John’s Jottings

It’s the One Year anniversary of John’s Jottings today. I started the weblog with the intention of learning about how this media could be applicable in business and to a degree I’ve begun to accomplish that - but I still have a long ways to go. I’ve learned about RSS, a bit more about CSS , have had the chance to dabble some in Perl and have learned how a hobby site like this can easily bring in a little revenue. Best of all I’ve actually found some enjoyment in writing.

Some statistics since my first article “Snow”:http://www.johnsjottings.com/archives/2002/12/06/snow.html which talked about a difficult return trip from New York:

* I’ve managed 266 articles for the year, significantly less than my goal of one a day. Need to work on that.
* 504 comments on those articles (most of the spam deleted, first by hand, now by MT-Blacklist)
* Top three commenters were me (84), “Joe”:http://www.joegrossberg.com/ (49) and “Henry”:http://vpis.blogspot.com/ (16).
* Top three most commented on articles were “Catfish Noodling”:http://www.johnsjottings.com/archives/2003/04/23/catfish_noodling.html (101), “Joe Millionaire”:http://www.johnsjottings.com/archives/2002/12/28/joe_millionaire.html (22) and “Recipe - Baklava”:http://www.johnsjottings.com/archives/2003/03/22/recipe_baklava.html (20).
* I’ve had 56 trackback pings to articles I’ve written.
* Top three trackbackers were Joe (6), “Tony”:http://tonytalkstech.com/ (6) and “Robert”:http://robertkbrown.com/ (4).
* Top three most pinged articles were “Now We’re Cooking with Gas”:http://www.johnsjottings.com/archives/2003/02/15/now_were_cooking_with_gas.html (10), and four others tied with 3.

In case you are interested, and for my own benefit next year, “here is the SQL”:http://www.johnsjottings.com/archives/sql.txt I used to generate these statistics.

Some more statistics from the web server logs:

* Average hits per day: 3,866
* Average visitors per day: 396
* Top five search terms (with current Google rank): “catfish noodling”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=catfish+noodling&btnG=Google+Search (1), “joe millionaire winner”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&c2coff=1&q=joe+millionaire+winner&btnG=Google+Search (1), “noodling”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&c2coff=1&q=noodling&btnG=Google+Search (2), “coq au vin”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&c2coff=1&q=coq+au+vin&btnG=Google+Search (2), “how to smoke a cigar”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&c2coff=1&q=how+to+smoke+a+cigar&btnG=Google+Search (6)

And finally some affiliate statistics:

* Total number of affiliate programs: 3
* Total revenue for the year: $268.60 (expecting much better next year!)
* Most referred book for Amazon: 0684850117 (5 books sold)

After a year of posting rebuild times had moved up to the 8 minute mark. Not acceptable. I’ve removed the daily and monthly archives which were really not being used at all and that has gotten my rebuild times down to around 3 minutes. Much better, but I suspect that sometime soon I’ll have to turn off comments on older articles and figure out how to design my pages such that I don’t have to rebuild old articles. Something for another time.

It’s been a good year, thanks to everyone for your support.