[Geeky Guide] 2007 End-of-Year Report

2007 was a pretty big year for the Geeky Guide - it was one of growth and making new friends and cementing relationships. I'm proud of how the Guide has progressed over the course of this year and I think that it's really going to get somewhere soon enough.

So I thought it was only appropriate to go over the statistics for the site as based on Google Analytics and to some extent FeedBurner.

Google Analytics tracked 16,114 visits with 12,953 of tagged as absolute unique visitors. I either have to work on retaining reader loyalty or I just have a lot of readers who block Google cookies, hehe. Still, that resulted in 23,073 pageviews! Not bad for a little blog, hehe.

Sadly, most of my readers are still Internet Explorer users (47.33%) although Firefox users weren't too far behind (46.08%). Of course most users were Windows users (90.21%), which pretty much reflects the global population for the most part but at least Mac (7.39%) and Linux (1.42%) have a decent showing on the site. I was surprised to note a few people read this blog on their PSPs and on their Wiis. How cool is that?

59.09% of all traffic for the Geeky Guide came from referring sites and 32.18% from search engines. I still managed to eke out 8.73% of direct traffic which means at least some people actually bookmarked the site, haha. Of course top referrer remains to be Google (29.84%) in for the form of organic searches. The top five search terms for 2007 were "glorietta 2 bombing", "gay blogs", "ironman trailer", "lunchballz" and "pinoy gay blogs". Sites that seem to send me the most traffic are Blogger, the Official Google Blog, Misterhubs, Technorati and Google Images. It's interesting to note that Misterhubs is the only personal blog referring traffic to me with the other being pretty big name sites for searches and such.

Entries with the most pageviews were [Philippines] About the Desperate Housewives Debacle (which triggered 264 pageviews in one day), [Google] Strawberry Issues (which triggered 394 pageviews in one day), [Pink News] ICON is Now Bi!, [Comics] Why you should download Comics and how to do it (written by Geeky contributor Q the Conqueror) and [Viral Video Chart] Family Guy Star Wars.



On the FeedBurner side of things, we averaged 33 subscribers with a reach of 10 but that's only half the story. As you can see in the graph, number of feed subscribers jumped in July when Blogger enabled RSS feed redirects, thus revealing I had a lot of people who read this blog via RSS reader.

Most appear to use variants on Java-based feed readers with Google feedfetchers such as Google Reader and iGoogle coming in second. In terms of browser-based RSS readers, people only predominantly use Firefox.

2007 was the year my Google PageRank climbed up to 3 but now it's dropped to zero - I blame my short experiment with PayPerPost. I just deleted the last of their links in the hopes that it'll refresh my PageRank come the next Google spider visit.

Well, that was our Geeky year. My thanks to all of you, the readers, for your continued support and interest in what the Geeky Guide has to offer!

[Geek Guide] Secret Subscribers

Okay, so maybe they're not that secret - I just didn't know about them.

When Blogger allowed users to redirect their feed traffic to a feed service of their choice yesterday (for example FeedBurner), I jumped all over the service and set things to see my FeedBurner feed instead of the Blogger default Atom feed.

Realistically, I was expecting to see a few more users who had subscribed to the Guide directly, sure. For the longest time I only had 8 users on FeedBurner so I was looking forward to bumping that number up a few notches into the realm of double-digits. Little did I know what would greet me upon logging in today.

>

WOW! There were 40 others users hiding out there in the ether! My thanks to all of you for deciding to subscribe to the Geeky Guide! I had no idea I had this many regular readers. This just goes to show that page views are definitely an outdated metric of site performance these days.

Again, my thanks to all of you and I hope you take the time to comment more in the future!

[Google] New Blogger Features

Some time back Google launched Blogger in Draft, a sort of beta-testing sandbox for Blogger's newest features.

Yes, we are thankful that there are new features coming out for Blogger, hehe.

Previously Blogger in Draft had released video uploads, polls and enclosure links with enclosure links being the only one to "graduate" out of drafts.

Today a new feature, the search box, was introduced both on the Blogger in Draft blog and on the Official Google Blog.

It seems pretty cool since you can have the search box in your side bar and it'll load the results in the main column without disrupting things too much. I've seen this run on the Blogger in Draft blog but I've yet to get it to work here on the Geeky Guide. So far, all I'm getting from the widget is a "Loading..." message. I've tried limiting my settings to search just the Geeky Guide but it doesn't seem to be working well. Let me know if the new search feature is loading when you visit the Geeky Guide - it should appear in the upper right corner, right at the very top of the sidebar.

To compare results, I've also created a Google Custom Search Engine which is called the Geeky Search and this should appear at the very bottom of my blog posts.

Let me know what you think of these two features and if they're integrating well into the Geeky Guide.

As a last note, Blogger now also allows you to easily redirect your users to a different site feed of your choice, like for example your FeedBurner feed? What? You forgot that Google bought FeedBurner? Well they did.

For readers of the Geeky Guide who may have subscribed to the site's feed before I signed up for FeedBurner, you won't experience any changes on your end. Instead, you will not be integrated into the FeedBurner version of my feed, which will give me a better picture of how many users are actually subscribed.

Ain't change wonderful?

[Google] About FeedBurner

The Google acquisition of FeedBurner went from rumor to official news fairly quickly as announced on both the Official Google Blog and the Official FeedBurner Blog. Then again, Google has been acquiring a number of smaller companies over the past, well, years and FeedBurner is one of those with logical interconnections with Google's current business strategies.

I know it's almost a week late to write about, but my work-related activities have delayed a lot of my blogging. Despite that, I still feel strongly about discussing this particular merger.

I've been using FeedBurner for a number of months now and over time I've grown to really appreciate the service. At first I didn't quite see the point - my blogs already had RSS feeds so there was no real need for me to create a new one. But then I figured that if even TIME Magazine was using FeedBurner, there had to be more to it, right?

FeedBurner feels like a mini-Google in its own right. It does have an advertising platform much like Google AdSense, but instead of providing general ads for your site, they provide ads for your feeds, which means you can still get advertising revenue even when users rely on RSS readers like Google Reader to follow your blog as opposed to visiting the site directly. FeedBurner also provides statistics of page visitors and more important feed subscribers similar to how Google Analytics, but again the focus is on site feeds. The list goes on and on in this tone.

So the acquisition is pretty logical and I figure that it was only a matter of time before it happened. Now of course I'm sure this is creating an uproar with various groups depending on what they're protesting. Some will say Google is being evil with all these acquisitions as opposed to their company mission. Others will argue that this acquisition is bad news for FeedBurner and that they're become underdeveloped and marginalized and soon there will be nothing left.

Frankly, I feel this is going to be one of those acquisitions that will involve FeedBurner disappearing as a brand on the web. They have way too many overlaps with existing Google products that it doesn't make sense for them to remain an independent brand name similar to how YouTube survives today. Just look at how aggressive their integration timeline is - they expect to start migrating to Google servers by the 15th of this month. That's pretty tight!

Is this a bad thing? Not really, at least for me. The core technologies behind FeedBurner are still going to be publicly available and I'm certain that given their overlap with existing lines of business, this means the development of their product will continue and will be well funded as part of they larger products they will become integrated with. Not every Google acquisition has the potential benefit of being able to integrate seamlessly into existing products, thus become additional items on their current development road maps. The challenge for other acquisitions joining the Google family is figuring out where to put them and how to re-align their philosophies and development direction to match the overall Google plan.

So for now, I think it's going to be goodbye to the FeedBurner that we knew but at the end of the day we're all going to gain.

[Geeky Guide] Subscriptions Reminder

Hello Geeky Readers!

Just a reminder for everyone that if you want to subscribe to The Geeky Guide to Nearly Everything in order to receive updates more directly, feel free to explore any of the subscription options at the top of the sidebar on the right. For your convenience, I'm posting the same links below:

Subscribe via FeedBurner




Subscribe via Email

[Geeky Guide] Additional Bells and Whistles

Hello again Geeky Guide Readers!

It's been a while since we first launched and I think the site has definitely made some progress. While consistency of updates remains a concern, we're doing a lot better these days than last quarter, and that's still something to be proud of.

To help make following The Geeky Guide to Nearly Everything more accessible to more readers, I've added a few things to spruce things up a little.

First, you it's now easier to subscribe to the site's RSS / Atom feed directly using your browser or through popular services like Google Reader or Bloglines using the new buttons I've added to the navigation sidebar, all courtesy of FeedBurner.

For all you social bookmarkers out there, you can also vote for any blog entry that catches your fancy through the major social bookmarking services out there, namely Digg, del.icio.us and Technorati. These voting links will be visible at the end of entry here on the site and appended to each RSS feed entry as well.

Lastly, I'm now trying to see how the site will fare on blog ranking sites. For now I've only signed up for Blog Top Sites and Pinoy Top Blogs

I hope this makes your Geeky experience a lot more convenient. If you have further ideas for making the site better of if you too want to become a part of the Geeky Crew, just comment or email me and let's see what we can work out.

Thanks for your continued support!