Month: January 2008

Where I’ve Been Facebook app jumped into my newsfeed

The Where I’ve Been Facebook application is a pretty cool app. I installed it a while back and haven’t really updated it in a while, but I’m a fan of seeing data visually displayed in a smart way — and this app definitely does that.

What I was surprised to see today when I logged into facebook was that my feed/profile had an update from that app:
where i’ve been facebook app

It states “Raanan just started using the new version of Where I’ve Been. Raanan has a shiny new Where I’ve Been map. View his map or create your own.”

What’s odd is that to the best of my knowledge I hadn’t clicked on any updates, hadn’t used the app in while, and never gave permission for this type of ‘spam update’. I looked through the various settings of the app but could not find any option to turn off this type of messaging in the future.

US Solider & blogger Major Andrew Olmsted was killed in Iraq yesterday and left a final blog post

I have run across Andrew Olmsted’s blog posts from time to time, and was deeply saddened to see that he lost his life today in Iraq.

Major Andrew Olmsted, who posted a blog since May 2007, was killed in Iraq on Thursday, Jan. 3. Major Olmsted, who had been based at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, began blogging after his unit was sent to Iraq with the mission of helping to train the Iraqi Army. No official details have been released on his death, but reports say that he and a second member of his unit were killed during an enemy ambush in Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. Olmsted was determined to make a difference in Iraq. “The sooner the Iraqi government doesn’t need U.S. support to provide security for its people, the sooner we will probably be asked to leave.”

What’s incredible is that he wrote a blog post in case he was killed and asked a friend to publish it:

This is an entry I would have preferred not to have published, but there are limits to what we can control in life, and apparently I have passed one of those limits. And so, like G’Kar, I must say here what I would much prefer to say in person. I want to thank hilzoy for putting it up for me. It’s not easy asking anyone to do something for you in the event of your death, and it is a testament to her quality that she didn’t hesitate to accept the charge. As with many bloggers, I have a disgustingly large ego, and so I just couldn’t bear the thought of not being able to have the last word if the need arose.

You can read the full post here.

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 🙂

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 !