Some of you may have guessed that some of this blog was used as a part of one of my units at uni for this Semester. Basically this is just a warning that this post will be rounding down what I have previously done and explaining what I have learnt. If you don't want to go through all that, just skip this post and carry-on to the next. Anyone that wants to read, I'll show you what I've learnt!!
So to start with, I've posted just over 40 times now, well over the requirements of the class as I was interested in what I was blogging about. Most of my posts have been text, but I have also used video, quote, RSS feeds from other websites, answered questions and re-blogged other people's posts. I really enjoyed watching what would happen after I posted something. It was great when someone liked one of my posts or if they re-blogged it. I found that the most popular things that were re-blogged were the quotes by different writers, because of this I posted more quotes than I originally planned. I love finding different quotes though, so this little change didn't worry me at all.
While I enjoyed looking at my tumblr page every so ofter, I spent a lot more time looking at Google Analytics. Perhaps this is because Google is my homepage and I kept myself logged in so had a quick look whenever I was on the computer. This API was new to me, and it's now one of my favourites. Love it!!
As you can see, I had 41 unique visitors to the blog. A few of these people revisited because there were a total of 79 visits to the site. The average time that was spent looking at the blog was 4 mins 5 secs. The 16th of April I received 12 visitors to the site and this was the largest number I had. This was the day that I started sharing my blog posts on Facebook, but also the day I used Google Trends. I think it was more likely the fact that I compared Harry Potter and Twilight for the one post that made such a jump in my page views for this day. One thing that I noticed was a major jump in visits if I posted more than once a day, so in future I will be posting multiple times rather than just one post a day. There were different browsers used to look at the blog, these were:
Internet Explorer - 49.37%
Strangely enough, I have all four of these browsers in use on different computers in my home so I know the blog can be seen on each. I feel that the CSS I have used to style the blog suits my chosen topic well and as it's seen on the most commonly used browsers, should be easily viewed by the majority of Internet users.
As you can see from the image above, I have followers from a number of different countries - though Australia is the most common. This is perhaps because I have about 6 people from the unit following me, but could also be because I have talked about Australian authors in my posts. In total I have 21 followers as of the 14th of May.
I've had visitors come to the blog in a number of ways:
Direct (or no listed site referral) - 4 visits
I think this shows that the social networking that I did use through Facebook has helped the site, but the majority of my visitors are direct from Tumblr. I found it quite interesting that I had 6 direct visits from Google, though this may have been friends that I told about the site. I'll have to check on this.
The most successful posts that I have had on my blog have been when I use quotes or when I do something interesting with an API - like Google Trends. I have thoroughly enjoyed learning all about RSS, collective intelligence and web 2.0 tools that are available to use. There are so many different ways or options out there to display data in a creative way - there's no need to display anything in a simple table anymore, it's fantastic.
I will continue to use this blog. I've enjoyed doing it and learned so much along the way. I found that it was also a great place to vent when I was feeling stressed or sick, just what every student needs right!?!
