It seems that I've been doing this a year now.
(Well, that's technically not true. Way before I knew was blogging was, I was already doing it but I didn't know it at the time. I got the idea from Alan Cox. My old on-line journal covered my doings from part of 1999 through 2002. Of course, only a few friends were reading it. It had no syndication. I didn't know what RSS was. I didn't know I should know. And the software was just 2 simple Perl scripts, a Makefile, and a single table in MySQL. Like Radio, it build pages statically and pushed them to the server via FTP or rsync.)
Getting Started
I started this blog at the suggestion of Jon Udell, originally playing with UserLand's Radio. I gave up on Radio after a few days of remembering why I didn't want to depend on Windows for something so important. In fact that first attempt at blogging is still hosted on UserLand's server.
A month or so after I began, we started syndicating my Linux entries and MySQL entries on the Linux Magazine web site.
My first post was about hardware and on-line communities. Since then I've moved on to a MovableType powered blog hosted on one of my co-located servers. And now I write entries in a variety of categories: MySQL, Linux, Perl, Random funny stuff, etc.
Late last year, I also started my flying blog to document my glider training and subsequent fun in the air. Later this year I'll begin training for my power training and continue to log my progress there.
Traffic
Let's look at some numbers.
In the past 365 days, I've posted roughly 732 entries. That averages about 2 per day.
My top 10 posts (based on the number of times viewed in the past year) are listed below. You can hover over the link to see the number of hits each has had as of today.
- RedHat 8.0 ISO Mirror(s)
- MySQL Full-Text Search Rocks My World
- FreeBSD or Linux for your MySQL Server?
- DVD Player Hacks
- The 10 Habits of Highly Annoying Bloggers
- MySQL, Linux, FreeBSD, and Swap Space
- Revisiting FreeBSD vs. Linux for MySQL
- MySQL, Linux, and Thread Caching
- Penis Puppets
- Yahoo Gets Slashdotted
A lot of those, like DVD Player Hacks, RedHat ISOs, and Penis Puppets are mostly thanks to Google. Others, such as the MySQL related posts and the 10 Habits are thanks to lots of bloggers linking to them. The MySQL Full-Text story was linked from the MySQL home page for a while. That generated a lot of hits.
It's interesting to note that no one force drove the bulk of traffic. Some was from other bloggers, some from Google, and some for other publicity. Notable entries are: Slashdot, Scripting News, Daemon News, MySQL AB, Barrapunto, Jon Udell, Phil Windley, and so on.
In the last year:
- The front page of my blog has been hit 207,377 times, resulting in 15,619,459,294 bytes transferred (not counting images or style sheets). That's over 14GB.
- My RSS feeds have been requested 1,148,625 times, totalling 7,316,111,247 bytes sent--nearly 7GB.
- I've been visited by 245,111 unique IP addresses.
- I've served a total of 2,771,246 requests across all archives, indexes, and RSS feeds--not including images or style sheets. That's 40,447,281,983 bytes--nearly 38GB
- When all versions are combined, the most popular aggregators are NetNewsWire and Radio UserLand.
Since I log all traffic into MySQL, that was pretty easy to figure out. :-)
People
I had no idea it would last this long. And I wasn't prepared for
all the benefits I'd reap from blogging. I've met
a
lot of interesting people via this blog--to many to mention. If you
consider the time and energy that I put into reading other blogs, this
has been quite an undertaking--but a completely worthwhile one.
My blogging in some way or another influenced a few others to jump on the bandwagon. In no particular order:
- Brandt Fundak (college friend, former roommate)
- Dan Isaacs (college friend and self-proclaimed asshole)
- Steve Friedl (unix whiz)
- Kasia Trapszo (the original Unix Girl)
- Morgan Deters (college friend, perpetual student)
- Michael Radwin (Yahoo)
- Derek Balling (former Yahoo, perpetual cynic
- Josh Woodward (from college, co-worker at Marathon and Yahoo, etc.)
- Katie Stanton (former Yahoo co-worker, now at Google)
If there are others, please let me know. If you don't belong on this list, tell me. My memory can be fuzzy at times.
Trivia: Dan and Brandt's blogs are hosted on this server too.
Okay, I'm done rambling. For now.
Posted by jzawodn at June 20, 2003 10:52 PM
Happy Birthday :)
A nice history. The Radio Userland story has been a short-story, your MT blog may become a long novel, perhaps like Harry Potter. I am excited to see your next edition named "Jeremy Zawodny and the Order of the flying Blog" :)
Congratulations from germany.
Gerald
One remark concerning your statistics. The top 10 posts are based on the number of times viewed in the past year - that must not the optimal measure for this kind of stats. A lot of people just may have made a curious look - because they were in the list. The ranking of this articles in search engines might have been better - because they were in the list. Alltogether that's a kind of backcoupling. So what's about a test. Just make a reset and clear your list.
I think it's an accurate measure for most of the posts. I've been watching the access patterns for my popular stuff. Aside from the random ones that have long-term viability because of misleading Google searches ("dvd player hacks" and such), the stuff that's popular on its own merits is obvious within the first 3-4 days.
I wouldn't use search engine ranking. After all PageRank is Dead, right? :-)
> I wouldn't use search engine ranking. After all PageRank is Dead, right? :-)
You should'nt say that too loud - you just got back your number 1 position at google for the keyword "jeremy" ;-)
PageRank is like the Phoenix - coming back from the ashes. It's just as mystic as a firebird in an Harry Potter novel. So perhaps you will have to write a new article, i suggest the subject should be "Jeremy Zawodny and the Order of the PageRank" :)
Hey Jeremy,
Are you still using MovableType and do you recommend it (for a reasonably clue-enabled user)?
PS <fawn>Love your stuff<fawn />
