Two Thirds Done

Thoughts and experiences of an eighty one year old Wild Duck.

Avram Miller by the sea
EN | IT

587 posts since 2006

Tag: wordpress

  • A Favor to Ask

    I have been writing this blog since 2007. There are about 570 posts with 430,000 word which is equivalent to about five books.

    I have never worked very hard at getting anyone to read it. Which is a strange thing to admit, because I clearly want people to read it. Otherwise, I would have just kept a diary.

    This week I finally sat down and looked at the numbers properly.

    What I found

    For years I believed I had around fifteen hundred subscribers. I did not. 640 of you receive these posts by email. Another 500 or so follow the blog in a WordPress app and never see an email at all. And 700 more signed up, were sent a confirmation link they never clicked, and have been sitting in limbo ever since, some for years, probably wondering why I stopped writing.

    Several of you have told me exactly this. You subscribed and never heard from me. I am sorry. I did not know, and the dashboard kept telling me everything was fine.

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  • My blog at an Inflection Point

    I just had my own personal inflection point.  For various reasons my last blog post got more then ten times as many visitors as a normal post and the numbers of subscribers tripled.  I am not sure what to make of this or how it might impact my blogging in the future.

    I started this blog in December 2006 when I was 60 years old.  I called it Two Thirds Done because I felt with the combination of my own good health and longevity in my family, I had/have an excellent chance of getting past 90 (and knowing it).  So at sixty, I had 33% of my life ahead.

    I had a number of objectives in starting the blog:  Learn about blogging, having a place to express concepts or comments on things that were going on, and to improve my writing skills.

    Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress actually gave me my first tutorial in how to use WordPress.  I had lunch with Matt at the suggestion of Mike Hirshland who was a partner at Polaris Ventures at that time and on the board of Automatic the parent of WordPress.  I remember being very impressed with Matt. I was used to meeting with entrepreneurs  who were young enough to be my children but this was the first time I had a meeting with someone who was young enough to be my grandchild.

    At first, I would send links to my posts to a few friends via email.   Over the years, I started putting links on sites like Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter.   Visits to my posts went from about 10 a day in 2007 to 20 in 2011.  The number of visits resulted from a combination of the number of new posts and the number of people being expose to links.  I actually posted more frequently in the beginning then I do now. Mostly because I work harder on each post now than in the beginning.

    Some readers subscribed to my posts.  Since most visitors come via links which I posted on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, I thought that my audience was made up primarily of people I actually knew although a number came via search terms.   For instance, my post Social Media for Seniors has been very popular as well as my various posts on Prostate Cancer.

    Now, my audience  has changed and I am not sure why.  My recent post “When Technologies Collide” got more than 2,000 views in the first few days.  Prior to that post, I had 25 subscribers, I now have more than 75.  Normally, I do not get even one comment.  This post got 30 comments.  WordPress posted my blog on “Freshly Posted” which exposed it to a lot of people that would normally not see it. May of these “Liked” it and I would get an email link to their blogs.  I would certainly say it is a diversified group of people.  Some even re-blogged my post which was a feature I was not even aware of.