Webomatica Blog Anniversary: Get It Over With

May 20th, 2007

Technically, I started this blog back on January of 2006. This was the first post: Content Conversion to WordPress. It’s lame.

Early on, I had no idea what I was doing and early posts are therefore embarrassingly strange and aimless, such as Good Busy Day, and Monday Joomla Rocks. I hadn’t decided if I the blog was personal or not, and I hadn’t yet figured out the descriptive headline, one topic per post concept. My primary goal at that point was to learn the WordPress platform and get up to speed with MySQL and pHp (the latter two I still haven’t done).

Eventually, the writing became the goal. In April of 2006, I wrote my first movie review under the moniker “Movie Notes” which has stuck to this day. It was for Friends With Money which I gave four stars. In the months following, I worked up to about a post a day.

In September of 2006 something clicked (I don’t remember what) and I started posting three times a day and added on book, music, and technology reviews. That pace lasted a few months until recently when I’ve reverted to a minimum of two posts a day and two over the weekend.

So I’m not exactly sure what date I should consider as this blog’s birthday — technically, it has already passed. But I figure I’ll just get the self-evaluation over with right now, since it’s been a pretty good month. Here are some juicy info-porny stats of the first year (kept vague for ad reasons):

• In total, I’m approaching 1 million page views, and unique visitors in the low six figures.
• According to server logs, monthly page views finally crossed six figures (100,000+), and for the past thirty days I met my goal of 1,000 unique visitors per day.
• Discounting huge traffic spikes (digg — February was James Bond month), these numbers double every three months. Not exactly exponential growth, but for a blog hobby I’m pretty pleased.
• Alexa is full of crap, but this site oscillates between 70,000 and 50,000. Today it’s 53,878.
• Technorati: 13,783, Authority 273.
• Google Page Rank: 5

However amusing tracking site traffic can be, I’m always a bit cynical. Most of my traffic for the past month has been Google searches for Battlestar Galactica and Gilmore Girls, the former is going on hiatus and the second is going bye-bye completely. All that traffic will likely vanish. I’ve got to get cracking on some new stuff to fill up the pipe, other than Joost invites.

Goals for the future:

• I’d like to get up to more unique visitors per month (100,000+). Maybe at that point I’ll look into additional ads. I plan to pass extra income onto readers in the form of contests (well, and fund the purchase of StarCraft 2).
• Also would like to get more feed subscribers.
• Thinking about setting up a tip jar via PayPal.
• Opening up reviews of music, movies, books, websites to reader suggestions or anybody willing to send me a review copy.
• Write more for Blogcritics.
• Get more active in the blogging community. Checking out more blogs, commenting on them, and eventually giving back all the knowledge I’ve accumilated through getting this blog to where I hope it will be next year.

Anyhow, for all you regular readers and folks who have just discovered this blog, thanks for checking it out, commenting, and linking every once in a while. It keeps me going, especially comments like these.