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raanan.com 2010 in review

Pretty cool summary below, which each user of WordPress.com received recently. Interestingly, I posed 42 times in 2010, with my overall goal of posting once per week — so a bit off that pace — but fairly close.

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

Featured image

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 41,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 5 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 42 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 259 posts. There were 26 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 8mb. That’s about 2 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was October 9th with 1,772 views. The most popular post that day was Two Factor Authentication.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were stumbleupon.com, ma.tt, automattic.com, twitter.com, and Google Reader.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for google apps personal, google apps personal use, blackberry numbers letters, raanan bar-cohen, and gps.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Two Factor Authentication September 2010
5 comments

2

Quick Tip For BlackBerry Users When Calling Phone Numbers with Letters February 2008
21 comments

3

Sync Skype Chat History on Multiple Machines With Dropbox June 2009
11 comments

4

Switched to Google Apps for Personal Email January 2008
37 comments

5

Upgraded to iPhone 3GS from 3G. Veridct: Worth it ! June 2009
4 comments

2008 Year-End Wrap-Up for My Blog & iTunes

Last year this time I posted some stats from 2007 about this blog, and I spent a couple of minutes today doing the same for 2008, plus looking at iTunes for similar types of “buzz” data:

Top Posts (based on pageviews):
Apple MacBook Air Commercial – Catchy Song
The Great Sync on OS X: Google
Switched to Google Apps for Personal Email
Garmin Nuvi 350 portable GPS navigator
Quick Tip For BlackBerry Users When Call

Top Referrers:
automattic.com/about
ma.tt
stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url=http%3Aā€¦>
google.com/reader/view
twitter.com/raanan

Top Search Terms:
apple air commercial song (or a slight variation of this )
comcast blast
garmin nuvi
viigo review
installing leopard

Top Clicked Links:
phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.wā€¦
yaelweb.com
google.com/intl/en_us/mobile/sync
plaxo.com/downloads
photomatt.net/2007/06/20/raanan-joins

From iTunes – looked at top songs played. What was interesting is that since I almost always just click “shuffle” – the distribution is pretty much flat among 1000 or so albums, but the ones listed below had a slight edge:
Mosh Ben Ari: Live ( earlier post )
Daniel Salomon: Haifa 87
Hadag Nachash: Live
Habanot Nechama
The Idan Raichel’s Project: Within My Walls
Avishai Cohen: Shaot Regishot ( thanks Yoav )
Roy Adri: Until End

Here’s to a happy, safe, and quiet start to 2009 !

raanan.com has a new home: WordPress.com

This blog is blazing fast !

Why you ask ?Ā  Because it’s now on the grid platform at WordPress.com šŸ™‚ Ā Ā  Up until now I’ve been running it on a server that I’ve had for a number of years.

The process of moving from a self hosted WordPres setup to WordPress.com was super simple.Ā  For those who are interested, here was the proces:
Step 1) Exported the blog content from my old blog by clicking “export” in the WordPress dashboard
Step 2) Imported the XML file and the images from my old blog to WordPress.com with the 1-click importer in the WordPress.com dashboard. (image fetcher feature will be available soon on WordPress.com)
Step 3) Confirmed that everything was in place on the new blog — the importer brings everything in – posts, pages, images, youtube embeds and comments.
Step 4) Added the mapped domain option to my WordPress blog so that instead of raanan.wordpress.com, it becomes raanan.com
Step 5) Selected the blog.txt theme and applied it ( this theme will be released on WordPress.com soon ).
Step 6) Changed the name server settings at my registrar

And that was it.Ā  What’s also nice is that I was able to get rid of the plugins I was using because that functionality is already bundled in with WordPress.com – including Akismet, Stats, and Gravatar.

2007 year-end stats for raanan.com

Always fun to look at year-end stats.

I brought this blog back online March 23rd, 2007 – with the goal of posting about once a week — here are some fun facts for the past 9 months or so:

Overall site traffic:
7,796 Visits
12,747 Pageviews
1.64 Pages/Visit

A good traffic day during the week is about 150 pageviews, and a slow day is around 50 — on the weekends traffic is usually very light. For December 07 this site had 1,261 Visits and 1,869 Pageviews.

Overall RSS usage:
4,894 views of all items
2,813 clicks back to the site

Content Summary:
57 posts
66 legit comments
51 categories
40 tags

I clearly should have waited for tags in WordPress 2.3 — way too many categories šŸ™‚

Spam:
Akismet has stopped 8,000 comment spams. And the rate of increase is astounding — it took about 7 months to get to 4,000 spams, and in the last 2 months spam has doubled to 8,000.

Most popular web posts:
Blackberry Curve 8300 review
Viigo RSS reader for mobile review
Thanks Dow Jones – Hello Automattic !
Hit by the OS X 10.4.10 update problems – having flashbacks to BSOD
Garmin Nuvi 350 portable GPS navigator review

These top posts get most of their traffic from search engines. Clearly reviews and anything Apple related are being searched for.

Most popular posts read in RSS:
Blackberry Curve 8300 review
Video – Splendora Laughternoon Break
Useful Mac apps: Play WMVs, Google Analytics Widget, and Quinn
WordPress Facebook App
Big win for Shahar Peer at US Open tonight

I took a look at overall click-through rates from RSS items viewed to clicked, and the numbers crunch out to a CTR of 57% ! Lots of that is coming from resyndication (both legit and some spammy looking sites) and headline-only RSS readers. Also video doesn’t always render properly in RSS readers and I see posts with video getting clicked on by subscribers.

Top Traffic Sources
referring sources
12.93% Direct Traffic
28.23% Referring Sites
58.84% Search Engines

Top referring non-search engine sites:
automattic.com
photomatt.net
google.com (most likely Google Reader)
stumbleupon.com
digg.com

Top Search terms from search engines:
viigo
raanan bar-cohen
ringtone ideas
blackberry curve
garmin nuvi 350

Top referring search engines:
( Google is blue, Yahoo is green )
search_engines
Wow ! I’m sure this includes Google blog search for Google, but I’m surprised how little the other search engines drive traffic to this site. I saw a recent update that overall Google marketshare is now at 65.1% of search — I wonder what that number is for blog content.

Top Browsers:
Firefox 49.77%
Internet Explorer 35.12%
Safari 11.04%
Camino 1.77%
Opera 1.18%

A bit surprising, but the people I know personally who visit my site on a regular basis are all on Macs or a Linux setup.

I also recently added the Quantcast pixel tracker, and you can see some interesting demographic info about raanan.com here.

Here’s to a great 2008 !

Gravatar turned on

With a quick copy & paste I now have gravatar enabled on this blog. I’ll tweak the look & feel a bit later, but you can see it in action on this post.

Matt has also enabled gravatar on his blog and has posted his implementation here. You can see other examples, including code examples for other blog platforms, by reading the “implement” page on gravatar.com.

Don’t have a gravatar yet ? Signup — it’s free and takes 2 seconds.

Made a few changes to the site – let me know what you think

Been testing and trying various widgets and features on this site ( and on the RSS feeds ), and would love any feedback on what’s working and what’s not.

* daily delicious links summary in the RSS feed. I had this running for a few days, and the feedback has been mostly of confusion or slight annoyance. I took it out šŸ™‚ What do you think ?

{democracy:2}

* I replaced the built in wordpress search with Lijit – which searches my site, sites in my blogroll, my delicious links, etc. Seeing some solid results and I like the interface. Let me know what you think:

{democracy:3}

* Alex King has a great set of plugins that I use here. The mobile plugin is solid and really makes the site load up fast on my blackberry. I’m also using Alex’s share-it plugin, and the twitter plugin (shown in the sidebar). He has a bunch of other good ones, check them out here.