{"id":147,"date":"2008-08-20T09:20:25","date_gmt":"2008-08-20T08:20:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=147"},"modified":"2008-08-20T09:20:25","modified_gmt":"2008-08-20T08:20:25","slug":"walking-randomlys-first-birthday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=147","title":{"rendered":"Walking Randomly’s first birthday"},"content":{"rendered":"

Exactly one year ago today I wrote the first post<\/a> on what has become my own little piece of the web. Walking Randomly was created on a whim after a conversation between myself and a web developer called Matt who was leaving the University to set up his own business<\/a>. Beer was involved (for me anyway – he is tee-total) and so the details of the conversation are fuzzy to say the least but the net result was that I ended up with a version of Word Press installed on a server in the States along with the domain name of my choosing and an email that said “Have fun blogging.”<\/p>\n

When someone goes to that amount of trouble on your behalf it would be churlish not to actually do something with it so I started writing about whatever entered my rather chaotic thoughts to see if I could make anything of it.<\/p>\n

So, one year and 120 posts later, has it been succesful? Well, that very much depends on your point of view. My brother is an economist and he may well ask “Has it made you any money?” The answer to that question is “Not a penny!” – in fact it costs me money (although not much – I think Matt is giving me mates rates on hosting). So from this point of view it is a complete failure. In my defense, however, apart from a few Amazon Associate links, I haven’t attempted <\/strong>to make any money from it so my lack of monetary success is hardly surprising.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

How else can one measure the success of a blog? Number of hits per day perhaps? Well, depending on which analytical tool I choose to believe, Walking Randomly gets somewhere between 250 (according to awstats) and 670 (according to webalizer) visits per day<\/strong> and this is rising steadily. Then there is the number of RSS subscribers which currently stands at 143 according to Feedburner. The number of RSS subscribers fluctuates on a daily basis but the general trend is upwards so I am at least going in the right direction. These figures might not be stellar but they aren’t bad considering that WR is somewhat of a niche site (putting it mildly).<\/p>\n

What other figures can I use to measure Walking Randomly? Well, it has a google Page Rank<\/a> of 4 out of 10 and an Alexa<\/a> rating of 1,57222,14562 – both of which are somewhat disappointing. It also has a Technorati<\/a> Authority rating of 38 which puts it in the top 276,569 blogs apparently. Whichever way you choose to look at these 3 statistics, WR is not doing so well but should I care? Do these numbers actually matter? What’s your opinion?<\/p>\n

A less numerical but, in my opinion at least, much more important measure of blogging success comes from people’s reaction to what you write. For example, if I write an article explaining how to fix a problem with MATLAB and if even only one person finds it useful enough to say so in the comments section then it pretty much makes my day. Blog comments are a powerful thing – any one of you readers could make or break my day with a well crafted one – so be gentle!<\/p>\n

It’s even better when someone goes to the trouble of linking to your site, providing they are doing so in a positive light of course. One person linked to me recently with along with the comment “Even the title suites me. I’ve been surfing this site most of the day. It’s amazingly cool.”<\/em><\/strong> and I didn’t even need to pay her! I don’t think that anything I have ever done has ever been described as ‘Amazingly cool’ before – I’d call that a success. Whoever you are – Thank you!<\/p>\n

When all is said and done I enjoy going through the process of putting a post together and I enjoy getting feedback from readers and so, if viewed as a pleasant way of passing the time, WR has been a resounding success. My only hope is that it is as much fun to read as it is to write.<\/p>\n

Now, where’s the Champage? I have a birthday to celebrate!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Exactly one year ago today I wrote the first post on what has become my own little piece of the web. Walking Randomly was created on a whim after a conversation between myself and a web developer called Matt who was leaving the University to set up his own business. Beer was involved (for me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-walking-randomly"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3swhs-2n","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=147"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1565,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions\/1565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}