Recently, this blog got its 100,000th visitor since August 2005. While such numbers don’t have much meaning in and of themselves, they do provide an opportunity to take stock and consider what has happened so far and where things are going.
Between August 2005 and July 2007, the major purpose of the site was to document the Oxford experience and stay in touch with friends and family while off in England. Since returning to Canada, it has had less of a defined purpose. There has also been a conscious decision to make it significantly less personal overall. As a result, it now mostly consists of either personal musings on impersonal topics or responses to books or news items. This is not wholly without value. It fosters interesting discussions and provides a mechanism for keeping in touch with some friends. It may also help to inform some people a bit about topics of interest or importance, such as climate change.
At the same time, there are some things that concern me. I don’t really see enormously much value in providing links to information available elsewhere, along with minimal commentary. Additionally, I worry a bit that writing drips and drabs every day could sap energy that might otherwise be put into longer-term and more ambitious projects.
With Emily here, I also have less time to spend on random musings. As such, writing a daily post is more often than not an exercise in frantically scanning the news for something that I can comment upon without overly much thought or research. One solution is to dial things back and only write when I actually have something I want to say. That removes the impetus to come up with something daily – which has advantages as well as disadvantages – but should help to keep me from boring people with items of only limited interest or creativity.
I daresay the reason there have been 10^5 visitors to this blog is that the posts have been a) so good, and b) so regular. Take that for whatever it’s worth.
I have to agree with AT — the more content you have, you the more traffic you will get. It’s worth adding long tail content to the internet. I wish I had your blogging discipline.
I understand what you are both saying, but traffic is not an objective in itself. As with a Blackberry, it can be hard to maintain time-use perspective when one has a blog.
What Makes for a Good Blog?
By Merlin Mann on Writing
I predict that, within the next couple of weeks, this blog will exceed the 150,000 visitor mark, as measured by Sitemeter.
It should perhaps be noted that Sitemeter is configured, via a cookie, to ignore visits from computers I use.
Very crudely (using just three data points) that suggests an increase in the mean number of monthly visitors from an average of about 3030 between August 2005 and May 2008 to about 5550 a month since.
It seems we crossed the 150K threshold a bit earlier than expected. The high level of interest in this post on SSL was a factor in that.
Hooray! Congrats!!
Within the past week, we crossed the 175,000 mark.