their blog I’ll add a link to their site (as well as blogs that I just like of course :) ). Following on from this I’m trying to break out of just being a reader of the blogs I keep an eye on – these days I’ll try and actually post comments. RSS a great way of managing the massive amount of information that is produced on sites I like but it’s too easy to forget that going and seeing the site, making a comment etc creates a more positive response to the content creator than just incrementing the hits to their feed by one.

I’ve added a slightly more granular category category system (which I’ll probably overhaul in the coming weeks) so that people can focus on a single area if they want to, or ignore one. I’m posting less personal entries as often the bigger audience really doesn’t want to know about that type of content.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be looking to make some more changes to my blog and I’d love to hear feedback on those changes.

Interact

So – if you do read my blog, how have you found it? What could I do to make it better? What do I do well already? If you have a blog I’d love to see some posts about what people have done to improve their sites :)

– JD

Average Rating: 4.5 out of 5 based on 174 user reviews.


4 comments. Add your own comment.

PukekoHunter says 8 December 2005 @ 13:03

Well… I tend to have a less geeky blog. I like to blog about what I do and interesting things that I see (adds a nice personal touch)

Sorry – but I don’t tend to follow techie blogs much! I do like how you’ve used images in your blog tho – the more pics the better I say! :)

Nic says 10 December 2005 @ 10:19

I think I found you from….. you. I think. Or someone at Intergen. You are also on the NZ .net bloggers list…. :)

traskjd says 10 December 2005 @ 15:50

I think I posted a comment on your site Nic :-)

The NZ .Net Bloggers OPML certainly can be thanked for the RSS traffic – which is great (was a great idea to set that up as well, as somebody reasonably new to the industry it quickly let me get to know some ‘local celebs’ :-D )

– JD

HappyTomato says 10 December 2005 @ 23:22

I find your blog too techincal for me most times to be honest.. coz i like to read what ppl are up to, what’s going on in their lives etc.. :) so I dun tend to read techie blogs much .. So i’d say dun leave out those personal entries completely!! :D .. But seeing it’s your blog I’d still come to visit regardless ;) (maybe just less often if all i see are stuff that i dun get.. lol.. :P )

oh and btw u left a comment at Ed’s blog and not mine? I feel left out now.. sniff sniff.. :P

-Bo ;)

Leave a Comment

Name (required)

E-mail (required - not published)

Website

Your comment: