I’m a more than a little embarassed to report that I couldn’t even make it two full weeks into this challenge. I missed three whole days of Week 2, and I’m hanging my head in shame. Granted, I could offer up all kinds of excuses (had to take care of my sons, gave a talk about cloud computing to a class at DePaul, finally cleaned up my address book, etc), but that really isn’t the point. It’s a shame, because this week saw one of my most popular posts of all time…but my good feeling about that accomplishment is marred by my failure to follow through on this challenge.
But I’m not stopping – the point of 28 Days of Blogging is not to “win” anything (at least not for me). Rather, this is about blogging more regularly. About paying attention to my blog and the content within. And if I miss a few days, it’s not a failure. Well, at least not a giant failure. I’ll keep writing and keep pushing through this month because, at the end of the day, this is about getting content out there. Good content. Content that is interesting, amusing, and maybe, just maybe, useful. So on to the recap!
Nothing like a simple list to kick off the week. My initial though was that this week was going to be “WordPress Week”, and all my posts would feature something WordPressy. Yeah. That lasted about two whole days.
Total Pageviews – 62
This post began as a WordPress security overview, but I started to get “under the gun” time-wise, so I limited the scope to just a how-to on some best practices for the admin account in WordPress. Not a whole lot came from this post, except for a snarky comment talking about how my advice was practically worthless. I replied in kind, and then got freaked out that the commenter might take that as a “challenge” to hack my blog, so I immediately went into even further lockdown mode.
Total Pageviews – 47
This was it. The big Kahuna. The biggest and most visible post I’ve written here so far.
And it was one of the quickest and dirtiest. How was it dirty? I kind of lied about when I posted it.
Officially, this post was written at about 1 AM on Thursday, but I backdated it to Wednesday in the interest of not “failing” at the 28 Day Challenge (of course, in retrospect, I missed anyway). I was up at 1 AM consoling an angry baby, and reading my Google Reader at the same time. I noticed a post on ReadWriteWeb that had a strange “ATTENTION GOOGLE USERS, THIS SITE IS NOT FACEBOOK” disclaimer in the middle of it, and quickly discovered the whole deal – Facebook users were logging onto ReadWriteWeb thinking it was the “new” Facebook. I thought this was hilarious, and wrote up a quick recap post explaining what happened.
The rest is history. Sort of. Loads of comments on Facebook as well as the blog post, and, (as of tonight), at least 45 tweets of the article. That might not sound like a lot to you, but for me, it’s a huge day. Oh, and I’m the number one Google hit for “dumb Facebook users”. Lesson learned? I should give up on all this “tech” blogging, and instead, just write snarky posts about people who use the Internet in foolish ways.
Total Pageviews – 1,762
I already knew that this week was going to blow everything away in metrics, and that it was going to be due to the Facebook post. I wasn’t wrong when it came to visits, but I definitely declined in bounce rate and pages per visit (compared to last week). The number in parentheses is the same metric for Feb 1-7 of 2009. The number in italics is the same metric for last week (I really need to think of a better way to present this data).
Visits: 2,184 (787) 822
Bounce Rate: 86.68 % (88.69%) 77.98%
Pages Per Visit: 1.27 (1.35) 1.43
Returning Visitors: 282 (159) 247
Fun, unrelated note – as of yesterday, my blog is serving up all static content (stylesheets, javascripts, and images) via Amazon CloudFront. Sure, in theory I’m doing this to increase performance, but in reality, it is just to have an excuse to play around with cloud technology)
_Oh yeah. And the image in this post comes to us from Flickr user pieterjanviaene via the miracle of Creative Commons.
_