The WordPress.com stats monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for my blog. It’s less impressive than in 2010. That’s swapping Mexico for the UK for you. Still. Here it is.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 46,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 17 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Filed under Blogging
It’s been almost a year since I moved my blog from Blogger to WordPress, and today seems like a good day to share my WordPress experience. Not least because yesterday I got my highest number of visitors ever. I rarely look at the statistics to be honest, but I got an email from WordPress.com telling me that my post on Mexican Chess was being promoted on their homepage. I also got a load of comments from new people. So I had a peek. Over a thousand. Woo hoo.
There are lots of reasons to blog. Mine are simple. I blog for me, mostly. I like looking back at old posts sometimes. Quite often I need info on somewhere I’ve been, and I can often find what I need. Or just take a walk down memory lane. I quite like writing as well, which helps. But I have a few narcissistic tendencies too, of course. So extra visitors boost my little author ego. And the comments are always welcome. Voyeurs, stalkers, lingerers and general passersby – this is the post you can finally say hello on.
But anyway, I digress. WordPress. The dot com version, which is the platform I use. I like it. A lot. There’s lots of competition for blog hosting, and I’ve tried plenty of them. My Opera, Blogger, Tumblr, Posterous to name but a few. But WordPress.com is definitely my favourite. In many ways, it can be quite limited, unless you want to start paying for extra features. But I’ve decided I like it that way. With Blogger I continually got carries away with all the millions of things you could add and install to make it sparkle and pop. Which makes it easy to lose focus on the point of the exercise – the content.
With WordPress I chose a clean simple template, put up a simple top banner to stamp my mark on it, and started writing. The machinery behind the blog is simple, clean but very functional too. The widgets are practical. The comment section works well. The stats are informative, if you care to look at them. They tell me I’m gaining visitors month on month quite nicely. The spam controls catch almost everything. I like the Pages. It’s all good, basically. Blogger is fine, but I have to say I much, much prefer WordPress. And its limitations.
Filed under Uncategorized
Comments, Stats and Lies
For years I’ve been recommending, sometimes pleading, with Blogger bloggers to install the Disqus commenting system on their blogs. Blogger’s commenting set ups suck. Really, really suck. It does work a lot of the time, I guess. But then chemotherapy works a lot of the time. It’s not something you’d go for if there was a better, pain free alternative though, is it?
Disqus integrates Twitter and Facebook in a much better way. It displays on a post in a much more user friendly, more aesthetic manner. And it enables threaded commenting. I personally wouldn’t now use a commenting system without threaded conversations.
The biggest argument I’ve heard against Disqus is that it was tricky to install. I didn’t think it really was, although it wasn’t the easiest plug in ever. That’s all changed now. It really couldn’t be simpler. I tried it out yesterday on one of my Blogger blogs. You register an account, then register a blog (name and url address), and then you click a button. That’s it.
Another plus is that more and more blogs and websites (the Independent newspaper in the UK is a good example) are using Disqus, which makes having an account handy.
In other news, I’ve decided to add buttons to my blog. Stat Counter, because Rich of the Mexfiles can tell which countries his visitors come from, and, because WordPress comments doesn’t offer this into, I can’t. One must keep up with the Jones’, you know. I can now tell you I’ve had 5 visitors from Vietnam in the last twenty four hours. Fascinating stuff. There’s also now a Creative Commons button. Because people keep stealing my content. Now they can’t. Think about it.
Edit: I almost forgot about the lies! Stat Counter says I’ve had 74 visits today. WordPress tells me only 68. It’s possible that WordPress doesn’t count ghosts. They should. I’d like a few more ghosts here. Statistics for blogs isn’t an exact science. So if every visitor could just leave their name, country of origin, length of time spent on the blog, IP address, broswer they are using, OS they have installed….
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Filed under Uncategorized
Tagged as blogger, comments, disqus, stats, wordpress.com