Curious About the Mountain of Traffic

Sometimes, I look at my blog statistics that are built into Wordpress.

Today, for the last 20 days, I see this Wordpress reporting of HITs:

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Naturally, I am curious about that mountain of traffic this past few days but since the WP data is so flakey, I jump to Google analytics for that blog and look at the last 30 days:

hmmm, no sign of any traffic event in the last few days.​

Looking back at the WP data, I notice that while visits had the mountain, the visitors did not. So there was maybe one person who returned to the blog over and over and read the entire blog a few times creating lots of visits but not lots of visitors.

Except, GA shows no corresponding increase in either page views or sessions that supports this idea.

So:

- I go back to WP stats are flakey, they are counting some sort of bot activity that GA does not

- WP stats are flakey, what the heck is a "hit" anyway and why when I look closely, are they reporting last 20 days?

WordPress.org sent out a newsletter!

This email that I received absolutely cracked me up. Apparently, this was the first update that they had sent out in four years!

Howdy. Long time no talk. I take that back -- criminally long. I think this is the first message we've sent to the WordPress.org announcement mailing list in about four years.

That's older than AJAX! Where to begin?

Since the last newsletter we've added themes, plugins, multiple categories, sub-categories, tags, static pages, WYSIWYG, widgets, update notification, post revisions, and colors other than black and white. ....[ It ended with ]
The kids these days are spending all their time on something called Facebook. Apparently you can "friend" the WordPress group here:http://www.facebook.com/pages/WordPress/6427302910
Now get off my lawn!
* Thank You *
Thanks for reading, and for blogging with us. We'll try to do these more often, as we strive to keep you in "the loop" on all things WordPress.
Forever yours,
Matt
http://ma.tt http://wordpress.org

I feel a lot better about some of my unused mailing lists and domains. Of course, my products and online learning centers are good, but they aren't as fully kickass as Wordpress.





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Blogging Software - Todays problems

I have a few problems with the current generation of blogging software. I wonder if my list is very different than most others.

1. Sticky. Most forums allow the moderator to mark a comment or thread "sticky". This means that this posting, even when it's not the most recent, stays at the top. I can't seem to find this feature in the blogger or wordpress, the two blogging systems that I use. I'm about to try Typepad so stay tuned..

2. Subscribe to updates by email. This elusive feature is one that I would really like. The comments section allows users (including the moderator) to get emails about new comments but I'm talking about having a simple subscription method to get emails about all updates to the blog. I gather that RSS would be better system but I don't seem to understand RSS and I'd really like it to be a simple email system. Even the feedburner addition to wordpress and blogger is lacking this.

3. More HTML functionality such as tables in blog posts. While it's cool to be able to post videos and images, I sometimes try to put some info on a blog post that is best done as a table. While I succeeded after laborious efforts, it should be simplified (by the way, I did figure out some of the bugs and workarounds in blogger for tables but I can't seem to find my write-up here. Maybe it's on another blog, maybe it's on a forum. Ask if you want to see it)

4. Integrated trackbacks, stats, and subscriptions. Basically, I like that google bought feedburner and is integrating them. I just want it done already plus, I'd like them to remember us mortal non-techie users and provide us simple emails subscriptions and de-emphasize the glitzy rss feeds that handle everything including podcasts (another technology that I've not yet gotten involved with).

5. Promotion. It would be nice if there was more automated pinging built into the blogs. Or, if there is more than I am aware of, more documentation on them. I tend to update my content and then to manually use:
www.pingomatic.com
www.pingoat.com
www.pingmyblog.com
www.autopinger.com
www.kping.com
But I can't tell if my efforts are useful or wasted. I do know that if I correctly join and participate in the blog communities, I do well.