Year in Review – Most Popular Posts of 2007

The second year of Internet Duct Tape found me settling down into my blogging rhythm. It went from an obsession to an integrated part of my life, which was important because there were many weeks where I’d be lucky to even check my stats because I was so busy at work.

2007 Highlights

• Finally got my own domain name, which I think really fits
• I was featured in the book Blogging Heroes. It’s pretty neat to see your name on the written page.
• My cat was lol’d by the readers of icanhascheezburger.com (easily the post of the year on IDT)
• Best of Feeds has been going strong with around 10-20 new links a week on the subjects I find most interesting.
• Tried doing a web comic for a bit, but it was too time consuming and I stopped in May
• Hovering at around 2.5 million page views
• A solid 6,000 page views a day even when I don’t write new content
• Learned about different aspects of web design/programming: javascript, css, rss, and ruby on rails

2007 Software

• Created a new blog documenting my dirty little hacks at IDT Labs
• Tag Cloud Generator brought tag clouds to WordPress.com before they were official, and is still used on icanhascheezburger.com
• Auntie Spam became even more useful
• Comment Ninja has let me reply to reader comments with ease
• Technorati Favorite Your Fans made scratching each others backs even easier
• Delicious and StumbleUpon are now joined at the hip for me because I submit links to both sites at the same time
• I showed bloggers how to easily create a digest post, create a link digest, and create a blog command center
• It’s easier than ever to cut-and-paste an image from Flickr into a blog post and give credit attribution

Most Popular Posts of 2007

• Top Romance Movies: 76 Romantic Flicks
• How to Earn a Six Figure Income from Blogging
• How to use Facebook without Losing Your Job
  
• Revolutionizing the Web with Firefox and Greasemonkey
  
• How to Create LOLCats
• This is Harold
• 7 Tips for Learning the Declutter Habit
• Windows XP Logon Screen with No User Account
• Distraction Free GTD: 32 Todo List Web Apps
• Do Anything: 3 Steps for Success
• How to Install a Firefox Extension
• The Secret to Finding the Perfect Valentine
• Getting Started with Google Code Hosting
• 14 Tips to Get More Done in Less Time
• The Missing Curriculum for Programmers

You can also see the break down of most popular posts per month

Top Sources of Traffic for 2007

stumbleupon.com		50.6%
lifehacker.com		6.2%
joel.reddit.com		5.3%
del.icio.us		4.6%
digg.com		4.0%
www.dansdata.com		2.5%
wordpress.com		2.4%
icanhascheezburger.com		2.3%
reddit.com		2.2%
blogs.chron.com		1.9%
popurls.com		1.4%
meneame.net		1.4%
clicked.msnbc.msn.com		1.1%
linuxtoday.com		1.1%
gawker.com		1.0%
userscripts.org		1.0%

The number of RSS subscribers has been climbing steadily, and I’m impressed that I have any with the way I jump around different topics.

Thank you for reading my little spot on the interweb.

What I learned in my first year of blogging

It’s hard to believe, but the blog is already one year old. It started as a lark, a way of reputation management, but it grew into something very different. Milestones are always a good time for reflection, so it is time for some more navel gazing.

1 Million Page Views Served

Like McDonald’s and Paris Hilton, //engtech has now seen 1 million served. Page views, that is. Not bad for in under a year on a free blog hosted on wordpress.com. At the five month mark I was proud to have hit 50,000 page views.

But enough about me. My friends at Beats Entropy recently hit 105,000ish and put together a small clip show / introduction to their site. It’s an acquired taste but those who acquire it like it just fine.

//engtech is 5 and a half months old

This is part of a series where I take a measurement of how this blog has grown (1.5 months, 3 months, 4 months). I wouldn’t be surprised if no one finds it as interesting as me, but I think it’s kind of neat to watch a blog grow from nothing to thousands of hits a day. Since my last post on the subject I was Dugg for the first time. Now I also show up on sites like TechMeme when I comment on a popular news story. Cool!

I Digg It – Week 2 (With more Trunk Monkey)

Two weeks ago one of my posts made it to the front page of Digg, and it gave me a massive boost in traffic. Being a geek what I found more interesting than the tiny elation of “they like me, they really really like me!” was the bigger picture:

• How did I get to the front page of Digg?
  • It was a howto on a subject a lot of people find interesting — synchronizing calendar/contact information.
  • It was already the #1 traffic generating post on my blog.
  • Started with lifehack.org, then lifehacker.com, then the front page of del.icio.us, then got picked up by one of the top posters on digg.
• What is the significance in terms of back-links, increasing Google ranking, and increased page views over time?
  • Social networking sites can bring a massive amount of traffic in a short period of time, but what do they do to your long term traffic?

I Digg It – Getting 35,000+ page views in a week

(Pssst, there’s a part 2 to this article)

There’s some unwritten law of the Internet that after getting to the front page of Digg, you have to post the traffic stats or a band of unruly trunk monkeys will beat you down and make bongos out of your asscheeks.

Contrary to popular belief, I do not want that to happen. Here is my lame-ass traffic analysis based on the referrer logs that wordpress.com provides. I’ll post the original logs and the perl script at a later date.

Before this huge spike in traffic I was averaging around 1100-1200 views a day. The highest day of the spike was around 17,000 views. I’m sitting at around 3,000 views a day but I expect that to drop and average out at 1400-1500 a day.

50,000 views in 5 months and 5 days

The page views ticker just past the 50,000 mark. Not bad for 158 days running.

UPDATE 2006/09/18: And just 3 days later there’s been another 25,000 page views thanks to lifehack.org, del.icio.us, lifehacker.com, and digg.com

Of course, how many of those hits translate to new regular readers? :)

//engtech is four months old.

It’s only been one month since the last time I posted a stats update, but a lot has changed.

//engtech is three months old.

The blog has been around for three months now and it has been 2 months since I last looked at the statistics.

• 75 categories with 162 posts.
• Unknown (more than 20) comments with 342 spam comments blocked by Akismet (Pretty much all of the spam is from the same idiot).
• The blog has had ~8000 page views in 3 months.
• Most views in one day was on 2006/07/14 with ~1220 views from when I posted my article on Programmer Productivity to reddit, digg, and blogcritics.org.
  • Second most views was on 2006/07/05 with ~550 views from my article on language independent source code documentation tools.
• I was averaging around 20-50 views a day but it has increased to around 250 views a day since I followed the tips in Building an Audience.
• RSS reader stats are showing a maximum of 200 in one day on 2006-07-14 with an average of around 26 a day.
• A google.com search for engtech currently comes up in position #5 (up from #19 last time I checked)

Previous “The Stats” Entries:

• 2006/05/27 – At 1.5 months
  

One and a half months in…

So this blog has existed for approximately six weeks now. Some stats.

• Has 52 categories with 77 posts. Most posts are in Resume Resources (13).
• 1 genuine comment and 5 spam comments blocked by Akismet.
• The blog has had ~400 page views in six weeks.
• Most views in one day was 52 on 2006/05/25. (This is when it was linked from JL Gray's blog-roll).
• Has had up to 11 20 people reading it using an RSS feed in one day. Averaging around 3 readers a day.
  • WordPress has some pretty nifty built-in statistic features.
• It is currently showing up at position 19 when doing a google search for "engtech".
• Has absolutely nothing to do with:
  • "Engineering technicians".
  • Any specific company (CA, BR, AU, NO, US, IN)
  • Anything other than having to pick a title for a blog and coming up with "engineering technology".

So far I am very impressed with WordPress as a content management system. Admittedly, I am using this less of a blog and more of a personal blogroll with a synopsis per link to make it highly searchable. I am probably misusing the category function as if they are tags (note that many categories only have one tag).

I have a nice hierarchal layout for categories that is not apparently to the external public because of the theme I am using, but hopefully that will be fixed in one of the newly available themes. They may still have the bug where if a parent category is empty then all the child categories do not display, in which case I'll be sticking with the current theme.

The one issue I've had with my Press It! bookmarklet is time-outs. So what I've been doing instead is saving the bookmarks I want to press until I have a good window of time to work on the blog (normally during off-peak hours) and then press them all at once.