David Chan’s Blog

By bounce, I am referring to bounce rate. A bounce is recorded when a visitor views only one page of your site during the visit. As someone who runs a blog, I strive to make my content coherent (ie. my blog contains a lot of programming and technology content) so that it appeals to a certain audience. A good indicator of whether my blog is coherent is if people view more than one page per visit on average, or if I have a low bounce rate.

People usually find my blog through search, and so they land directly on a post (instead of the front page). Likewise, when my blog get Stumbled, the landing page is always a post. When visitors finish reading that post, ideally they’d take a look around to find more of the same content. With that in mind, would the bounce rate of visitors from Google and StumbleUpon be the same? Here is my referral data from the last two months (July 1st - Sept 11th):

As you can see, the bounce rate from StumbleUpon visitors is very low compared to visitors from my other top referrals.

My conclusion (well, it’s more or less an assumption, but an educated one) is that the StumbleUpon Interests selection works very well to channel interested readers to your content. It’s not a bad bet that users who go through the entire process of signing up to StumbleUpon, installing the tool bar, and setting up their interests must really be passionate about the selected topics.

That or they have a lot of time to kill, which, admittedly, is something that StumbleUpon also does very well.

The moral of the story? Tag your Stumbles wisely!

P.S. If you have a blog which gets Stumbled often, post some of your findings on your bounce rate!

Are you a lazy blogger?  Here’s a tool to generate a freebie blog post for you, which doubles as an excuse to explain your inactivity!

Here’s what I generated by randomly selecting the dropdowns:

Holy crap! I just woke up to the fact I have not updated this since 1999… You would not believe how much it’s costing me. My bad.

I am tied up with discovering time doesn’t stand still, choosing my retirement village, just generally being a parent to the secret service, my day pisses me off from 8am to till I fall into bed at midnight. I am smitten. But who cares.

I absolutely, positively promise that when the weather turns bad, I will blog more often. If you have kids. No Joke!

The Lazy Blogger’s Post Generator [aussiebloggers.com.au]

Frequent readers of my blog will have noticed by now that something’s different.  I’ve had my old blog design for about a year and a half, and for the last six months, the look of it was really bothering me.

In short, my old blog looked like a cheap suit - very grey with too many noisy bits (pinstripe background seals the “suit” analogy).

I decided to reduce all the clutter by choosing a minimalistic layout, and the base theme is one by Codreanu Catalin.  The colors come from the SNES controller (and the Earthbound menu).

Hopefully now the content takes precendence without obtrusive layout getting in the way.

Original post (June 24, 2008):

A quick search for myself reveals that I’ve been taken off the Google index (do a quick search for “david chan blog”), and I might know why.  My guess would be that my Twitter Friend’s links appeared to be “spam” to Google’s crawlers.  I’ve heard of people being penalized for link spamming, though that was not my intention at all.

My Twitter blog digest posts will be disabled until further investigation.

Update (July 7, 2008):

After investigating and confirming that I’ve been black-listed by Google, I have sent off a notice of reconsideration.  Will update again when reply comes.  Stay tuned - it’s going to take several weeks.

Update 2 (evening July 7, 2008):

Within about 12 hours of my Google index reconsideration submission, it appears I have regained my old positions for some search terms. I’ll need to do more checking to make sure that all my old posts have been indexed.

If anyone else runs into this problem, I would be more than happy to guide them through the reconsideration process.

My coworker Nick Simpson is truely amazing.  He is one of the most knowledgable sys admins I’ve known and I’ve been with many different companies (ie. I’ve been around the block).  His blog is neatly designed and he stumbles on many neat things.  Just recently I’ve been introduced to a new Facebook app to keep track of birthdays, and I got that information from his recent post titled “Facebook iCal birthdays“.

But if you do a search for “Facebook iCal Birthdays” on Google, you won’t find Nick’s post.  Even a search for “Nick Simpson” doesn’t return much from his blog.

One thing I’ve noticed is that the permalinks for his blog posts are in a very machine unfriendly format.

This doesn’t translate into any searchable keywords, and makes it hard for anyone to find this via a keyword search.

I’m a big fan of searchables and many readers of my blog find my content via search engines (actually, only through Google…is there any other search engine?).

I hope Nick reads this and changes his permalink structure to include the post’s title, or the post’s keywords, as part of the permalink for the story.  You may already know this, but in WordPress, going into Settings->Permalinks will allow you to choose a suitable link for your posts.

What good is creating content if no one can find it?

Last week, my colleagues and I have decided to read and review each other’s blogs, in an attempt to reinforce blogging amongst the team.  I wanted to prepare my blog’s RSS feed so that it’d be easy for a tool to aggregate all our feeds together into one syndication.  I went to my blog’s RSS 2.0 feed in my browser and was unpleasantly surprised.

Where are all my posts?  I also checked my atom feed and it was even worse, it showed up completely blank in my browser!  I tried to add the feed into my Google Reader and it came up fine, which was a bit confusing.

A quick Google search produced others in the same situation, and I didn’t see any real solutions or fixes for it.  I think Scoble’s rant pretty much summed up the problem, that the WordPress RSS feed doesn’t validate, and shows up differently in browsers and such.  That explains why it came up empty in FireFox but displays correctly once added to a feed reader.

Luckily I don’t have nearly enough readers to complain about my feed being quirky.  I think WordPress would (hopefully) have this issue fixed before my blog grows to that proportion.