Well, November was a whole lot better than October was. I ended up being sick for just about the whole month of October, so I didn’t bother with writing a summary for that month.

This month, however, has been pretty good. I did my “Command of the Grill Week“, which didn’t go all that smoothly, but tasted delicious.

I have to thank the mumbler and Kellypea for helping me out. Art gave me a nice plug, and Kellypea was adventurous enough to try Disco’s Hot and Tangy New York Strips.

Now, on with the stats …

Visitors: 15,369! No, that’s not a typo. In September I had 405 visitors, and I’ll admit that this is all thanks to one article getting stumbled.

PageViews: 30,903. Up from 1,567 in September.

New Visits: 92.4%. This was 57.88% in September.

Bounce Rate: 34.18%. This was 53.46% in September. Even though it went down, I’m still pretty happy. I was able to double my subscribers, which was amazing, and really I’m just glad that those visitors thought it would be worth checking back, just from that one article.

Top 5 posts:

1. Find out What is Using up Your Hard Drive Space With WinDirStat - This one blew everything else out of the water. 27,829 pageviews. Thanks so much for stumbling me Pearl!

2. Steak Satays - Delicious meat! These came out so good, I was really impressed. You just have to taste them to believe it.

3. Combat Steak - A bone in ribeye, with a mushroom and red wine sauce. So tasty!

4. What is ESATA? - An explanation of the external Serial ATA specification. I know what I’m using the next time I buy an external hard drive.

5. Test Drive Ubuntu Linux Without Installing Anything on Your Computer - This was a article about a great way to try out Linux by booting with a CD. When you’re done, you can pop it out, reboot, and it’s like nothing happened.

So, I hope to put out some great posts this month, even with Christmas, New Years, and all that nifty stuff coming up.

Once again, a big thank you goes out to all of my loyal readers, you’re what keeps me blogging. Also, welcome to all of my new readers, I hope you like what you see, and keep coming back for more.

Posted in BlogNewsandUpdates 5 Comments »

September was another great month for Port 16. I had 34 posts, which brought my grand total up to 75 since the blog’s start.

This was the blog’s second full month of operation, and I really have to say that I couldn’t be more happy with the stats. Well I could be a little happier, but I’m not complaining one bit.

Here are the vitals.

Visitors: 405 Absolute Unique Visitors. This is up from 105 last month. I’m really glad to have each and every one of you here.

PageViews: 1,567. Last month I had 1,370, but I was also working out some theme issues, so I think that a good chunk of last month’s numbers were actually me reloading the page.

New Visits: 57.88%. This is up from 34.06% last month. Lots of new people finding the blog.

Bounce Rate: 53.46%. This is really encouraging, since it means that around half the people who come to the site look around for awhile. Last month the number was 43.27 percent, which means a larger percentage of people stuck around, but I’m still happy that I am keeping so many visitors.

Top Posts

1. Test Drive Ubuntu Linux Without Installing Anything on Your Computer - Most geeks want to check out Linux, and this is a painfully easy way to eyeball it without changing anything on your computer.

This post somehow was stumbled, and received quite a number of visitors. The spike in the graphic above is actually just from this post.

2. The Gmail Collaborative video - I posted about the release of the final video, and I have seen a large number of people coming from the Gmail blog to visit me. It hasn’t been the first time this has happened, but I’m still impressed at the number of people who come over from there.

3. WordPress 2.3 is available - I still  haven’t installed it. Soon though. Lots of new features here, so you should take a look at it.

4. Alphabet Soup - Chasing Microsoft Certifications - Some reasons to get certified, and links to a salary survey.

5. Those crazy kids and their blogs… - This was a summary of a bunch of blog updates that I had seen in the blogs that I follow. Don’t ask me why I chose that couch though. My wife had taken some pictures of couches she liked, so that she could compare them later on. If you are curious, we didn’t buy this couch, but it does look similar to our old one.

Last month I had said that I would like to get more on topic, and I am glad to see that all of the top posts this month were about technical topics.

If you were a reader of my old blog, you may notice that I have started re-posting every once in awhile. I didn’t want to grab the whole blog, since most of it is dated now, but I am grabbing my favorites. I still have a big list that I am going to migrate, but I am breaking them up with fresh posts.

Stay tuned.

Posted in BlogNewsandUpdates 6 Comments »

Amazingly, the changes didn’t take long, and everything went smoothly. I’m still going to be changing the adds in the right sidebar some, just because they look so tiny now.

Now, although I increased the size of the right sidebar, I didn’t change the left sidebar. The page is now a humongous 965 Pixels wide. I didn’t think there would be too many people out there running their displays at anything less than 1024 x 768, so I figured it would be OK.

Even if there are some poor souls out there running at 800 x 600, they would still get the content, just some of the sidebars would be cut off.

Does that big sidebar look goofy? I think it is a little strange, but I didn’t think it was too bad. Let me know.

Posted in BlogNewsandUpdates 2 Comments »

AKA: Yes it’s broken, but that’s on purpose.

 I am going to be adjusting the theme here for a little while. Ever since I added that BlogRush Widget, I have needed to adjust the sidebar size. Unfortunately, to do that I had to change the size of other web site elements as well.

I have (hopefully) worked out all of the bugs on my testbed site. Now all I have to do is make the changes on the live site. So for a little while, things may start to look strange. I’ll post again when I am all finished.

Stay Tuned.

Posted in BlogNewsandUpdates No Comments »

The big news this week, at least on the personal side of things, was the release of the Fortress Forever. I have been waiting for it for so long, and so far I’ve played a little over 6 hours.

I didn’t realize it until Monday the 10th, but the mumbler has returned! Art has returned from China with his lovely bride. I was heartbroken while he was gone, and not only didn’t I get his emails and blog updates, but his server was down, so I couldn’t even look at his blogs at all.

Art always refers to me on his blog as “MBM” for “my buddy mike”. I even have my own tag on his blog. One of his blogs is called “Incoherent Mumbling“, also accessible from www.mumblr.com, so I decided that I am going to start referring to him as “the mumbler”. At least sometimes.

Also it turns out that while I was goofing off all weekend, Phil from Thought Sparks has been busy launching his new blog, Tech Fires. Read his announcement for yourself. Phil’s been churning out some really great tutorials lately, so I’m really interested to see what he puts on his new site.

I’m also really interested in one of his widgets, it points to BlogRush. Looks like a syndication widget that gets you syndicated on other blogs as well. Looks pretty neat, I’ll have to go check it out.

In Tech News, one of the bigger stories this week has been the release of the iPhone software unlock, which I think I have covered enough for the week.

Also, last weekend I realized that football season has started again! What was I doing to miss that? I’m not a huge football fan, and as a matter of fact, last year was the first year that I watched more than the Super Bowl in about a decade.

If your curious, I’m a Denver fan, since I lived here for about a decade now, I should probably root for the local team. I also cheer for the Patriots, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh.

I also made a few minor changes to the blog, I added my Pownce feed, the MyBlogLog widget, and also some more adsense ads.

I’m looking forward to a more productive week, thanks to all of my readers, and to everyone who commented on the posts this week or provided me with valuable feedback.

Remember, you can reach me on Pownce, if you are on it, as well as my blog log or on email. My email address is “mike” at this domain name (port16.com). Feel free to drop me any thoughts or comments. 

Posted in Pownce, The Mumbler, FPS, Foretress Forever, Hacks, BlogNewsandUpdates 3 Comments »