Matt Cutts, a prominent Google engineer has been posting an overview of the web statistics that his blog receives for the last few years. I certainly can’t compete with the staggering amount of traffic his site takes, however I thought it might interest a few people. In the next day or two, I’ll be writing three short posts highlighting this sites web statistics since 2006 in a yearly format.
Category Archives: Websites
Housekeeping, Part 1
Friday evening I mentioned that I was going to perform some housekeeping on my site which was well overdue.
I had expected that it would only take an hour or two, however I significantly underestimated the number of posts and the time required per post to remove the unneeded categories and tag them appropriately. In the end, it took so long that I couldn’t complete it all on Friday night and I’ve had several smaller sessions over the course of the weekend to complete it.
While a little time consuming, the results are quite promising – I’ve gone from 50 categories down to 27 and I may whittle that down further yet.
Housekeeping
When I upgraded WordPress in February, I mentioned that I’d do a little housekeeping. The housekeeping in this instance was related to the original category functionality and the newly added tagging feature.
It took a little longer than expected for that to happen, so I’ve set aside an hour or two tonight to work on it. I think in the first pass through, I’m going to focus on collapsing down the current category list and in a second pass add in tags describing the content more richly.
Multiple Personalities
I’ve been blogging on this domain since 2004 on various topics ranging from technical to personal and everything in between. For quite some time now, I’ve been thinking that I’m not really meeting anyones reading needs, as the content on the site flip flops between technical and personal so often; such that people that only want technical are forced to filter out the personal fluff and visa versa.
To solve that problem, I had a couple of different options available:
- separate the current site in halves using a category, such as personal and technical
- move the technical content onto a subdomain, such as http://technical.lattimore.id.au
- move the technical content onto a completely different domain
I currently make fairly extensive use of categories within the site to organise my posts. I could have gone through and uncategorised the current posts and placed each post back into one of the two new categories or sections. To help with searching or stepping through the site, tagging all of the existing posts would have aided in that area. While it would have worked, it didn’t feel right to inject ‘useless’ categories into the mix to solve the problem.
Option number two would require multiple WordPress installations. There is nothing wrong with that and it’ll obviously work just fine on a technical level but without a little bit of upfront work, seemed as though it’d end in tears some point down the road.
In the end, I chose door number three and set about finding a new domain name that fit the bill. I wanted something that had a clearly technical inclination and after using a handy domain utility, couldn’t believe my luck when I found that ifdebug.com was available.
At the moment, I’m undecided as to what I’ll do with the existing content on the site. I’m inclined to just leave it here as it’s the simplest option, however there are benefits to moving it over to if debug; we’ll see how it pans out.
In the meantime, expect a steady stream of personal content to be published through this site and the technical goodies to land on ifdebug.com.
Microsoft Invests USD$240 Million In Facebook
After a lot of rumours flying around the internet about Facebook looking for investors or buyers and the rumour being continually shot down; today sees an announcement that Microsoft have invested USD$240 million dollars in Facebook. The $240 million dollars is nothing short of a minority stake in Facebook, which has now been officially valued at USD$15 billion dollars, yes you read that correctly billion dollars.
While everything was still on the rumourmill, it was expected that both Google and Microsoft would have been bidding for a stake in Facebook. What has surprised the industry to some extent, is that Microsoft actually won the deal. Of course, this investment has now extended the marketing agreement between Microsoft and Facebook, which now sees Microsoft as the supplier of user centric advertising on the Facebook platform globally, where as it was previously limited to the United States. Of course, Facebook haven’t closed the door on further investment opportunities – we might see at least one other deep pocketed company come to the table yet.
While I appreciate how important this investment was for Microsoft, in a vain attempt to keep themselves in the online marketing game – I haven’t yet joined the dots on how it is going to work. As most savvy internet users will attest, the Microsoft search platform via MSN and its successor Live is some what limited. To add insult to injury, the advertising platform that Microsoft have been building seems so lacking compared to Google, that Microsoft are only recently realising just how far behind they are.
None the less, it’s good for everyone to see some healthy competition in the online advertising space. I expect there will be a lot of people watching this space to see how it develops over the coming months; for all we know this might be the starting point for Microsoft to launch a full frontal assault against Google.