I’m off to facilitate at the fraternity’s annual Leadership Institute in northern Indianapolis. I’ve scheduled a few posts to be updated while I am away. I’ll be back in the middle of next week and then will resume regular updates. In the mean time enjoy this awesome picture about leadership.
For those who are curious, here is a breakdown of the most popular posts in the past 90 days. I’m not sure why, but the Daft Punk Console post is by far the most popular. Popularity is calculated based on a combination of views, comments and other criteria. From now on the sidebar will keep tally of the most popular posts.
1. Monday Morning Distraction: Daft Punk Console
2. The Complete Story of How I Won a Free Ford Fiesta (for 6 months)
3. Eminem – We Made You
4. Kanye West responds to South Park
5. Traffic Report March 2009
6. What the car will look like
7. Good Idea or Bad Idea: Vibram Five Finger Shoes
8. How I Almost Wrecked the Ford Fiesta
9. Monday Morning Distraction: Civony
10. Officially Announcing the NYC Blog Launch
I’ve been extremely busy the last few weeks. I am taking the LSAT on Monday. I’ve been posting almost 100% videos lately because it is fast and easy. Starting next week I’ll be back to more regular updates. I have a few original pieces I am thinking about, once I have more time I’ll start working on those.
Take a few moments and check out Outside The Letterbox, a new blog on the network run by Brandon. This brings the total of hosted blogs up to six. As always if you are interested in getting hosted, let me know.
Let me start by saying that these statistics don’t tell the whole story. There are four measures of traffic. Unique visitors, Total visits, Page views and hit. The first three are self explanatory. Hit are “each file sent to a browser by a web server is an individual hit.” Obviously hits are a very inaccurate measure of traffic. The month of March saw 4,360 unique visitors, 10,988 total visits, 68,498 page views and 251,815 hits. Numbers were up significantly from the first two months of the year.
The following is based on page views and is most certainly not an accurate measure of traffic between the blogs. How inaccurate is this? I won’t bore you with the exact details of how this is calculated, but I took the time to calculate the difference between page views of a blog and unique visitors. The numbers are way off. I’m thinking margin of error of at least 10%. Having said that, it is still fun to posts these graphs and let the trash talking ensue.
This will be the last traffic report for a while. After spending sometime going through these numbers and comparing them to ‘Gate’s numbers, I have decided to find an entirely new method of tracking traffic. If you have suggestions, let me know.
Brandon Hatfield and Lee Grisham, two of my fraternity brothers from college have launched the 5th blog on the KyleLibra.com Blog Network. I told them I would give them a few days to get it set up and figure things out before I announce it to the world. It has been five days and I think that is plenty. Lee has yet to make a post, but Hatfield has made three. Starting in September both of them will be living in New York City together, hence the name NYC Blog. You can check out the blog for yourself by going here.
Ford is running a contest to give out 100 of the 2011 Ford Fiesta to people to test out and then tell the world about through social media. This is my contest entry. With only a few hundred entries and the deadline two hours away I figure I at least have a shot. The only thing I can guarantee is that my entry is better than this one.
1997 – Paul McCartney knighted
1993 – Janet Reno confirmed as first female Attorney General
1986 – NFL Adopts Instant Replay
Oh yeah, and I was born. I should also note that there have been three terrorists attacks on my birthday. Weird, I know. I also share my birthday with some interesting people: Rupert Murdoch, Antonin Scalia, Douglas Adams, Joey Buttafuoco, Jesse Jackson Jr. and Johnny Knoxville.
It has been a really long time time since I’ve made one of these updates. I am going to try to start doing these about every three months. The main reason I put this off is that I had fallen pretty far in the rankings and wanted a chance to redeem myself and my blog. When Memorial Day Weekend rolls around you all can start bugging me for another update.
Unfortunately I am still #2 on my own blog network. I’m not sure what to say about that.
‘Gate Blog – 48.1%
KyleLibra.com – 25.3%
Great American Sports Blog – 13.3%
Hamby’s Blog – 11.0%
Richmond’s Blog – 2.0%
The most obvious conclusion I can draw from this data is the relationship of updates to traffic. If there is nothing to look at, no one will visit. The quality of updates probably factors in as well, but there isn’t really a good way to measure that.
For those of you who aren’t big on twitter, here is another reason to get with the program. A whopping 17.6% of my blog’s traffic came directly from links I tweeted. This was the main reason I was finally able to pull back ahead of the Sports Blog.
When I looked at specific ip addresses viewing the blogs it became apparent that Hamby looks at his own blog the most causing his traffic to be slightly inflated. I am probably guilty of this as well, but with the constant travel it isn’t really easy to figure out. I didn’t factor this in to the graph, but I might in the future if I can figure out an easy way to do so.
I would really like to see some other blogs join the network. If you are interested, let me know.
Update: After a good suggestion by a friend, I am going to start tracking month to month data of the blogs through a line graph. This way we can see who is going up and down in traffic in relation.
I have decided to resurrect the blog. I have updated my final post appropriately. I am not like Sylvester Stallone. Instead I’d like to think of myself as Michael Jordan, I retired at my peak and didn’t realize it.
What started as a software update for the blogs I hosted turned into playing around with some scripts on this site, which turned into some posts, which turned into this. I will be making posts fairly regularly until I decide on a format. There are a few new things that have been added such as the “film ranking” and “best of” pages. Keep watching for more changes!
Any suggestions or comments would be appreciated.