Maszman Speaks! » Weblog

State of the Blog 2012

Tom — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 15:04:11 +0000

Having passed the 10-year milestone back in October, I’m expecting to hit the 10,000 post mark sometime this year. Using Google Analytics, I took a look at what this actually means. I only have metrics from 2005 on so there’s a couple of years of data that’s unavailable but we can still draw some conclusions.

Since January 1, 2005 there have been 17,696 visits to 5716 posts. While this doesn’t look too bad, a lot of those visits are due to spam bots and don’t represent actual visitors. The trouble is trying to determine who of those visitors was legitimate and I’m not sure how to do that. I average about 10 visits/day and that seems to be a trend that’s maintained over time so I’ll use that metric.

Comments are a different story. I have 311 comments for 9515 posts. That doesn’t include the comments I had when I was on Blogger and using a third-party commenting system but there weren’t very many. That’s around a 3% commenting rate. I have no idea what’s normal for a blog like mine, but that seems low. Compare that to my spam comments which hit 52,740 as of today. If it weren’t for Akismet handling the spam, I would have collapsed under the workload years ago. I guess even the obscure aren’t as invisible as you’d expect.

Netting it out, I spend a lot of time and effort for very little recognition. But since this isn’t my job and I don’t derive any income from it there’s no reason not to continue as long as it doesn’t drive me crazy. For me, that’s as good as it gets.

Site Theme Update

Tom — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 17:30:26 +0000

As you can see I’ve updated the site theme to clean things up and help it load faster. There will likely be issues with photo posts, unfortunately. I’m still working on the best way to format those. My old theme did a lot of work for me with photos.

Let me know what you think in the comments (yes, they’re re-enabled).

What’s happening since I turned off comments

Tom — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 16:03:50 +0000

It’s been a while since turned off comments here in order to try to get a handle on whether my pageview stats were driven by comment spammers or by actual readers. I’ve been checking the results on Google Analytics and the conclusion so far is it’s not clear what’s happening. It’s basically impossible to tell when I turned the comments off. At this point, I believe I’m going to continue to keep the comments off. There’s really no compelling reason my part to turn them back on due to extra work all the comment spam creates for me. I get so few comments that aren’t spam that it’s just not worth it.

You may disagree, of course. If so, there’s a Contact page you can use to tell me what you think. But otherwise, no more comments. But thanks for reading, everyone. There really is someone out there who notices.

Even I don’t read this thing

Tom — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 16:55:54 +0000

I guess I should have been paying more attention but this blog reached its 10th anniversary on October 17th. Woot. I guess.

The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book

Tom — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 19:25:34 +0000

Recently, Steven Berlin Johnson gave a talk at his alma mater Columbia University on the future of text called The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book. It’s a bit disjointed, but definitely worth reading.

In case you’re wondering, keeping a commonplace book involved transcribing into it interesting or inspirational passages from oneâ€™s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations.

Update Status: Update

Tom — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 23:29:01 +0000

As you can see, I did manage to update the theme to something that works for me. It’s Elegant Grunge by Michael Tyson. I’ll probably move some of the things around and I know I want a header graphic, but for now things are good enough.

Let me know what you think.

Blog Update Status: Fail

Tom — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 16:29:30 +0000

I had planned a major site overhaul, new theme, updated widgets, visible tags in posts, etc. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out. I had to revert back to the old setup, but with a couple of minor changes. The old “Asides” block is now called “Miniblog” and no longer has its own RSS feed. If you’re a regular RSS reader and have a separate feed for the Asides, I apologize for the change. The theme I am using is old and hasn’t been updated so it doesn’t handle the asides category in the database. There’s a new header image too. If you’re wondering, it’s my Heritage H-575 archtop.

The BradLands RIP

Tom — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 16:28:33 +0000

Brad Graham, who was one of the people who originally inspired me to start my own weblog, has passed away suddenly at age 41. You would be hard-pressed to find a more influential or better regarded person on the web. A lot of people are going to miss him.