I’ve been looking through my blog stats lately, and not only am I not stagnating, as I thought erroneously since relying on Sitemeter for the quick-and-easy stats, but it appears that my readership has grown since I switched to WordPress. I had a feeling it would.
Twelve percent of you are reading this site via an RSS reader. One of the first things I did upon request of one of you was to allow my posts to be read in full via RSS. Am I right in assuming you’d like to keep it that way, or do you think I should go back to presenting the post titles and making you click through to read?
This is an important question, because one of the things preventing me from joining Pajamas Media is that they want full control over my RSS feed, including my only being allowed to send post titles via RSS.
The other thing I’m starting to wonder about: I don’t get a whole lot of referrers anymore. Bruce Hill told me tonight that I’m the Dave Van Ronk of bloggers–that much of my audience is other bloggers. Even if that’s true, that doesn’t mean you can’t throw me a link once in a while. I mean, geez.
But I digress.
Visit are up 16% in October over September (which was up 11% over August), and that’s just counting the first thirteen days. (I’m going by average daily visits.) Pageviews have skyrocketed, but I attribute that to the WP format, which isn’t as amenable to scrolling up and down as my old hand-coded HTML was. You can still read a week at a time using the archive links in the right sidebar, though. I’m trying to put copy in the excerpt slot so that you can skim through synopses and decide whether or not to click through. That’s me, always giving you the choice to ignore me or not.
I’m debating whether to solicit a guest blogger or two to keep my audience happy during the daytime. I have a job that actually expects me to work during the day; a post at lunchtime is the most I can squeeze in, and frankly, I’d rather eat lunch away from my desk than sit in front of a computer and blog. I could also simply prepares posts ahead of time and schedule them to post during work hours, but, well, that takes a hell of a lot of planning. It seems the best I can do these days is write one or two posts before I go to bed and save them for the morning post. (And that makes me on time for work, too, so I imagine it’s going to be the wave of the future.)
How the hell do people actually manage to blog from work? The only job I ever had where I could blog was a contracting job in web where I had downtime while waiting for page approvals. Every other job I’ve ever had has involved, well, working. Like, the whole shift.
But I digress again.
Yeah, I’m thinking about a daytime guest blogger. If you’re interested, you know my email address. So do the spammers, but I like you better.
I would prefer full postings on RSS… I must wonder though, why Pajamas Media is unable to truncate the feeds themselve. You can use Feedburner and give them the RSS feed they want…
Just a suggestion.
They ask you for !?WHAT?! with the site feeds? And people are willing to go along with that? *sigh*
By the way just had a look at RSS feed and for your blog it wants to know whether RSS 2.0 RSS.92 or Atom. What would you like? :-)
If it’s of any worth, the one thing I dislike about Instapundit is that many a time I have wasted my time linking to just a title to find that the post is of no interest.
I do full page views and it does cut into the Sitemeter stats, never asked what anyone preferred? Should. Will PJ Media have posts once it gets started that is? Sounds elite like the Cotillion.
I presume that they want title-only feeds to force people to go to the sites and view the ads. If you get money from them, it might be worth it to you, but…
I despise title-only feeds. It is rare when titles tell me enough to know if I want to read a post. The best compromise IMHO is a feed that provides the first paragraph. If I like what it says, it is worth it to click-through, and if I don’t care, I can ignore it. I used to try to read Josh Marshall’s TPM, but his feed doesn’t give me anything near enough to tell whether which if any of his posts are worth the trouble.
Meryl, I don’t understand enough about this to cast an informed vote. Suffice it to say that I use Bloglines to access your Blog. Until today, I was unable to get an up-to-date view of your recent articles. That didn’t matter to me much, though, as I simply used the Bloglines link to your Website, and read your stuff directly.
Hugh
I think the title-only feed restriction will be one of the first staples to blow on the ever-growing stomach of network blogging.
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