ArticlesOn April 10, OddThinking celebrates its first anniversary.
Girtby.net’s first anniversary was celebrated with a retrospective of the year, and I found that to be quite fun, so I pay homage to that format here.
In the last year, there have been a total of 183 posts, 645 comments and over 2600 spams.
Highlights by Month
April
First Post – it still remains one of my favourite posts. I wish I could still write them like I could in the old days.
May
First puzzle analysis. This post gains an enduring popularity that surprises me and then disappoints me, as I think there are other posts more deserving.
My first personal attack. Never been particular proud of that one. I have thought about deleting it.
First comment from someone I haven’t met… I think.
June
Hugely prolific month.
First post to mention local politics
First time I realise (to my disappointment) that geeky subjects get more response than non-geeky ones.
First swear word (“damned”)
July
I posted a comment to Google Blogoscoped that got referenced as a comment on Coding Horror, and before I knew it I had thousands of readers checking out CLOSE THAT WINDOW!. So now, not only is one of my favourites, but it is one of the most popular. It’s all been downhill from there!
Alastair reports that he noticed a surge in his blog traffic just from referers from that page in my blog. Never been more proud of OddThinking!
Looking through the fossil record, the earliest I can prove I received comment spam was July 12. Suspect it was really earlier, but evidence lost.
August
First surreptitious retraction
First WordPress plugin: EmailShroud
September
First “hot bot favourite”: an article about plugins which bots seem to hit disproportionately more often than humans.
First use of the “Aside” Style: The practice of including an “aside” to the main blog thread proved to be so common, I created a special style to make it clearer.
First accusation of interfering with elephants.
Resolved to make blog articles stick to one point. Comments rate surged. However, correlation does equal causation.
October
First use of the F-word (That word is “fuck”, in case you weren’t aware.)
November
First book review
First graph
First appeal to the readers for info… and it fails miserably.
December
I write a 200-word post claiming no-one cares about dreams. I get a heap of comments totalling 600-words. So, I follow up with a post saying people do care about dreams, and include one of my favourite anecdotes. No-one comments. I am clearly a blogger who knows what his readers want…
Resolved to make titles less punny.
January
Most prolific month ever. Over one post per day.
Series on Rational 1000 starts. OddThinking is soon the top link for “Rational 1000” on Google. Too bad no-one ever searches for it.
First guest author
February
Most overtly political blog article.
Finally another topic to rival Sudoku in search popularity: Kakuro.
March
Second WordPress plugin: CRCRLF
Statistics
Here are some of the statistics I pulled from the logs.
Most Read Pages
- EmailShroud 1.0.1
- Pursuing Sudoku with Pseudo-code
- A Kakuro Solver
- CLOSE THAT WINDOW!
- Browser Comparison: Password Management
- 20Q
- WordPress versus RSS versus Bloglines
Most of those articles above are geeky articles. What’s popular when people aren’t in the mood for geek, and just want a story?
Most Read (Non-Geek) Stories
- Indoor Marbleous Championships
- The Doctor’s Son
- Statistical Outliers
- Spaghetti Express
- Air-Traffic Control – In Space
- Ice-Cream Flavours and Personal Bests
Another way of assessing a post is by many comments it provokes. Let’s look at the statistics there.
Most Commented Posts
- The Case for Case-Preserving, Case-Insensitivity
- WordPress versus RSS versus Bloglines
- Small shift in OddThinking Look & Feel
- EmailShroud 1.0.1
- Marking Up Sections and Headings
Who is making all those comments?
Most Prolific Commenters
- Me!
- Alastair from Girtby.net
- Aristotle Pagaltzis from Plasmasturm
- Sunny Kalsi from The USS Quad Damage
- Alan Green from Cardboard.nu
- Casey Whitelaw from CaseyPorn
- Chris from Brainsnorkel
- Casinos from a variety of web-sites offering Texas Hold’em
Thank you to each and every one of you (except the many elephant-interferers who sign themselves “Casinos”.)
The Extreme Lengths I Will Go To
I played with a number of styles of post.
I never did achieve Girtby’s brevity.
Here’s as close as I got:
Shortest Posts
- Pots and Puns
- The Trouble with the Web
- Fodder first time in Sydney
- Pingbacks are back
- Small shift in OddThinking Look & Feel
On the other hand, I wrote some doozies:
Longest Posts
- Comparing Strings: An Analysis of Diff Algorithms
- Business Presentations and the Cognitive Style of Edward Tufte
- Analysis of the Australian Bush Game
- Revoking Australian Citizenship
- The No-Nos and Yes-Yeses of the Nonogram solution
Bots Statistics
The top 70 bots (identified by manual inspection of User Agent string) account for 16% of all visits, and 73% of all page hits.
Searchiest Search Engines
(i.e. whose bots crawl the most)
- Yahoo!
- MSN
- Bloglines
- AskJeeves
While not visiting me as often as Yahoo!, Google referred more people to my site.
Search Results
A fair number of visitors come to OddThinking straight from a search engine. A record is kept of what they were looking for when they got here.
The most popular search terms change each month… slightly…
Most Popular Search Terms, by Month
| Month | Top Search Term | Runner-Up Search Term |
|---|---|---|
| Apr 05 | statistical outliers | avrack skins |
| May 05 | sudoku | statistical outliers |
| Jun 05 | sudoku | wordpress google sitemap |
| Jul 05 | sudoku | statistical outliers |
| Aug 05 | sudoku | nonograms |
| Sep 05 | sudoku | codewords puzzles |
| Oct 05 | sudoku | fill-a-pix/statistical outliers |
| Nov 05 | sudoku code | wordpress filters |
| Dec 05 | sudoku code | 20q algorithm |
| Jan 06 | sudoku code | spaghetti express |
| Feb 06 | kakuro solver | sudoku code |
| Mar 06 | kakuro solver | riddle how could the boy be his son |
OddThinking gets the top billing on Google for “Spaghetti Express” for a cute little story. I believe the searchers are really looking for one of various restaurants of the same name.
These aren’t the only searchers who aren’t going to find what they were looking for on OddThinking. Here is a list of other search terms that seem to alight at OddThinking.
Most Misguided Search-Engine Referrals By Month
| Month | Search Term |
|---|---|
| Apr 05 | how many decisions do we make each day |
| May 05 | we are all unique |
| Jun 05 | how do you make a 7 year old cry twice |
| Jul 05 | can paint shower -bridal -baby -curtain |
| Aug 05 | chrysler flaking paint |
| Sep 05 | distinguishing facts about my father |
| Oct 05 | battlestar gallactica plot synopses episode 2005 |
| Nov 05 | the data at the root level is invalid |
| Dec 05 | black names shithead |
| Jan 06 | women are boring |
| Feb 06 | how much is 300000 bytes |
| Mar 06 | find a nickname for julian |
Posting/Commenting Frequency
The following graph links together several statistics about how prolific I was, and how prolific you were. It’s a bit complex, so I explain it below.
The tops of the vertical bars show how many posts I made per day. They should be measured against the scale on the left.
In the first couple of months, I tried to be prolific. I had tried blogging before and was rather sporadic. I figured there was a good chance that the blogging bug would leave me after two or three months. I wanted enough posts by then that if someone stumbled across my blog there would be enough posts to make the visit worthwhile. It turned out that I underestimated how much I would be able to churn out in later months.
It is hard to see much of a trend here. After thinking about it for a while, I suspect there’s a strong inverse correlation between the number of posts I make and the number of photographs I take. (Each photo needs processing work to be done on the computer before I host it on a photography web-site. Photography and blogging have the same bottleneck: available time in front of the computer.)
The green and blue boxes show how the posts are split between the posts that never received a response and those that did receive comments.
It’s not entirely clear what my success metrics are for this blog, but avoiding “the sounds of crickets” seems to be one of them. I did a good job at provoking responses in September/October, but not so well in the more prolific month January.
The light blue line (using the scale on the right-hand axis) shows how many comments I receive per day. Unsurprisingly, it is strongly correlated to the number of posts I made. I really enjoy receiving comments, so that’s another number I want to increase.
The dotted yellow line has no scale shown. It compares how many page hits I have had each month, since I started measuring at the end of September. It seems to show correlation with the number of posts, combined with a healthy growth rate.
Profits
Q: Ignoring inflation, how long before Google Adsense will pay enough money to buy my own weight in chocolate bars?
A: 125 years.
Adsense pays less than 20% of my hosting fees. I am not quite giving up my day job just yet!
Summing Up
Lots of thanks to my regular 5-star readers and to everyone who provided comments.
Here’s to another year. I have already exceeded the life-expectancy of this blog about four times over, so who knows – I might even make it!
Comment by Aristotle Pagaltzis on April 10, 2006
I was so, so disappointed when I saw that. After the first couple paragraphs, I was baiting my breath to get to the end of the article to post a comment saying “it’s all downhill from birth.â€
Oh well.
It’s all downhill from birth.
Because, I kind of noticed the same. I was recently going through my posts, and found that lately, the bulk of stuff is just quotations, and of the posts which aren’t, very few are nowadays the sort of musings that I love looking back at, like the various wiki-themed reflections. I think the most recent really good one is the one about URI design from December, four months ago.
I’ve written good stuff in the meantime, sure, but they’re all do-ish articles, not think-ish ones. If that makes any sense. And it feels kind of lame.
I think the culprit was making a feed for the log, because it forced me to have titles, and titled entries work very differently from the more stream-of-consciousness style logging that I used to do. I don’t know if I can explain the difference very well, as it’s sort of subtle: titled articles with permalinks are more like individual units, whereas my previous writing was more of a contiguous, if meandering and somewhat fractured monologue. (Note that length of entry doesn’t come into play at all; the old entries I still like were no shorter than the ones I write now.)
Hmm. Expect to see an edited version of this comment up on my log.
Comment by Aristotle Pagaltzis on May 18, 2006
(PS.: I can’t believe I wrote I was “baiting†my breath.)
Comment by Julian on May 18, 2006
That’s okay. I always figured “baited breath” meant it smelled of fish.
p.s. Still waiting for the blog article!
Comment by Cassie on May 22, 2006
What chocolate bars are you referring to? Are you going top shelf, economy, or somewhere in between? And would you buy them all at once? (If this is the case, you could invest the money in the meantime, so it would take less time to build the required wealth, plus you could probably get a discount by buying in bulk.) Also, losing weight would decrease the amount of chocolate required and hence the money/time taken. By employing these strategies, and maybe some others (a good financial adviser can help), I reckon you could get those chocolate bars before you die (unless you get murdered and raped by an evil pact of sex-crazed necrophiliac blog-readers in the near future).
Comment by Julian on May 31, 2006
Cassie,
You raise some interesting and important questions.
I had selected Mars Bars as canonical representative of a chocolate bar – not top shelf, but not a family block of milk chocolate either.
Unfortunately, that was the end of the rigour in my calculations, as I neither accurately priced the bars nor did I accurately weigh myself.
I fear that any good financial adviser would laugh me out of their office until I finish performing these two basic pieces of research.
Comment by Cassie on May 31, 2006
I try to help.
I think buying your weight in chocolate from the proceeds of blog advertising is a worthwhile pursuit, and one that I would actively encourage.
Obviously I don’t have the necessary figures either, but I just want to warn you not to be too set on Mars Bar (or similar). The family block may be more financially viable, and there are still plenty of good options in this size.
However, the contrast between the lengths you will go to for other projects/analyses, and the obvious lack in this one, leads me to believe that you are not really serious about this project. That disappoints me.
BTW, a good financial adviser would laugh you out of their office at the mere mention of the project, regardless of whether you had completed the research.