You have State of the Union Address, State of the University Address, and I will have my very own State of my Blog essay. This blog site is now coming to about 20 months old. It has grown tremendously over the months. While in January 2008 we served 10343 page views to 2502 visitors a month, for the month of November 2008 we are now serving 36362 page views to 9735 visitors. That’s over triple the traffic in less than a year. Bandwidth growth is even more exponential: 281MB in January 2008, 3.7GB in November 2008.
It is phenomenal how blogging has grown for me. ZitSeng.com boasts PageRank 4. It has become top hit for a bunch of interesting keywords. One thing that quite surprised me is the number of iPhone searchers that are directed to my site, when I don’t really have plenty of first-hand iPhone information (particularly since I don’t own one). But how will complain about traffic coming your way. Traffic is good especially when it helps drive my Adsense income.
Speaking of Adsense, I started on the programme at the end of December 2007. Without taking up a lot of my effort, it is generating some appreciable income. By “appreciable”, I don’t mean it is giving me a sizable income, but that it is something noticeable that I don’t loose interest altogether in the programme. I’ve gotten my second cheque, and in 2009, I’m looking forward to receiving a steady stream of pocket money. (Don’t be too envious, it isn’t enough to fund any hobby of mine… although I would like to dream that it will soon.)
WordPress is a really fun blogging platform. I’ve now moved to the 2.7 Release Candidate 1. There was some new UI quirks that are annoying me, but overall there are some important enhancements that I have wanted to see. I am beginning to feel slowness taking over the site. I’m not sure if it is bandwidth, or that WordPress has accumulated too much crud. This is something I will have to look into soon.
This year, I’ve also spun my own WordPress theme. After procrastinating for a long while, I’ve finally put together what I envision to be the perfect theme. It is called Simplicity, because it is simple. I’m really happy that many people seem to like it too. A simple Googling research will show the number of sites using the Simplicity theme.
I looked a little into the web analytics for this site. A particularly interesting observation is how far the distribution of browsers used to visit this site deviates from the “norm” on the Internet. Over at Wikipedia, the browser uage share given for Q4 2008 puts IE at 71.11% (46.1% here), Firefox at 20.06% (34.2% here) and Safari at 6.62% (11.9% here). Clearly we have a very different profile of visitors here.
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