Archive for "Web"
Ten Years of Webcam Captures
Posted on January 6, 2008 by Ching under Flickr, Life, Web.
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A Look at 2007
Posted on December 31, 2007 by Ching under Blog, Web.
Kurt asked me a couple of weeks ago how many visitors we get on our blog. I truly had no idea as I hadn’t been keeping track. I guessed probably only a handful since it’s mostly just family and friends that visit here. Besides that, I’ve been blogging about less controversial (and more and more boring stuff) lately unlike in years past so that doesn’t really do anything to build your readership. Brian says I have no internal censor, but I beg to differ. If I didn’t, I’d be blogging about my usually unpopular opinions about all sorts of things (which I have prudently kept to myself lest I get Dooced, and I wouldn’t wish that fate upon anyone including myself) and making people mad. It’s great for web traffic, but not so great if you actually want to keep your day job.
Anyway, Kurt’s inquiry got me to thinking about our web site statistics. How many people actually come here? Much to my surprise and delight, Life After Marriage actually gets a lot more visitors than I initially thought. Here are some of the more interesting stats:
We had about 400,000 hits in 2007. These hits were by 41,558 unique visitors who visited our blog 108,684 times (this equates to about 2.61 visits per visitor according to Awstats) throughout the year. The visitors looked at nearly 250,000 pages (or 2.25 pages per visit).
Altogether that’s approximately 3,500 unique visitors per month or 115 unique visitors per day. Not too bad, considering I thought I had a following of five: my mom and dad, my in-laws, Cannady Girl, Multitasker Girl, and myself. This is good news for me because it gives me hope on generating ad revenue. The only downside is that these visitors are not sticking around. For 2008, Brian and I will need to figure out a way to not only increase our reach (we are pretty much non-existent and do not matter according to Alexa; then again, very few of us can come even remotely close to the astronomical success of the extremely viral “Elf Yourself” site) but also keep our visitors coming back. Even if we can’t do much about the increasing pages per visit, I’d like to at least see the number of visits per visitor go up. To me that would be a sign of customer retention.
In marketing class this sem we learned the importance of building relationships with your customers (my customers would include you, dear reader). We talked about the Get-Keep-Have (GKH) model and how most people take the “keeping” function for granted. Get + Keep = Have, so without investing resources in the “keeping” function you can’t expect to sustain your customer base. I know this is important. The challenging part is knowing what it is that I’m supposed to do to keep you guys coming back. That part, I don’t know.
I guess Brian and I will just keep at it. We’ll try different things and see how they work. For instance, one of the things I’ve decided to try is a monthly newsletter. If you’re not currently on the distribution list and would like to be on it, just shoot us an email at newsletter@brubakers.us and put SUBSCRIBE in the subject or body of your message. We’ve got a few other things we’d like to try, but we’re just going to roll these things out gradually so as not to overwhelm you all. 🙂 Around this time next year, we can check the results to see if we’ve made any progress.
Before I close, allow me to leave you with some more interesting data about our regular visitors:
- Generally based or located in the US
- They stay for about 5 minutes on average
- 62% use IE, 10% use Firefox, 20% some other unidentified, and the other 8% use Netscape (RIP), Opera, Mozilla, Safari, Konqueror, Lynx, etc.
- The visitors who arrive at Life After Marriage through a search engine usually arrive by way of Google (which comes as no surprise to us because Google is our favorite search engine, too)
- The top five search phrases that have led visitors to our blog this year are
1. life after marriage (obviously)
2. download
3. crack (don’t ask, I have no idea why people looking for “crack” end up on Life After Marriage; I can assure you, Brian and I are both 100% drug free even to the point of avoiding legal drugs unless we absolutely, positively have to get medicated)
4. bang bang sauce
5. first night after marriageIncidentally, “myspace swingers” came in 8th on the tally. LOL. I find it funny that people looking for lifestylers end up on our blog when the blog entry (if I’m thinking of the right one) that is triggering the search hit is the one where I wrote about Brian’s anti-MySpace sentiment. To this day, Brian is convinced that the people on MySpace who are looking for “friends” and “activity partners” are really swingers. To this end he has deleted his MySpace account. Although, he is still on Facebook and I’m pretty sure there are swingers on there too. Don’t tell Brian, though. LOL.
Anyway, I hope you found this foray into our web statistics as interesting as I did. Thank you for your continued patronage and support. Please remember to click on the ads now and then. Every penny helps!
Have a safe and happy new year!
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NORAD Tracks Santa 2007
Posted on December 24, 2007 by Ching under Family, Web.
I can’t wait until Logan gets here so I can show him the Santa tracker web site by NORAD. It’s pretty nifty! They’ve got a map marked with all of the places that Santa has already visited. As of the last time I checked, he was in Congo. He’s pretty fast, too. He’s already been to the Philippines and Australia and part of Europe. He should make it to the US in good time.
Brian says that NORAD has been tracking Santa since he was a little kid. I didn’t believe him until I checked their web site. They’ve got over 50 years of historical data. Amazing! Other features of the web site include video footage and the ability to track Santa in 3D via Google Earth. I bet they didn’t have this when Brian was a little boy!
Anyway, I’m really excited to show this to Logan. I think he will love it!
P.S. To speak to a NORAD Santa tracker in person, you can call 1-877-HI-NORAD or 1-877-446-6723. The call is free within the United Sates.
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Just Testing: Flock and Del.icio.us
Posted on December 15, 2007 by Ching under Web.
I recently downloaded Flock because I was having problems with my Internet Explorer. I figured now would be the perfect time to try it. Flock is supposed to be way better. It’s not bad actually. I like the “people” and “media streams” features. So far those are the only two features that I’ve really tried.
I’m trying the blogging function now. I guess we’ll find out how well this works soon enough. In about two seconds actually, when I post this test entry. 🙂
Blogged with Flock
P.S. In addition to testing Flock, I’m also trying out Del.icio.us. I’d signed up for it before but then never used it. This time I’m going to make an effort to actually use it.
Here’s my link roll:
And my tag cloud:
P.P.S. I want a Pleo!
I tried to post this video on Dad’s blog but it wouldn’t work. Check it out! It’s better than the RoboDog!
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Anecdotes
Posted on December 1, 2007 by Ching under Web.
File this under web discovery.
I may be one of the few I know who love hearing and reading anecdotes. Whenever I say the word, people always seem to respond with a puzzled look. A whatta? It may just be that I’m not around the right people. Whatever the case maybe, I have found kindred spirits online. Anecdotage.com is a web site devoted to preserving and sharing anecdotes. Their mission is to be the world’s widest collection of celebrity anecdotes.
I discovered the web site while researching information on French cultural anthropologist Clotaire Rapaille
Then again, the web site could just be an extension of the public’s fascination with celebrities. This could simply be another way to obsess with celebrities. However, I choose to think that my initial assessment is true.
Here’s a good one.
“Hugh Massingberd, a former editor of the obituaries page of the Daily Telegraph, recalled the unwieldy challenges posed by a refusal to capitulate to the seductions of the posthumous parallax [a bending of life histories toward all that is light and wholesome, away from anything that might reflect unfavorably on the dead].
“‘One day, an injunction arrived from on high that we were to make a point of including the cause of death,’ he reminisced in The Spectator [in 2001]. ‘As it happened, a candidate for the morgue of the morrow, a priapic jazzer, had handed in his dinner pail after a penile implant had unfortunately exploded. We duly complied with the editorial diktat.'”
It has been reprinted here without permission but I am linking back to their web site (Anecdotage.com) so hopefully they won’t mind it. It is free word-of-mouth, buzz advertising after all. I hope you enjoy their web site as much as I do.
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