The R Zone stats for January 2006

published Feb 01, 2006, last modified Dec 03, 2020

It's time to report to my readers how this blog has been doing.

And how did your blog do, Rudd-O?

It's my distinct pleasure to announce it's been doing absolutely great. In summary, there have been surges and dips of traffic, of course, but I'm seeing an average of 1100 page reads daily, which would be much higher if the traffic statistics for the first 15 days of January had been as high as the stats for the last two weeks. In total, this site has been visited 38539 times. Keep reading for details.

The top stories for January

The most read stories of this month are:

  1. Why swap on Linux is always good, even with tons of RAM
    Tot: 2628, Avg: 119, Max: 1736
  2. The RevvedUp theme for WordPress
    Tot: 1732, Avg: 577, Max: 1098
  3. WordPress admin themer
    Tot: 1399, Avg: 45, Max: 67
  4. A summary of the threats to our way of life
    Tot: 1350, Avg: 169, Max: 395
  5. Turning the tide on the threats to our way of life
    Tot: 840, Avg: 140, Max: 296

There's a lesson to be learned from each of these five pages. All of them have: - great content, useful for other people: people become repeat readers of this kind of content, and blog about them, so you get links for free - links everywhere in the Web, pointing at them: properly publicizing your original content in the appropriate forums goes a long way towards ensuring a steady flow of readers Okay.

Unexpected surprises

Wow! This blog started in December, with 25 visits per day. How do I explain a steady flow of content readers that grew to a thousand daily? That's hard to do! First off, this blog didn't start "empty". I already had over 500 articles, ready to be picked up by Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search. But this doesn't explain the steady flow of readers — the Pareto rule applies here, with the top ten percent articles getting about 90% of the readers. Second, I publicize my open source projects here, and for some reason, those receive a steady flow of visitors. Mostly from the Freshmeat records for my projects. But the winners are, clearly, my WordPress-related projects. Third, more than five thousand readers gathered to read two articles that got picked up by the LinuxToday newswire. Although "got picked up" is an euphemism: I made sure they got publicized by submitting my articles there, and LinuxToday's kwan did the rest. But the biggest surprise is how many readers came to see the theme and my WordPress plugins. I've even gotten contract requests from some of the visitors. Google AdSense has been a disappointment. I don't blame them. Maybe I have to tweak the ad positioning. I'll do that once I have some leisure time. I plan to intermingle ads with content, which will require major template reengineering, so I honestly need time to concentrate and enter "in the zone" again, just like I did to prepare this blog. Did you know that this blog's current iteration (the one you're seeing today) took more than one month in the making? Life is good. I can't complain.