Thursday, January 01, 2009

The Year in Blogging

I have a neat little thing called Google Analytics that keeps track of what's happening on my blog. In 2008, 6,943 people visited my site, viewing 14,846 pages. The average time on the site per visitor was one minute, 54 seconds. (Obviously these are chickenfeed compared to even moderately popular sites.)

The top refering sites (excluding generic referers like images.google.com) were:

HAIF (Houston Architecture Info Forum)--a great community of people interested in the architecture (past, present, and future) of Houston.

Houston's Clear Thinkers-- a very popular blog that just sent oodles of folks over after mentioning my blog once. This blog is perhaps best known for being a die-hard defender of Enron, accusing the feds of prosecutorial misconduct.

Swamplot--My favorite Houston blog, it covers real estate in this city (broadly defined) with plenty of snark.

Glasstire {Texas Visual Art Online} -- All the traffic from Glasstire was in response to this post, where I summarized the Hunting Prize controversy, in which work by Joan Fabian was disqualified supposedly for being sculptural but apparently for its political content. It turned out that another artist had the same thing happen to him. He wrote about it in the comments, the Glasstire people linked, and my little part for citizen's art journalism was done! (Glasstire is a pretty good site with little blogs covering various local scenes.)

Mike McGuff -- Houston media insider and prolific blogger linked to a couple of my posts this year, generating a decent amount of traffic.

Off the Kuff -- This great Houston politics site (written by fellow Rice grad, Charles Kuffner) linked to me a while back, and also my comments on Kuff's site sent over some visitors.

The Comics Reporter -- Tom Spurgeon occasionally links to my posts from his excellent blog. The most recent one was "Best Comics" post.

My most popular post was the Ed Kienholz post, weirdly enough. Apparently it pops up a lot when you are looking for Ed Kienholz images.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Check your Google Reader subscriptions periodically. There are 13 of us right now, but it should grow as you continue to blog. I don't know the terms, but you can put advertising on the feeds without mucking up your website.

3:50 PM  
Blogger  Robert Boyd said...

Interesting! I never did that before. I wonder who the 13 are? I'm a long way from Swamplot's 211 (and that guy has tons of advertising!). Talking Points Memo has almost 12,000 subscribers. Even a kind of obscure (but excellent) design/illustration/literature blog like A Journey Around My Skull manages to have 116. Are these just people who subscribe through Google Reader? Or anyone with an RSS feed?

5:32 PM  

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home