Last night I posted my 200th entry. The blog as it is has been around since 6th September 2003, the older entries in the archives were added all at once with some back dates to the time they were written. I updated the theme of the site on the 1 year anniversary to what you see today. Some stats:
These stats exclude all my own machines, and only include browsers that supports javascript or loads the stats image, so this excludes spam bots, rss aggregators, search engines etc.
Number of unique visitors: 8201
Search Engines: Google 5439, Yahoo! 170, AOL 40, MSN 6, Virgilio 6
Top 5 keywords used in search strings: allofmp3 (726), devco (621), mutt smtp (336), openssl frontend (79), nikon d70 reviews (69)
Browsers used: IE6; WinXP 3436, IE6; Win 2000 1046, IE6; Win98 307, Moz 1.6; WinXP 301, Netscape 6; MacOSX 284
Browsers Total: IE 5591, Mozilla 1683, Netscape 610, Opera 242, Konqueror 35
Operating Systems: WinXP 4222, Win 2000 1576, Linux 726, Win 98 539, Mac OS X 351
I started the blog to have a place to put stuff where I can find it again and also to experiment with the blogging revolution and some of the technologies it employes such as personal CMS systems and RSS/Atom. I also wanted to discover the workings of the new wave of personal sites that interact with each other, where people comment on the same topics and know about each others posts using sites like Feedster and Technorati.
It has been interesting to see the positive growth and improvements made in this regard mostly by a grassroots movement but it has also been interesting to note the success and failures of businesses trying to capitalize on this new media.
Feedster is the leader in weblog searching and while being useful often suffers under its own success with slow response, downtime or other issues. And still I have to wonder about its place in the market given that I almost never see referrers from it – which may be an indication that only a small % of web browsers use it – and also to see it suffer under the growing pains of RSS such as inclusion of paid for ads that appear in the RSS feeds in their search results. Google now at least fetches my RSS feeds often – they may be checking for updates on weblogs.com since they are quite quick off the mark once I posted something. New articles appear in the Google search results very quickly after publishing.
For me, Google is still king and I hardly ever use Feedster for anything, and usually once I used it, I go and do a Google query in any case since it tends to be more relevant and useful results. Often I do the Google query while waiting for feedster to produce results and find what I wanted by the time feedster managed to render a page. I know the Feedster team has added some new machines and stuff recently and indeed it is a bit faster now.
Other useful sites like Technorati has a great idea and good software but it is often unusable due to load and so forth, hopefully the recent cash injection they received will allow them to upgrade their service and be a useful resource again, for now it is just too irritating to sit and wait for their progress indicator that never gets anywhere most of the time.
NOTE: This is a static archive of an old blog, no interactions like search or categories are current.
