Reflection on the last 14 weeks.
So, a final uni blog post. I’ll apologise to anyone reading this for the break in the voice of my blog (if the voice breaks), this post is something I have to do for uni, after this it’s back to the usual. This morning though we got up extra early to see some planets in alignment. Unfortunately there was pretty solid cloud cover but we saw at least two of them and Canberra put on a fantastic sun rise (I like to think it was for my birthday) so it was totally worth it anyway.
So, first things first, was my blog successful?
It’s a very loaded question but I think that in terms of what I set out to do, yes, it was.
I had to pick a topic I could stay interested in and write about for 14 weeks. Check. I intend to keep writing so I’d rate that as successful. I wanted to start this blog to keep myself accountable and have a record of my progress towards running 10K. Check. I wanted to run 10K by the time the semester was up. And along the way I’ve met people who are doing the same thing and writing about their own journeys, a whole interconnected community of people sharing the same goals and supporting each other in attaining them. So, Check to that one. From my point of view then the blog was a success, the social interaction was an unexpected but also welcome side affect of writing about my experience.
Another interesting thing (which you can also see in that graphic) is that the bulk of my traffic is made up of referring sites, which is awesome. In my tumblr travels I’ve found a suite of like-minded people, some newer to running than me, some more experienced. I’ve also come across people who share other interests of mine (vegetarianism, punk rock, drumming, bass guitar) and had the pleasure of watching their posts as they unfold. I’m following around 50 odd people, the majority of which are fitblr sites (a term that perplexed me at first, until I realized it was a tumblr/fitness word derivative/mash-up).
Interestingly (to me at least) is that more people are looking at my blog with safari (42%) than any other browser (firefox in at a conservative 34%). Which is odd because Safari is nowhere near the most popular browser in the market. Do runners tend to own Macs? Is there some correlation between blogging, running and Mac ownership that I am unaware of? I don’t know.
Over the course of the semester I’ve kept an eye on my analytics. Other than the details about where people are from (132 visits from 8 different countries/territories) and what browsers they’ve been using, what’s interesting is the time on site, bounce rate and unique visitors. At first, as you would expect, my daily visitors was pretty much 0 unless I posted something (and even then it was low low low). Now more often than not I get at least 1 visit per day even on days when I haven’t posted, though of course it still spikes when I put new posts up.
I’ve also seen bounce rate drop from 100% (ouch) to 74% odd. Which actually is pretty good because all the new posts are displayed on the one page and for the most part there is no cause to go any deeper. I also think an average stay of a minute is pretty good. Most of my posts would be easily consumed within that time. It would be sweet if there was an API to link my runkeeper account with my tumblr though, that would be sweet.
Finally what surprised me the most was which posts were the most popular. I expected it to be the photos (not because I’m fantastic with a camera, but because I’m lucky enough to live somewhere truly beautiful) and they certainly ranked well, but interestingly so did the posts about our accomplishments and where I talked about the issues I was having or had had. I guess that proves the value of the social aspect of these blogs.
I’m really happy with the way the CSS in my blog is working and that I was able to replicate the shadow effect from the rest of the blog on the tag cloud. I’m going to keep working on my KML file for the google map and hopefully I can get that up and running soon.
Well, I think that pretty much covers it, interconnectedness, the way that people around the world can overcome distance to share common experience, the cool things you can do with code (CSS, KML hopefully) and the way you can track all of this cool stuff to get a better picture of what it is that is bringing people to your site and what they’re doing once they get there. It’s certainly been an interesting experience sharing this with the world.
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