I’m about to hit a nice little landmark that I think is worth sharing: as of tomorrow, I’ve been blogging for exactly one year.
Before I jumped onto the blogwagon, I was really quite skeptical about the entire concept. I had no idea what a trackback was, little clue about Technorati, and unsure why RSS feeds were so darned special. Even worse, I wasn’t quite sure I’d have enough to say to fill a blog (and wasn’t sure if anyone out there would care enough to read it). I simply knew that I had to do something to publicize and promote my book.
So please forgive me if I feel a little self-congratulatory. I feel like this blog has been a big success. If nothing else, it’s given me an excuse to give my writing muscles a workout (as if MultiReal wasn’t doing that already) and put my name in front of tens of thousands of people’s eyeballs.
Some interesting stats:
- This is my 83rd post.
- There have been a total of 270 comments on this blog this past year. Not as much discussion as I’d hoped to generate, but then again, my posts tend to be of the “let me stand on my soapbox and blurt shit to you” variety rather than the “let’s all gather around and discuss shit” variety. Maybe I can spark more conversation if I end all my blog posts with the sentence “Discuss.”
- The ratio of spam comments to real human comments on this blog is somewhere around 12 to 1. (Luckily, the Akismet plug-in shields you all from 99% of the spam.)
- I’m currently receiving around 45,000 visits per month to my various personal websites. Keep in mind that this figure includes everything under davidlouisedelman.com: my personal website, the Infoquake website, and my John Barth fan site, in addition to this blog. Also keep in mind this figure includes search engine bots and spiders and RSS readers and whatnot.
- Traffic to my websites has quadrupled over the past year. Look at this chart that I got off my website stats program a few days ago:
Not so bad, eh? We in the marketing biz like to call that nice smooth upward curve “pretty frickin’ groovy.” - The most popular post on this blog is The Day The Empire Strikes Back Changed Everything.
- The most commented post on this blog is Why Does MySpace Suck So Badly?
- The Technorati ranking for this blog is 53,887. Frankly, I’m just not sure what this means, or if it means much of anything. I will note, however, that when John Scalzi listed the Top 50 Personal Blogs in SF/F on July 6, I barely inched into the list at number 50 with a ranking of 149,618. So apparently this blog has climbed 96,000 slots in five months, which I presume has to be a good thing.
- I also cross-post the entries from this blog to my LiveJournal, my MySpace blog, and the SFNovelists group blog. And I post the Infoquake-related stuff to my Amazon blog too. Oh, there’s also the occasional cross-post from the DeepGenre group blog I belong to.
I’ve been trying to keep my favorite posts listed in the sidebar on the WordPress blog, but here are a few others that have fallen through the cracks:
- Why Does MySpace Suck So Badly?
- Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
- How to Manipulate the TV News
- Reverse Engineering the Turing Test
- From First to Final Draft: A Case Study
- How to Get Information to Flow Backward
- Bruce Springsteen’s “Meeting Across the River”
- Limits on Speed, Limits on Freedom
- The Joy of Strict XHTML
- Should Novelists Sell Advertisements?
- Who Do You Write For?
- Why Is Spelling and Grammer Importunt?
So thanks, dear reader/browser/anonymous data bot, for helping make this blog a success. I appreciate every last mother-lovin’ one of ya.
Oh yeah, and lest I forget the purpose that I started this blog for in the first place: buy my book.
Discuss.