{"id":209,"date":"2006-04-10T01:05:35","date_gmt":"2006-04-09T14:05:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2006\/04\/10\/happy-birthday-oddthinking\/"},"modified":"2007-04-10T21:56:10","modified_gmt":"2007-04-10T11:56:10","slug":"happy-birthday-oddthinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2006\/04\/10\/happy-birthday-oddthinking\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy Birthday OddThinking"},"content":{"rendered":"

On April 10, OddThinking celebrates its first anniversary.<\/p>\n

Girtby.net’s first anniversary<\/a> was celebrated with a retrospective of the year, and I found that to be quite fun, so I pay homage to that format here.<\/p>\n

In the last year, there have been a total of 183 posts, 645 comments and over 2600 spams.<\/p>\n

Highlights by Month<\/h3>\n

April<\/h4>\n

First Post<\/a> – it still remains one of my favourite posts. I wish I could still write them like I could in the old days.<\/p>\n

May<\/h4>\n

First puzzle analysis<\/a>. This post gains an enduring popularity that surprises me and then disappoints me, as I think there are other posts more deserving.<\/p>\n

My first personal attack.<\/a> Never been particular proud of that one. I have thought about deleting it.<\/p>\n

First style change<\/a><\/p>\n

First comment from someone I haven’t met<\/a>… I think.<\/p>\n

June<\/h4>\n

Hugely prolific month.<\/p>\n

First post to mention local politics<\/a><\/p>\n

First time I realise (to my disappointment) that geeky subjects get more response than non-geeky ones.<\/p>\n

First swear word<\/a> (“damned”)<\/p>\n

July<\/h4>\n

First user poll<\/a><\/p>\n

I posted a comment to Google Blogoscoped<\/a> that got referenced as a comment on Coding Horror<\/a>, and before I knew it I had thousands of readers checking out CLOSE THAT WINDOW!<\/a>. So now, not only is one of my favourites, but it is one of the most popular. It’s all been downhill from there! <\/p>\n

Alastair reports that he noticed a surge in his blog traffic just from referers from that page in my blog. Never been more proud of OddThinking!<\/p>\n

Looking through the fossil record, the earliest I can prove I received comment spam was July 12. Suspect it was really earlier, but evidence lost.<\/p>\n

August<\/h4>\n

First surreptitious retraction<\/a><\/p>\n

First WordPress plugin: EmailShroud<\/a><\/p>\n

September<\/h4>\n

First “hot bot favourite”: an article about plugins<\/a> which bots seem to hit disproportionately more often than humans.<\/p>\n

First use of the “Aside” Style<\/a>: The practice of including an “aside” to the main blog thread proved to be so common, I created a special style to make it clearer.<\/p>\n

First accusation of interfering with elephants<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Resolved to make blog articles stick to one point. Comments rate surged. However, correlation does equal causation.<\/p>\n

October<\/h4>\n

First use of the F-word<\/a> (That word is “fuck”, in case you weren’t aware.)<\/p>\n

November<\/h4>\n

First book review<\/a><\/p>\n

First graph<\/a><\/p>\n

First appeal to the readers for info<\/a>… and it fails miserably.<\/p>\n

December<\/h4>\n

I write a 200-word post claiming no-one cares about dreams<\/a>. I get a heap of comments totalling 600-words. So, I follow up with a post saying people do<\/em> care about dreams, and include one of my favourite anecdotes<\/a>. No-one comments. I am clearly a blogger who knows what his readers want…<\/p>\n

Resolved<\/a> to make titles less punny.<\/p>\n

January<\/h4>\n

Most prolific month ever. Over one post per day.<\/p>\n

Series on Rational 1000<\/a> starts. OddThinking is soon the top link for “Rational 1000” on Google. Too bad no-one ever searches for it.<\/p>\n

First guest author<\/a><\/p>\n

February<\/h4>\n

Most overtly political<\/a> blog article.<\/p>\n

Finally another topic to rival Sudoku in search popularity: Kakuro<\/a>.<\/p>\n

March<\/h4>\n

Second WordPress plugin: CRCRLF<\/a><\/p>\n

Statistics<\/h3>\n

Here are some of the statistics I pulled from the logs.<\/p>\n

Note: Much of the statistics is limited to data collected since September, when I installed BAStats. I’ve tried to eliminate the influence of bots from the statistics.<\/div>\n
Most Read Pages<\/h5>\n
    \n
  1. EmailShroud 1.0.1<\/a><\/li>\n
  2. Pursuing Sudoku with Pseudo-code<\/a><\/li>\n
  3. A Kakuro Solver<\/a><\/li>\n
  4. CLOSE THAT WINDOW!<\/a><\/li>\n
  5. Browser Comparison: Password Management<\/a><\/li>\n
  6. 20Q<\/a><\/li>\n
  7. WordPress versus RSS versus Bloglines<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Most of those articles above are geeky articles. What’s popular when people aren’t in the mood for geek, and just want a story?<\/p>\n

    Most Read (Non-Geek) Stories<\/h5>\n
      \n
    1. Indoor Marbleous Championships<\/a><\/li>\n
    2. The Doctor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Son<\/a><\/li>\n
    3. Statistical Outliers<\/a><\/li>\n
    4. Spaghetti Express<\/a><\/li>\n
    5. Air-Traffic Control – In Space
      \n<\/a><\/li>\n
    6. Ice-Cream Flavours and Personal Bests<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
      I’ll probably use the results of this review to create a Greatest Hits<\/a> list that I’ve been mulling over<\/a> for a while.<\/div>\n

      Another way of assessing a post is by many comments it provokes. Let’s look at the statistics there.<\/p>\n

      Note: All discussion of comments includes (a) pingbacks and (b) comments made by me. I figure that being provoked myself to respond is at least as valuable as provoking someone else to respond!<\/div>\n
      Most Commented Posts<\/h5>\n
        \n
      1. The Case for Case-Preserving, Case-Insensitivity<\/a><\/li>\n
      2. WordPress versus RSS versus Bloglines<\/a><\/li>\n
      3. Small shift in OddThinking Look & Feel<\/a><\/li>\n
      4. EmailShroud 1.0.1<\/a><\/li>\n
      5. Marking Up Sections and Headings<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        Who is making all those comments?<\/p>\n

        Most Prolific Commenters<\/h5>\n
          \n
        1. Me!<\/li>\n
        2. Alastair from Girtby.net<\/a><\/li>\n
        3. Aristotle Pagaltzis from Plasmasturm<\/a><\/li>\n
        4. Sunny Kalsi from The USS Quad Damage<\/a><\/li>\n
        5. Alan Green from Cardboard.nu<\/a><\/li>\n
        6. Casey Whitelaw from CaseyPorn<\/a><\/li>\n
        7. Chris from Brainsnorkel<\/a><\/li>\n
        8. Casinos from a variety of web-sites offering Texas Hold’em<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

          Thank you to each and every one of you (except the many elephant-interferers who sign themselves “Casinos”.)<\/p>\n

          The Extreme Lengths I Will Go To<\/h3>\n

          I played with a number of styles of post.<\/p>\n

          I never did achieve Girtby’s brevity<\/a>.<\/p>\n

          Here’s as close as I got:<\/p>\n

          Shortest Posts<\/h5>\n
            \n
          1. Pots and Puns<\/a><\/li>\n
          2. The Trouble with the Web<\/a><\/li>\n
          3. Fodder first time in Sydney<\/a><\/li>\n
          4. Pingbacks are back<\/a><\/li>\n
          5. Small shift in OddThinking Look & Feel<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

            On the other hand, I wrote some doozies:<\/p>\n

            Longest Posts<\/h5>\n
              \n
            1. Comparing Strings: An Analysis of Diff Algorithms<\/a><\/li>\n
            2. Business Presentations and the Cognitive Style of Edward Tufte<\/a><\/li>\n
            3. Analysis of the Australian Bush Game<\/a><\/li>\n
            4. Revoking Australian Citizenship<\/a><\/li>\n
            5. The No-Nos and Yes-Yeses of the Nonogram solution<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

              Bots Statistics<\/h3>\n

              The top 70 bots (identified by manual inspection of User Agent string) account for 16% of all visits, and 73% of all page hits.<\/p>\n

              My main complaint about the BAStats<\/a> plugin is that it doesn’t distinguish between the two, making all of its reports 73% irrelevant.<\/div>\n
              Searchiest Search Engines<\/h5>\n

              (i.e. whose bots crawl the most)<\/p>\n

                \n
              1. Yahoo!<\/li>\n
              2. Google<\/li>\n
              3. MSN<\/li>\n
              4. Bloglines<\/li>\n
              5. AskJeeves<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

                While not visiting me as often as Yahoo!, Google referred more people to my site.<\/p>\n

                Search Results<\/h3>\n

                A fair number of visitors come to OddThinking straight from a search engine. A record is kept of what they were looking for when they got here.<\/p>\n

                The most popular search terms change each month… slightly…<\/p>\n

                Most Popular Search Terms, by Month<\/h4>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
                Month<\/th>\nTop Search Term<\/th>\nRunner-Up Search Term<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
                Apr 05<\/td>\nstatistical outliers<\/td>\navrack skins<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
                May 05<\/td>\nsudoku<\/td>\nstatistical outliers<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
                Jun 05<\/td>\nsudoku<\/td>\nwordpress google sitemap<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
                Jul 05<\/td>\nsudoku<\/td>\nstatistical outliers<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
                Aug 05<\/td>\nsudoku<\/td>\nnonograms<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
                Sep 05<\/td>\nsudoku<\/td>\ncodewords puzzles<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
                Oct 05<\/td>\nsudoku<\/td>\nfill-a-pix\/statistical outliers<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
                Nov 05<\/td>\nsudoku code<\/td>\nwordpress filters<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
                Dec 05<\/td>\nsudoku code<\/td>\n20q algorithm<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
                Jan 06<\/td>\nsudoku code<\/td>\nspaghetti express<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
                Feb 06<\/td>\nkakuro solver<\/td>\nsudoku code<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
                Mar 06<\/td>\nkakuro solver<\/td>\nriddle how could the boy be his son<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n
                Often the second (and third and fourth) most popular search term was a variant on the most popular search term. I ignored it in these cases.<\/div>\n

                OddThinking gets the top billing on Google for “Spaghetti Express” for a cute little story<\/a>. I believe the searchers are really looking for one of various restaurants of the same name.<\/p>\n

                These aren’t the only searchers who aren’t going to find what they were looking for on OddThinking. Here is a list of other search terms that seem to alight at OddThinking.<\/p>\n

                Most Misguided Search-Engine Referrals By Month<\/h4>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
                Month<\/th>\nSearch Term<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
                Apr 05<\/td>\nhow many decisions do we make each day<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
                May 05<\/td>\nwe are all unique<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
                Jun 05<\/td>\nhow do you make a 7 year old cry twice<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
                Jul 05<\/td>\ncan paint shower -bridal -baby -curtain<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
                Aug 05<\/td>\nchrysler flaking paint<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
                Sep 05<\/td>\ndistinguishing facts about my father<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
                Oct 05<\/td>\nbattlestar gallactica plot synopses episode 2005<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
                Nov 05<\/td>\nthe data at the root level is invalid<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
                Dec 05<\/td>\nblack names shithead<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
                Jan 06<\/td>\nwomen are boring<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
                Feb 06<\/td>\nhow much is 300000 bytes<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
                Mar 06<\/td>\nfind a nickname for julian<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

                Posting\/Commenting Frequency<\/h3>\n

                The following graph links together several statistics about how prolific I was, and how prolific you were. It’s a bit complex, so I explain it below.<\/p>\n

                \"Post<\/a><\/p>\n

                The tops of the vertical bars show how many posts I made per day. They should be measured against the scale on the left.<\/p>\n

                In the first couple of months, I tried to be prolific. I had tried blogging before and was rather sporadic. I figured there was a good chance that the blogging bug would leave me after two or three months. I wanted enough posts by then that if someone stumbled across my blog there would be enough posts to make the visit worthwhile. It turned out that I underestimated how much I would be able to churn out in later months.<\/p>\n

                It is hard to see much of a trend here. After thinking about it for a while, I suspect there’s a strong inverse correlation between the number of posts I make and the number of photographs I take. (Each photo needs processing work to be done on the computer before I host it on a photography web-site. Photography and blogging have the same bottleneck: available time in front of the computer.)<\/p>\n

                The green and blue boxes show how the posts are split between the posts that never received a response and those that did receive comments.<\/p>\n

                It’s not entirely clear what my success metrics are for this blog, but avoiding “the sounds of crickets”<\/a> seems to be one of them. I did a good job at provoking responses in September\/October, but not so well in the more prolific month January. <\/p>\n

                This ain’t the best metric to optimise. One way to provoke a response is to say something really stupid, or to put an apostrophe in the wrong place.<\/div>\n

                The light blue line (using the scale on the right-hand axis) shows how many comments I receive per day. Unsurprisingly, it is strongly correlated to the number of posts I made. I really enjoy receiving comments, so that’s another number I want to increase.<\/p>\n

                The dotted yellow line has no scale shown. It compares how many page hits I have had each month, since I started measuring at the end of September. It seems to show correlation with the number of posts, combined with a healthy growth rate.<\/p>\n

                Profits<\/h3>\n

                Q: Ignoring inflation, how long before Google Adsense will pay enough money to buy my own weight in chocolate bars?<\/p>\n

                A: 125 years.<\/p>\n

                Adsense pays less than 20% of my hosting fees. I am not quite giving up my day job just yet! <\/p>\n

                Summing Up<\/h3>\n

                Lots of thanks to my regular 5-star<\/a> readers and to everyone who provided comments.<\/p>\n

                Here’s to another year. I have already exceeded the life-expectancy of this blog about four times over, so who knows – I might even make it!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

                On April 10, OddThinking celebrates its first anniversary.<\/p>\n

                Girtby.net’s first anniversary<\/a> was celebrated with a retrospective of the year, and I found that to be quite fun, so I pay homage to that format here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-oddthinking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}