Tag Archives: blog

Blogging in 2k9

1 Jan

I’ve done it the past few years, so it seemed appro­pri­ate to once again wax philo­sophic about this, the very blog you’re read­ing now. This year brought a few changes.
  • Ana­lyt­ics — Sur­pris­ingly, it wasn’t until this year that I added web ana­lyt­ics (Google Ana­lyt­ics, of course). I knew about GA and its ben­e­fits of course, but hadn’t both­ered because I didn’t think many folks were read­ing this blog. But I finally decided it was silly not to know, and might prove inter­est­ing, which it has.
  • AdSense — As a corol­lary to the ana­lyt­ics, I decided to install a Word­Press plug-in to man­age Google’s ad-display plat­form AdSense. It’s not that I think my small read­er­ship war­rants ads to defray host­ing costs or that I expect much use­ful­ness to come of the ads on dis­play. How­ever, I’ve writ­ten about AdSense before and hav­ing a work­ing knowl­edge of it is a use­ful skill for a web developer/marketer. And hey, if I make a few bucks so much the bet­ter! But I’m still a long way off from the $100 min­i­mum for Google to cut me a check.
  • Top­ics — Though it does fly in the face of com­mon blog­ging advice to “pick a theme and write exclu­sively on that topic,” I con­tinue to write about var­i­ous top­ics. This year, mar­tial arts, web devel­op­ment and cod­ing, and design have com­prised the bulk of my posts. Not sur­pris­ingly, these are what occupy a lot of my thoughts. In the com­ing year I’ll con­tinue to write about these and other top­ics, but I hope to change my cur­rent Word­Press theme to one that bet­ter orga­nizes the con­tent into dis­tinct con­tent areas.
  • Com­ments — Despite open­ing com­ments to all users with­out requir­ing an account, I rarely get com­ments. It’s sad. The inte­gra­tion with the plug-in Word­Book instantly adds my blog posts to my Face­Book “Wall” when I post here. This has increased read­er­ship and does gar­ner com­ments on the Face­Book entry (but not on my blog). I’ll inves­ti­gate a way to cross-post com­ments from Face­Book my blog as well as ask folks to com­ment on my blog, too! Except you comment-spam robots, you can stay away. In fact, a great plug-in called WP Spam-Free has stopped 806 spam com­ments from appearing.
  • Stats — 69 posts in 2009! Quite an achieve­ment, actu­ally; espe­cially con­sid­er­ing I write because I love it and not to meet any quota. Here’s how they broke down in my favorite categories:

So, here’s to another enjoy­able year writ­ing about inter­est­ing things that I hope oth­ers find use­ful, and fail­ing that, at least humorous.