How popular is Boris
After a nice day out yesterday – Mrs B dragged us to Moissac and Lauzerte against our will, but we all had a nice time despite ourselves – I thought I’d take a look at our site statistics to help me get over all the excitement.
The France This Way site has been getting an average of about 2,750 page views per day recently (wow, that’s a lot don’t you think!). This is the kind of fact that means little to anyone else but is very exciting for me, in part because I am (rather, was) an accountant and think statistics are interesting, and in part because I get excited rather easily.
Enthused by this incredible statistic, I thought I’d take a look at how many of those visitors were browsing Boris’ blog. Oops, small problem, seems I’d forgotten to include the statistics software in the blog. So I have no idea how many of you are out there, but more important – if there are quite a few of you I could just break through the 3,000 pageviews a day. Zippy doo daah! Time to crack open the champagne.
Arnold at Foreign Perspectives has already been giving me a hard time because I haven’t been ‘pinging’ my blog (’pinging’ tells the blog listing companies when a new entry has been posted, and is an important part of getting more readers). Arnold offers lots of useful advice and information about living in France, compared with my own ill-informed mumblings, and tries to put me straight when I start blathering. He’ll be singularly unimpressed when he sees I haven’t been looking at my statistics either.
Well, I thought it happened automatically, and it is supposed to, but something has gone wrong somewhere. Anyway, as of now pinging and statistics are going to be part of Boris’ daily life. And if 1,000s of you read this blog I’ll show off about it here, but if no-one does I probably won’t mention it. Or I’ll lie, in a desperate and pathetic attempt to boost my own ego.
Mrs B pointed out, a bit unkindly I thought, that statistics are nice but food on the table is nicer, so why didn’t I spend more time working on our gite website attracting holidaymakers and less time on frivolous chit chat, but I’m sure she was joking. At least, there is a slight possibility that she was joking, and an enormous chance she was serious, but that’s good enough for me.
Happily I have had a sudden inspiration of how to combine the two – make some money, and carry on wittering – and can now see immense wealth approaching our doorstep. Unfortunately, as I’ve said before, the French authorities will pinch it in social contributions before it reaches the letterbox, but the principle is the same.
More of this cunning plan next time I think, when I’ve thought it through. Have your wallets at the ready for an incredible opportunity.
Hi, I love your blog. But could you please syndicate your site in full, so those of us who use newsreaders can enjoy easier access? Thanks in advance!
Hi, glad you enjoy the blog, thanks!
Full syndication? Hmmm, sounds like an idea…but I don’t know what it means! Isn’t that what the RSS button at the top right does?
If you are asking if I can change it so that full articles are shown in the feed, instead of summaries, I would not be inclined to do that because unfortunately there are people in the world who misuse it – by including the full feed not just in a personal newsreader but in their own public website as their own material. So visitors surfing the internet are as likely to find the other site, with my musings, as they are to find my own site.
This for me is a bad thing! If that isn’t what you are asking just let me know
Cheers
Ah, the dilemmas of promoting a blog.
I originally used summaries on RSS feeds too but as anon says, it’s not popular for those using newsreaders (who make up a sizeable proportion of the blog readership community).
What I have been doing until a few days ago is to use the “copyright” Wordpress add-in which adds the appropriate little copyright message to all the RSS feeds. The problem with that is that what comes up on google news searches is the proper title for the post but the content is simply the copyright message which is fair to middling annoying and loses a LOT of readers.
Better perhaps is to use the “signature” add-in which is where my little copyright message lives at the moment. This has the side-effect of enabling me to include a mini-image in said signature and thereby count all the people reading the blog, which would be lost in the normal stats. Well, I’m assuming that this will work as I’ve not been running with the signature add-in enabled for long enough yet.
These don’t actually stop the growing number of sites which simply scrape off blog postings and create mini-sites full of it. For instance, my latest posting on Ryanair was picked up almost immediately by “Consumer News”, although on in extract form. However, whilst it ain’t gonna stop the illegit sites ripping off content, full-text plus copyright message does give you some comeback on the similarly growing number of legit scraper-type sites.
Down the road a little way is adsense for blogs but it’s just being trialled at the moment. When that hits the streets, I think our dilemma will be solved and, with a following wind, perhaps more of us bloggers will be able to devote more time to the writing with a reasonable return for our efforts.