Admin: Milestones and tweaks

There have been a couple of major milestones for the blog recently. Since installing the wordpress.com stats tracker on the blog, which I did back un July last year, the blog has attracted more than 110,000 views!

Also, since Flickr installed a stats tool a few months ago, to allow users to track the number of views of their images, my photos have racked up an all time view count of almost 109,000 views on Flickr!

Additionally, thanks in part to the recent boost in traffic from my DPS posts, and the photo projects I run here, my feed subscriber numbers has been climbing at an accelerating rate, now nearly 870 and closing in on 1000 readers. Feedburner also tells me that items on my feed have been viewed more than 73,000 times, and users have clicked to read more on 4,500 posts – not bad considering that the whole post gets sent via the feed.

Template tweaking

I’ve decided to get rid of the Skribit widget, which allows readers to suggest and vote on topics for me to write about. Only one topic suggestion was ever contributed, and only three people ever voted on it. Admittedly it wasn’t on long, but certainly long enough to determine that it wasn’t worth the valuable front-page space that it used.

I’d like to know what you all think about the Twitter feed at the bottom right of the front page. This essentially publishes my most recent five tweets (you can read about what Twitter is on this post). I’m finding Twitter fun, and a useful (if yet to mature) tool for networking and communicating between blog posts. I do think it, or something like it, will become a very powerful and widely used tool in the future. It takes the best of texting on your phone and blogging, and merges it into a powerful one-to-many micro publishing utility.

However, if you’re not using a Twitter-enabled tool of some kind to follow what your friends are saying, the instant access power of the messages are lost. I wonder if this makes the Twitter feed on the front page of the blog impotent? I would very much like to know what you all think of the twitter feed, so I’d appreciate it if you could take a moment to answer the single question poll below (RSS feed readers will need to click through to this post).

[poll=5]

If you use Twitter, but aren’t following my stream, add me! :) My username is neilcreek

Thanks for that! Just a couple of quick notes. I’ve updated the blog’s theme to Options 1.1.2, which has a couple of minor improvements, and fixes the problem with the category tabs not working. A newer version is expected soon which is planned to have even more useful features. Also, I’m planning to update to the new version of wordpress soon. And finally, I’m thinking of adding a universal footer to the site with some useful information, so keep an eye open for that.

See you soon with more photo talk!