1 Year Update
Well I’ve been blogging for a little over a year now, and I thought this would be a good time to reflect on what I’ve accomplished.
Writing for this site tends to come in spurts for me. I don’t lack ideas, I do find it challenging to set aside time to write regularly. We’ll see what I can do about setting aside more time in this upcoming year (in addition to the other “habits” I’d like to start or get back to).
I’ve published 277 stories, or on average 3 posts every four days. With 88 “Professional” posts and 187 “Personal” posts, plus a handful of others. I’ve also received 38 comments (2 of which I still need to craft a response to before posting). And I’ve received a few emails as a result of my posts, which technically count as comments. So I’m averaging better than the one in ten commenter to lurker percentage–though I’d like to see more comments.
Coming soon (I hope) is a site redesign and facelift, I’ll be transitioning the major focus to more “Professional” posts at least on the home page. Though I expect that I’ll still have a 2:1 ratio of personal to professional posts, those posts will just be a layer down. I also hope to do more Friday Funny posts.
Selected Statistics
So, here are selected statistics from the three different methods I’m using to track use. One is the analytics package that WordPress makes available from their site, the other is an addon called SitePress, and lastly there’s Google Analytics. It is possible that all of these have not been runnig concurrently. I’ll see what happens in 2010–if the numbers become much more similar across the various analytics packages.
In any case, the search terms and popular pages are interesting. My post on Cool Photo Effects: Tilt Shift and Movies When and How I Want them were the top stories over the year. And my posts on Microsoft Office were surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) popular. Guess lots of folks had similar problems.
And I can definitely say from personal experience Search Engine Optimization (SEO) works. I have a sitemap published in a format that Google understands, and I have an addon that notifies Google (and other search engines) when I post a new entry. Without fail, the next day my Google Alerts lets me know it’s found my new post.
| WordPress Site Stats | StatPress | Google Analytics | |
| Visitors | N/A | 3321 | 2936 | Pageviews | 6449 | 17914 | 4841 |
| RSS | N/A | 5112 | 4718 |
| Comment RSS | N/A | 523 | N/A |
| Page | WordPress Site Stats | StatPress | Google Analytics |
| Homepage | N/A | 4173 | 1316+88 |
| Cool Photo Effects: Tilt Shift | 336 | N/A | 338 |
| Movies when and how *I* want them! | 295 | 678 | 195 |
| Curriculum Vitae | 194 | N/A | 107 |
| About | 169 | N/A | 96 |
| WebEx is Stupid | 147 | N/A | 147 |
| Projects | 129 | N/A | 72 |
| Netflix History Analyzer | N/A | 900 | N/A |
| Messaging or Why I’m Posting | N/A | 517 | N/A |
| Top Search Terms | StatPress | Google Analytics |
| cool photo effects | 220 | 281 |
| Brandon Muramatsu | 65 | 89 |
| things that make you say hmm | 18 | 46 |
| muramatsu | 13 | N/A |
| office 12.2.3 | 12 | 18 |
| mura.org | N/A | 43 |
| mura@mura.org | N/A | 34 |