I could take my request stats for all time, sum them up by URL, and show you a list of my top ten requested posts ever. But that tends to skew towards the one-hit wonders, the posts that got traction on Digg or Boing Boing, accrued more views than my blog normally gets in a month, and then faded into long tail obscurity.
What I really want to know is which posts are my meat and potatoes, my breadwinners, which posts bring home the bacon, day in and day out? When I check my analytics, I tend to see the same posts in that day’s top 10 list over and over again. These are the posts that have a fairly high ranking in Google for a commonly requested search query, which usually translates into 50-150 views per post per day.
So I wrote a little script to loop through every day over the last year, query for the top ten posts within a given day, assign each post a single point, and then repeat for each day. At the end, I tallied up the points per post, and came up with a very unsurprising list of my top ten posts from a years worth of daily top ten posts on Justinsomnia.
There’s probably a name for this kind of statistical distribution. Anyone know what is it?
I ran the same analysis over the past 30 days and all the posts were the same (just in a different order), with one exception: “What would you free with $100 million dollars?” dropped off the list (it seems I’m not as highly ranked for a certain picture of Christy Turlington any longer) and in its place appeared Essential Database Naming Conventions (and Style), which I recently re-integrated into my blog. It used to be a static HTML page without my analytics tracking pixel.
Are these posts really representative of what you might expect to find on Justinsomnia these days? Where are the food posts, the hikes, the national parks? Well the Niagara Falls post made the list as my sole representative from the Outdoors category. But none of my food posts are bringing home the bacon.
The mainstays are clearly the “how-tos” or technical posts, accounting for six of the top ten—seven if we counted Database Naming Conventions. The rest all made the list because they contain a highly ranked image in the results of Google Images.
The surprising thing is that there’s not a single post on there from 2008 or 2009. One is from 2004, three from 2005, four from 2006, and two from 2007. If you can believe it, that Database Naming Conventions post is from 2003! Apparently in the eyes of Google, Justinsomnia’s best posts were written 3-4 years ago.
Ever since I posted about my poison oak experience three and a half years ago, I get to watch the poison oak season unfold as people search for it in Google (specifically, Google Images) and end up on my blog. Apparently poison oak activity really picks up in late April, early May—when people start to go outside again.
Back when I used to reserve my blog solely for personal communication, I hand coded some separate HTML documents related to my job and my grad school classes. Though both they and I have aged since then, I’ve wanted to absorb them back into my blog (much like my photo galleries) for posterity’s sake.
The one I still refer back to is my Essential Database Naming Conventions (and Style). For some reason I’ve always been into naming conventions, and still am—as the folks at work can attest. I added “updates” in a few places to point out what I do differently now. I’ve been using a “lite” version of this at work, perhaps it’s worth a 2.0 post?
State Transition Diagram for the CRUUD model was an attempt to document the work I was doing building user-interfaces on top of Microsoft Access for my job with the MEASURE Evaluation project. It’s the type of thing that’s fairly self-evident, if not quaint, but I like visual artifacts it contains.
Lastly I wrote Query Rosetta Stone to help some classmates translate between SQL and the anachronistic “relational algebra” for a databases class assignment.
For the past two years, I have been hatching a diabolical plan to re-release my photo galleries on top of a homebrew photo gallery CMS (currently they are powered by Gallery 2). I figured this would be just the push I needed to actually start putting more of my photos online—and thus reaping all the pageviews that Google Image Search would throw my way.
I even made two solid attempts to get some code written. On my second attempt I finally got a working prototype up on the web last fall. But even with that milestone, I never found that critical mass to really use what I had built.
All the while, I’ve continued posting photos to my blog. In fact it’s gotten so bad, I rarely even blog unless there’s a photo involved. I know, every picture I post here is only 380 pixels wide (which my dad complains about), but in the context of a post, I have the full expressive power of HTML at my disposal to present each photo however I like. Which makes the standard title-photo-caption gallery app seem needlessly limiting.
This is the realization I came to last night. I was more enamored with the idea of building something and doing so ostensibly for the search engine fodder it would derive than for any specific passion I have for photo galleries. And that’s made pretty obvious by the fact that the last gallery I put up was from my first trip to France, back in April 2007. Given that creating photo galleries is a total chore, I have little interest in continuing to use Gallery 2, let alone replacing it with something else.
So what to do? I’m thinking it might be time to dismantle my photo galleries altogether. But I don’t want to just delete everything, that’s not cool. One idea would be to simply repatriate my galleries as post-dated blog posts, similar to how I reabsorbed the Belly of the Beasts posts. That would be a massive undertaking, filtering through over 1000 photos. But it would enable me to at least archive the content for posterity without continuing to maintain a separate app. And I could ensure some continuity with a list of redirects. This sounds like the kind of manual Sisyphean chore I could really get into.
Ooo, maybe I could write a Gallery to static HTML script…
Update: the deed is done. I’ve converted all of my photo galleries to blog posts. I like this SO much better. Everything under one roof! I tried to set things up so all the old gallery links would redirect to the right posts (not easy for 1000 photos) so if you’ve ended up here in error, my apologies.
For posterity, here’s a screenshot of how my photo galleries used to look:
If you’re trying to find a photo from one of my old photo galleries, here’s how they map to the new/existing blog posts:
I started Justinsomnia (during a bout of sleeplessness) with Blogger back in 2002. This was before blogs had built-in commenting functionality. Eventually third party apps came along (like Haloscan, YACCS) that added commenting, but I was reluctant. I didn’t want comments to compromise the integrity of my posts.
After my friends began to add comments to their blogs, I noticed a change in my reading behavior. Whereas my blog was static—it didn’t change unless I posted something new, my friends’ blogs were dynamic, changing throughout the day as people stopped by and left comments. As a result I started going back to their blogs more often to follow the conversation. Meanwhile my blog sat idle.
Eventually I caved. I added Haloscan comments to my blog a year and a half after starting it. My blog survived. And comments grew to be one of my favorite parts of the medium. After all, I’m human. I love the contact, validation, support, questions, and feedback they bring.
Which brings me to Twitter. At one point during the CM Summit, Evan Williams was comparing Twitter with other communication channels, and he said “it’s the fastest way to get a message to a lot of people. Unlike broadcast, it’s two-way.”
This is a remarkably simple statement, but it really struck me. To most outsiders, Twitter seems a little pointless. But they’re usually judging each tweet in isolation, disconnected from the larger Twitterstream. When you start thinking about it being a discrete part of a larger conversation, you start to see where the value is.
It occurred to me later that Twitter takes the best part of blogging, the comments, and dispenses with the posts. (No wonder it kills blogs!) When you think about it that way, it sounds more natural, and certainly more conversational than blogging. Blogging is also a one-to-many communication channel, but the aspects that made it two-way (comments, trackbacks, aggregators) were all gnarly hacks bolted on after the fact. With Twitter, the two-way is built-in.
