Skip to main content

dot com parties, search engines and newsfeeds

Yesterday I was at my first dot com party, I think. Search engine people (developers and optimalizers), marketing people, designers, concept developers, interaction experts and consultants, and free beer/wine for everyone.

It was enjoyable to mingle around and talk to these people that thrive on the borders of my own industry (being software programming). But I also got a spooky feeling of déjà vu. Might be a sign of things to come. I do think we have a bubble burst ahead of us, maybe less then three years from now, maybe even this year. It depends on whether we, the industry as a whole, will be able to stabilize our growth in time.

Enough doom's day speculation. Talking to all these bloggers I began thinking about my statistics and news-feed (those of you who are more observant noticed that I outsourced the feed to FeedBurner when I upgraded to the new Blogger. This was mainly for the purpose of quick and easy feed statistics.

However, I've noticed a recent drop in hits/visits. According to my new year's resolution I want to achieve 200 weekly visits by the end of this year. I recently had a short bounce over 100, but after that it has dropped and stabilized around 80.



At the same time I've seen the FeedBurner number of subscribers rise to 26. I don't know how much these subscribers read my blog. I would think FeedBurner can't really tell either since they are continually pinged by various blog aggregators, so no point in measuring hits there.



Update: Found another interesting graph (number of FB subscribers):



A FeedBurner upgrade promises to give me the real numbers. I'm gonna try out the free trial and see what I get. They claim that by loading a small GIF into the blog-post they can track how many views a blog-post gets. If that works it sounds like a pretty accurate measurement of blog traffic. I'll post back with the results in a couple o' weeks.

With TotalStats you can see how many times each item in your feed has been viewed and clicked. Views are tracked by using a 1×1 tracking gif that when opened in a newsreader will render and we'll be able to count a view for you. Clicks are simply clicks on the headline of the item which will bring readers back to your site.
I like what this guy has done with abstracting away the link to traffic his feeds with some web server configing. Unfortunately, being hosted at Blogger doesn't leave me much control of the .htaccess file.

There is also some critisisim about. What does happen if FeedBurner goes out of business? Will you guys be able to find back to this blog and get a new newsfeed url? I think so :)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant

Encrypting and Decrypting with Spring

I was recently working with protecting some sensitive data in a typical Java application with a database underneath. We convert the data on its way out of the application using Spring Security Crypto Utilities . It "was decided" that we'd be doing AES with a key-length of 256 , and this just happens to be the kind of encryption Spring crypto does out of the box. Sweet! The big aber is that whatever JRE is running the application has to be patched with Oracle's JCE  in order to do 256 bits. It's a fascinating story , the short version being that U.S. companies are restricted from exporting various encryption algorithms to certain countries, and some countries are restricted from importing them. Once I had patched my JRE with the JCE, I found it fascinating how straight forward it was to encrypt and decrypt using the Spring Encryptors. So just for fun at the weekend, I threw together a little desktop app that will encrypt and decrypt stuff for the given password

What I've Learned After a Month of Podcasting

So, it's been about a month since I launched   GitMinutes , and wow, it's been a fun ride. I have gotten a lot of feedback, and a lot more downloads/listeners than I had expected! Judging the numbers is hard, but a generous estimate is that somewhere around 2000-3000 have listened to the podcast, and about 500-1000 regularly download. Considering that only a percentage of my target audience actively listen to podcasts, these are some pretty good numbers. I've heard that 10% of the general population in the western world regularly listen to podcasts (probably a bit higher percentage among Git users), so I like to think I've reached a big chunk of the Git pros out there. GitMinutes has gathered 110 followers on Twitter, and 63, erm.. circlers on Google+, and it has received 117 +'es! And it's been flattr'ed twice :) Here are some of the things I learned during this last month: Conceptually.. Starting my own sandbox podcast for trying out everythin

Git tools for keeping patches on top of moving upstreams

At work, we maintain patches for some pretty large open source repositories that regularly release new versions, forcing us to update our patches to match. So far, we've been using basic Git operations to transplant our modifications from one major version of the upstream to the next. Every time we make such a transplant, we simply squash together the modifications we made in the previous version, and land it as one big commit into the next version. Those who are used to very stringent keeping of Git history may wrinkle their nose at this, but it is a pragmatic choice. Maintaining modifications on top of the rapidly changing upstream is a lot of work, and so far we haven't had the opportunity to figure out a more clever way to do it. Nor have we really suffered any consequences of not having an easy to read history of our modifications - it's a relatively small amount of patches, after all. With a recent boost in team size, we may have that opportunity. Also the need for be

The Git Users Mailing List

A year ago or so, I came across the Git-user mailing list (aka. "Git for human beings"). Over the year, I grew a little addicted to helping people out with their Git problems. When the new git-scm.com webpage launched , and the link to the mailing list had disappeared, I was quick to ask them to add it again . I think this mailing list fills an important hole in the Git community between: The Git developer mailing list git@vger.kernel.org  - which I find to be a bit too hard-core and scary for Git newbies. Besides, the Majordomo mailing list system is pretty archaic, and I personally can't stand browsing or searching in the Gmane archives. The IRC channel #git on Freenode, which is a bit out-of-reach for people who never experienced the glory days of IRC. Furthermore, when the channel is busy, it's a big pain to follow any discussion. StackOverflow questions tagged git , these come pretty close, but it's a bit hard to keep an overview of what questio