It’s hard to believe that a year has already gone by, and harder still to believe that the site is still being read.  Last October when I decided to venture into the realm of the blogosphere once again, the intentions had been quite simple:  create a private site with a picture gallery, and maybe talk about upcoming trips to Japan or elsewhere in Canada.  That said, it didn’t take long for this to change and become what we see today.

To commemorate this first anniversary, I’d like to share a few things I’ve learned, some stats and briefly mention 5 of my most popular posts.

Things I’ve learned:

  • in the case of WordPress, unless it’s broke, don’t upgrade it.  Upgrades seem to be the biggest headache for bloggers and it’s the type of hassle I try to avoid.  If I really need to upgrade, then I’ll take my site offline for a bit and migrate an alternate installation over.  There will be no such thing as an "upgrade" on this site as it often leaves many things broken or incomplete.
  • if you help a plug-in author with some code or a slight fix in their comments, be prepared to receive lots of support questions from other users.  To this day I still get support questions for plugins that I offered a quick fix to last February, despite the fact the author is still actively maintaining the code.
  • if you have nothing good to say about an Apple product, be prepared for an increase in traffic.  I said one little thing about that useless Mac TiVo wanna-be thing, and it became my most popular post for over a month.
  • writing negative comments on popular blogs are sure-fire ways to temporarily increase traffic while also losing regular readers.
  • test your site’s load time at least once a day.  You never know when some plugin or widget will break and you might not even know it’s a problem until you see the dramatic drop in visits.  I’ve made this mistake once before and found that a plugin was preventing the site from loading until a 60-second timeout completed.  The admin screens still worked just fine, and I was wondering why my daily visitors had dropped to a trickle.  Suffice to say, that plugin was quickly removed.

This site’s Stats (October 18, 2006 - October 17, 2007):

  • Visitors: 1,482,104
  • Uniques: 81,920
  • Uniques Last Month: 9,915
  • Average Uniques per Day (this week): 187
  • Bot-to-Real Human Ratio:  5:1 (5 Bots to 1 Human reader)
  • Posts: 403
  • Comments: 529
  • Akismet has Caught:  2,084 Comments

Top Commentors (Not Including Me, of course):

  • Nick Ramsay as LongCountdown, 63 comments
  • Brian at LiftPort, 31 comments
  • Ms Danielle with her site by the same name, 27 comments
  • Reiko (my wife), 15 comments
  • Nick Phillips over at Anything Goes, 9 comments

Thanks to everyone that’s posted a comment, though, as I likely would have abandoned this project months ago had it not been for all the feedback.

Finally, I’d like to mention five of my most popular (non-plugin related) posts:

  • China Airlines 737 Catches Fire in Okinawa - This was popular mainly because I was writing the post as it was happening on the TV.  As people started Googling it, my site had been one of the first indexed and so had a prime spot in the Google SERPs.
  • Another Blah Apple Product - This was the first blog post that was Stumbled, and it brought quite a bit of traffic in the first week.  It was shortly after this post that I really started to enjoy the blogging experience.
  • Google’s Telecommunications Gambit - Not exactly my best argument about Google, but it was worthy of a few Diggs and even made a brief appearance on page 25,621 (or some other number so far away from 1 that it doesn’t matter).
  • BBC’s Superstorm Series - The popularity of this post surprises me.  It doesn’t really have great content, and the series isn’t something I would watch more than once, either.  But to this day, I often recieve at least one hit a day from someone looking for information about this series.  Perhaps I’ll convert the three episodes to some form of Flash and host them on a page somewhere….
  • The World Without Us - This was a great book, and I tried to say just as much in the book review.  This was not a sponsored post, but instead something I did in order to raise awareness of Alan Weisman’s great work.

So there you have it.  This site is now ancient (compared to millions of other blogs out there) and I don’t think I’ll stop writing anytime soon.  While I can no longer put the same effort and time into my posts as before, writing entries while commuting to and from work is still one of my many daily pleasures (the others involve coffee and bread…).  I’d like to thank all of my regular readers, and all of my occasional readers, too.  I know I’ve said this before, but if it wasn’t for you, then this site wouldn’t even exist right now.

What’s coming up this year, you ask?  Well, Reiko and I still need to write that helpful page letting people know what’s involved with marrying a Japanese national in Japan, and what it takes to get all the paperwork done in order for a Canadian to live and work here after marriage.  A few people have asked that I post an article listing several useful SQL queries so that we can extract some useful or otherwise interesting information about our blog directly from the database.  There are some more short stories and other creative works that I’d like to put into the Creative Writing page.  And, of course, there will be all kinds of rants and complaints about a wide variety of subjects :P

Here’s to another year of posting!