For those who aren’t interested in the stats, goals and internal mechanics for this blog, MakeYouGohmm, please skip reading this entry. For the rest, here’s a screenshot from third party Site Meter stats for the last year:

These Site Meter stats have been and continue to be open for review by anybody clicking the counter on the home page along the left side that currently sits at around 180,000. We have been using Site Meter since February 2004. MakeYouGoHmm opened on July 4, 2003.

First of all, thank you and welcome to all existing and new readers and subscribers!

This blog continues to grow at a steady pace. The graph above does show a dip in March, but in February we were slashdotted, so that provided an additional traffic boost and we don’t count that spike into the true numbers. We’re trending upward.

However, recently, I still was a little bit concerned when we switched blog scripts and the traffic was going backwards in a big way, like at one point falling back to late 2003 traffic levels. Fortunately, that ship turned around and the last few days we’ve had record numbers in visitors in non-spiked days (./ days excluded).

I’ve had a few people ask me why we switched scripts from Pivot to Wordpress and the general answer is flexibility and data size. Pivot uses a flatfile serialized data structure, not a database, and while it works fine up to a point, users will find that problems can and do start happening the larger the data size grows. Also, for many of the things we wanted to do moving forward, we really needed a relational database. Some of these ideas have already been implemented and several more will be coming in the future.

Next, Bob, the author of Pivot, told me that by the end of first quarter 2005 Pivot would be shipping a MySQL version but unfortunately, this didn’t happen. I’m noticing this morning that I can’t even get to the Pivot website (problem?).

Lastly — and this was sort of the straw that broke the camel’s back: we started to have some data problems where some pages being served were completely blank. I didn’t want to see users ending up at blank pages nor the SE going there so I acted swiftly and decisively. With these new bugs, add in the fact that Pivot wasn’t databased and I didn’t have the time to add the DB functionality myself, and it had me looking to move to another blog script.

Since we already had been using it on other sites, it had a MySQL database backend and tons of mods, I chose Wordpress. The first thing I found was that there was no Pivot importer, so I had to write one of those myself. If anybody else reading this needs a Pivot 1.2x to Wordpress 1.5 importer, just drop me a line or comment here and I’ll be happy to hook you up. After a few more Pivot to Wordpress import cases I will share this code back on Wordpress in the preferred place, but for my own single case import it worked great. In this case, we imported something like 1600+ messages and 800+ comments from Pivot.

So, that’s the story on why we switched from Pivot on this blog. I still think Pivot is an ok program for somebody who doesn’t have access to a database and isn’t planning on making a large number of posts in a short time. Also, we still use Pivot on a couple less updated blogs. Keep in mind, 1600 posts at an average of 10 posts a week (2 per day x 5 days a week) would take 160 weeks to reach … or over 3 years. Also, if you look at the size of the posts in this blog compared to most blogs you’ll find this blog tends to have more text. So Pivot flatfile is probably a very good solution up to 2,000-3,000 posts for an average-sized text blogger. The last thing I’ll say is the MySQL version of Pivot I’m sure is coming soon, it was just in our case we couldn’t really wait any longer and I didn’t have the time to add the database support myself. I’m not sure why the Pivot site isn’t coming up at the moment ….

In evaluating the Technorati cosmos for link love from other blogs and sources, these links in and sources have continued to grow as well, finally putting us over the 300 links mark:

Our MakeYouGoHmm reader and traffic goal is still in the distance, but we are definitely making great strides and percentage-wise are on pace as of the first quarter. Again, I thank you all greatly for reading because without you this wouldn’t be possible. If you think you know somebody that would like to read this blog, please drop them a line and tell them about it. Please remember, readers can sign up for any category, all categories, or even by keyword(s) via RSS, so they can drill down and be notified of only the information that interests them. That’s a feature I’m really excited about because it gives the readers total control. I wish every blog had this functionality. Readers who use the A9 search engine can also get a special A9 search column for MakeYouGoHmm

With summer approaching, which historically is not a great traffic time, it will be interesting to see how this impacts the traffic and readership numbers for this blog.

For those who may not have caught the resolutions/goals for 2005, the goal by the end of 2005 is to achieve at least 500 RSS subscribers and 5,000+ unique daily visitors. The red numbers along the left sidebar of the home page are charting the progress by percentage and will change colors if/when/as we get closer. Also, there I added a counter showing the number of days I’ve owned a Tablet PC. Pictured to the right you’ll see an example of the output.

Lastly, I added my picture to the About section. I’m not sure how long I’m going to keep it there. I don’t really like the idea of folks coming to the blog and the first thing they see is my ugly mug, so I might put that out and put something more interesting there in its place. My business contact information, however, I would like to keep there. It was a recent post by Scoble that motivated me to put that there. He was making the point that he tried to hook up a few bloggers with some contacts and/or business and because he couldn’t easily locate their contact information, he moved on.

Something that has surprised me about this blog is that some people are starting to identify me with this blog primarily. Recently I was at an event and instead of being introduced as “the host of Script School Radio (since May 2000)” or more commonly “the programmer behind TD Scripts.com”, instead I was introduced as “the blogger behind MakeYouGoHmm.”

Wow.

It never really dawned on me until this moment that this blog would ever be considered more noteworthy to anybody than my numerous other business ventures online. In fact, I still don’t consider it all that noteworthy for the things I’ve done, but hey, if that’s what people want to identify with me for, that’s fine with me (and hence the main reason I’ve added my business contact information). It used to link to my bio page at tdscripts.com.

Been listening to a video from the band, EL84K, coming up for today’s radio show, and it begins with an old sci-fi movie line where the alien speaks the chiling words: “particles of atomic death.” Something about that line won’t let me go. Now what does this have to do with site stats or checkpoints for the first quarter? Absolutely nothing. That sort of points out the random, fun nature of writing this blog!

Thank you for coming along and I hope we keep you hmming for many days to come!

• [site news] Problems with Wordpress and slow queries
• [site news] added spellchecker (for comments) and stats page
• [free code] How to import from Pivot 1.2x to Wordpress 1.5x
• 29% of traffic sent to Audi from ad campaign came from blogs
• How much should your blog / website charge for advertising?
• One of our dedicated servers HD went down [site news]