Visitor statistics at an all-time high

I was just looking at my statistics for each month since the inception of my blog in September of 2006. Last month, I had 1,979 views. This is the highest number of visitors I have had in a given month. The trend for views has been going up at a steep angle for the past couple months as I have been trying to provide more content each day and register the blog with social networking services.

What I would really like to see is articles of people writing about my entries. I’ve noticed that Crap Mariner, author of What is this crap? and other sites, has been writing about me quite a bit and linking to me as well. Actually, this guy writes so much, I don’t know how anyone could keep up with him. Here are just a few articles on his blog where he mentions my name:

1. Dandelions
2. Some prim-saving techniques
3. Tinkering Time with the Tinkerman
4. High compliments
5. Korii’s Creations
6. Bombing Run
7. So, what do the gears represent?
8. The Deranged Muse
9. Textures
10. Hail to The King
11. Tracking
12. Blue Hair
13. Podcasting Roundup
14. Podcast Roundup
15. Podcasting Roundup
16. The Broads Party
17. Paisley in the tower…
18. Letters: Why are you named Crap?
19. I think Paris Hilton needs to pay Nowhereville a visit…
20. Windup
21. 15% of an avatar
22. PHOTO CONTEST: Look Like Crap!
23. Roundup the Podcasts, Clem
24. Bridge
25. SL Podcast Roundup
26. SL Podcast Roundup
27. 25 Groups
28. What Is This Crap? will continue…
29. Come together…
30. What’s in your sky?
31. Toga! Toga! Toga!
32. Thanks
33. COMING SOON
34. Virtual Hot Wings (Welcome to the machine)
35. Cee Rap Rocks The Factory
36. The Drabble Engine
37. Yxes Delacroix earns her tribal name…
38. Wednesday’s Show is in the can!
39. Monday’s Show Notes
40. I want to rock on Thursday

With all of those links, you may think that he is infatuated with me. Crap is just a very link happy person that loves to share the spotlight with his friends. I find that I am often talked about if I show up for an event, release a new episode for my second life podcast – blue hair, or simply hang out and chat with the guy. It is pretty much the after effects of social networking within Second Life.

DrFran Babcock drops a reference on me as well every now and then and I am more than happy to return the favor as well. Therefore, here are all the references to me that she has written about me:

• DrFran Does SL
  1. Dedric Pops In
  2. New Year; New Projects
  3. My Burning Life Build
  4. Brainstorming About Burning Life
  5. Burning Life is Starting to Start
  6. Where’s Dedric?
  7. Two of My Favorites
  8. A Manly Sendao
  9. Tagging Dedric
  10. Jack Gelfand, got me out of a jam, so my scrapbook will work right. Bless the scripters one and all, especially Koz and Dedric, and now Jack!!!
• Second Life OPML: What happens when you go virtual…
  1. I have the day off, and the grid is down
  2. I better get going…
  3. Happy Valentine’s Day
  4. Work, work, work!
  5. Creepy
  6. 5 Things You Don’t Know About Me
  7. Lots of Things are Happening

The most valuable thing to a blogger, or at least to me, is the number of blogs that link to me, and how popular those blogs are. DrFran and Crap are perhaps my favorite blog authors and great long-term friends. Crap is actually my neighbor hosting the Edloe region next to mine, Woodbridge. DrFran is on the Mystical Mastery region where she teaches many classes.

I would love to have a better way to keep track of who is linking to me. All of the referrals that I see are usually through my posts at blogHUD. There just may be a lot more people out there that have been talking about me, but I just had not noticed, (sorry).

My most popular post has been about SL Clothes Previewer Trick or Treat Sack. I can only see the most popular links for today and the previous day. That specific post shows up every day. Most links to that article come from a forum post. The link is not showing up in my referrers today, otherwise I would link to it here.

There are a few linden owned blogs that link to me every now and then as well. I love it when they link to me because they have a large audience that may not have heard of me before. Here are some of their mentions of me:

• Hamlet Au (ex linden) – New World Notes
  1. Dedric Finds Search
  2. The ambivalent elephants of grace
  3. Social Animal
  4. Gather ‘Round the Wikitecture Tree: SL architects create true 3D wiki
• Torley Linden – Torley Lives
  1. Flickr’s launched “The Commons” community tagging project
  2. Thanx to those of you who tagged my Flickr pictures!

The official Linden blog for Second Life does not mention me specifically, but any time that I post a comment, I often get a lot of visitors coming to my website. This usually happens when not many others have commented, or I am one of the first people to comment on a post.

Usually, I post blog entries to my blog through a complicated set of steps. I start out by taking a snapshot in second life and then send it as an email to bloghud.com, which in turn will cross-post it to my blog. Sometimes blogHUD does not cross-post my entries and makes my blog appear to be stale with no content for a few days. The other problem is editing the content in the second life viewer is limited to 700 characters by default. I have modified my viewer to extend it to 5,000 characters, but that appears to be the limit. There are still problems where I can only send one screen shot at a time, and I cannot really edit the contents of my post all too well or even preview it before it is published.

I am going to continue to pursue different ways to build up my visitors to my blog. One thing that I am using for the first time is w.bloggar. This client lets me edit a post and save the contents on my local system until I’m ready to publish the information to my blog. I am also able to upload multiple images and even set a category for each entry.

I no longer have to worry about second life crashing on me while I am in the middle of writing a post. I will continue to use the snapshot email to send out photos quick, but I think I will start using w.bloggar every now and then for my long posts when I have something to say that takes a bit of thought.