Bullet Points - State of the Blog

On October 12, 2006 I wrote my first post for this blog.  At the time, it wasn’t even hosted at this domain, nathanrice.org.  But over the past year, I’ve had a blast writing here, and I just wanted to give everyone a quick peek at what I’m seeing for the next 12 months of this blog’s existence.

STATS

The blog is averaging around 500 visitors per day, with another 100 who have subscribed to the RSS feed.

Some of those visitors are robots being registered as visitors.

Most of those visitors are coming from Google and very rarely stick around.  Unfortunately, the search terms and the target audience do not match up.  Most people wanting to find out about Intelligent Design don’t want to read a daily blog.  People looking for Christian topics find this blog a little too far to the “left” for their liking.  Regardless, I need a way to convert new users into daily readers.

About 60 of you (those who actually visit the site, as opposed to reading the feed) come pretty much daily.

NUMBERS

There have been 232 posts (not including this one) and 1,568 comments.  Not too bad.

Akismet has blocked 17,902 spam comments.

I’d post the most commented posts, but unfortunately the numbers are bloated due to our recent threadjacking problems.

READERS WITH WEBSITES

I like to share link love with people, so for those of you who have blogs and also read and comment on this blog, here is some link love for ya!  If I miss anyone, let me know and I’ll update the post.

• Ben Cotten
• George
• Matthew D.
• Matthew T.
• Rindy
• Paul
• Trent
• James McGrath
• William
• Shelly
• Austin - Great site, by the way
• Jalanda
• Rob

Again, let me know if I missed you!

THE FUTURE

So, since I’ve gone back to working full time at home, I’ve had the time to write here a bit more … although I have lacked for ideas.  So with this new time, I’ve been trying to think of ways to update this blog more often, but without having to write long commentaries or editorials.

The solution, I think, is to use asides, or what I will call sidenotes, as well as twittering.

This will give me the opportunity to write shorter, more concise posts.  Sometimes I have these thoughts throughout the day that don’t necessarily justify a long post.  They may even only be a quick one or two sentence thought.

So in order to facilitate this, the blog will need a redesign.  I already have the structure nailed down pretty well, but it may take me a while to figure out how to color it and make it pretty.  If you can help in that respect, I’d certainly appreciate it!  Here’s a sketch I did of the “wireframe” for the new design.  It may not help any, but I can see it in my mind.

So that’s the state of the blog.  It hasn’t been a raging success, but it has been fun!  I’m not nearly as obsessed with my stats or growing as I used to be.  I’ve realized that the potential for growth is limited in this niche, especially considering the fact that my niche is much smaller than most.  I’m really hoping to turn this blog into more of a personal webspace … I’ll still be writing editorial style posts, but just not quite as often.  Who knows, maybe that’ll work and the blog will grow more now?

Anyway, many of you have been readers for a while now … some since the very beginning.  For you, I am appreciative.

For fun, in the comments today, let us know how you found this blog?  What brought you here?  How did we meet?

Thanks guys and gals!  Have a great weekend!!!

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