August Retrospective

As August was my first completed month of serious blogging, I thought I'd do a quick snapshot of the month and how it went. I spent no more than about an hour per day specifically "working on the site". However, as much of this site is really just an extension of what I'm doing anyway, much of my regular web browsing, personal projects, etc. ended up doing double-duty: as the normal portion of my hobby activities and as fodder for this site.

Overall, I think it's been a good month. I'm really happy with the numbers, the response I've gotten from readers, the things I've accomplished and the content I've written. I also see things I want to improve. I want my writing to get better (or at least do more editing before hitting "Publish"), want to bring more of my personal voice to the site, figure out how to keep up the momentum without burning out and figure out whether I'll be able to keep this site moving forward during November when I sit down to write my novel.

There are also problems and challenges for the coming month. One is a SERIOUS jump in comment spam. I really want to figure out a Bayesian way to allow regular comments through automatically and kill the obvious ones. I've tried the IP blocking (dropped it about 30%, but only for about a week) and have watched the same messages just come in from different IP addresses. I'm easily averaging 30-40 spam comments per day, which is getting really tedious. I also want to move to a design that isn't a prepackaged Wordpress template. I've been working on the structure first, to mark out the blocks, layout, etc. and think I'm getting somewhere (preview new design), but am having a hard time coming up with colors and graphics that I like. Suggestions would be welcome.

August site statistics and some thoughts about them.

Summary of the Month of August

Most Popular Pages
Lifehacking Your Grocery List
Web Based Screensaver
Hipster PDA
METER – methodical self improvement

Percentage of Traffic from Google

What's most interesting to me about the Google numbers is the steady increase as the content increased on this site as well as the big jump this week when I managed to finally get the permalinks to cooperate moving links like:

http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/?p=129

to links like
http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2005/07/25/lifehacking-your-grocery-list/

I still need to dig through the regular logs (not the site stats package I've been using) to see when Google's been spidering and how often the Google sitemap I installed has been hit.

Also interesting about the Google numbers is that in no week or even over the whole month has a single term constituted more than 3-4% of the Google traffic. This is intriguing and fits in with a bunch of the "long tail" discussion that's been bubbling up recently (more on that in the near future). Nearly 40% of my current traffic is from Google, but everyone's looking for something different. That really backs up the "build lots and lots of content" method of increasing the traffic for a site.