This past week has been just a little bit crazy. Of course, my clan had a great Thanksgiving, I really enjoyed the time off, and I hope the rest of you did as well.

The really crazy part of this week is that Pearl submitted me to Stumble upon, and just in the last 7 days, I’ve had 9,556 Visitors, and 19,473 pageviews! Just about all of the hits have been on my “Find out What is Using up Your Hard Drive Space With WinDirStat” post, and some of the posts in the “related posts” section of that page.

I was pretty impressed, until I exchanged a few emails with Pearl today, and she has been getting crazy amounts of traffic on her “Best 101 Lists” post. She said 40,000 hits (Digg it here) just recently.

I really had no idea how many visitors these sites can generate. Last month I posted about being stumbled twice, but that incident had only generated about 650 visitors, I didn’t see a big increase anywhere else. This time though, I doubled my subscribers, and have seen a small percentage of the visitors go to other pages on the blog.

So, if you’re reading this, and you’re one of the new subscribers, Welcome to Port 16!

Elsewhere in my field of blog-o-vision, the mumblr has a new theme, looks pretty nice, and it isn’t just the looks, check out this post for some free software.

I hope to get back on a better posting schedule, and try to work in some posts for everyone. If you see a something that is too technical, or not technical enough, please stick around, since I try to cover a wide portion of the spectrum.

And as always, feel free to ask questions, Kellypea asked a great question about the difference between storage and memory in the comments of the WinDirStat post, and I think I may even have to create a whole post about that subject. Trust me, it isn’t even close to the first time that I have been asked that question.

Thanks to everyone who continues to come back for more, as well as all of you who comment. Stay tuned, there’s more coming.

Posted in Digg, Stumble Upon, Updates 13 Comments »

There hasn’t been much going on recently, at least nothing that I felt deserved an update.

I haven’t even been reading my RSS feeds, and I do apologize about that. Now that I am feeling better, I hope to get caught up on that again.

But there was one thing interesting that happened, for some reason, a whole bunch of people found my blog from Stumble Upon, on two occasions. The first spike you see in the picture above represents 252 visits, and the second spike is 394 visits.

One of the strange things is that although the first blip was 252 visits, I registered 496 pageviews. The second blip was 394 visits, and 831 pageviews. They were one week apart, both on a Saturday.

Another strange thing is that these two spikes didn’t translate into a big increase in subscribers.

I have heard other bloggers asking if there has been any long term traffic increase from stumble upon, and I can’t say that there has been. I had about 40 visitors fir the week between the spikes, and 2 or 3 a day since, but the visitors don’t stick around. Maybe my Subscribe to Port 16 icon isn’t big enough?

Yet another strange thing is that the article that they are all visiting is the “Fortress Forever is Now Available“.

I think the biggest long term effect I have seen here is that my normal stats look really bad now, at least compared to those spikes.

Posted in Stumble Upon, Updates 3 Comments »

Well, we knew it was coming. Funny though, I thought it would be released in the morning, rather than in the evening. So get your databases backed up, and check your plug in compatibility, because WordPress 2.3 is here!

In the announcement, some of the features listed are:

- Native Tagging support

- Update Notification - This will tell you when a new version is available, and when one of your plug-ins have a update available.

- Canonical URLs - This sounds like it is really going to be great, re-directs broken or truncated URLs to the correct URL anyway. I’m curious to see this one in action.

- Pending Review feature - so multi-blog authors can put something up for review by an editor, rather than saving it as a draft.

- Better WYSIWYG functionality - I’ll have to see this one for myself. I’ve never liked the way the GUI editor works.

There are even more features that I didn’t mention. Read the announcement for yourself.

I’m not going to jump on board and upgrade tonight, but hopefully it will be this week.

Posted in Updates, WordPress 5 Comments »

This week I made some minor changes to the blog, expanding that right sidebar so that I could fit the Blog Rush Widget on it. I also re-arranged some ads and the other widgets. Visually it wasn’t much of a change.

I’m not sure what happened, but this week I joined a whole slew of web services. Jango, Last.FM, Rescue Time, and Clicky Stats.

Of course, WordPress 2.3 comes out today, so that should eat up a little of my posting time this week.

The Mumbler has been on me to start using tags, and ultimate tag warrior, but I have resisted. I guess one of the big features in WordPress 2.3 is tag support. Although it will require a theme update to support it. I seem to find that sites view my categories as tags, so I’m not terribly excited about that feature.

We’ve started having some cooler weather lately, which reminds me that Winter is coming up. Time to get my Jeeps Winterized, and get my house ready. I’ve heard that during the Summer, there is a slump in blog readers, so I’m curious to see what happens in the next couple of months when it comes to my readers.

Posted in WebServices, Updates, Web Tools, WebSites, WordPress, Themes 4 Comments »