Senator Andrew Bartlett
Sunday, August 21, 2005
 
Blog Birthday Highlights
I've noted other blogs often mark their blog's birthday by listing significant posts over the previous year. In keeping with that tradition, and in case any political science people can see anything significant in it, here's a few posts from my first year of blogging that stand out for me for various reasons.

As I'm a big fan of the comment facility, I like posts that produce comments. The one which I think has drawn the most comments was this post in February on climate change. For some reason Haloscan doesn't display the number of comments any more, but this one got 26 (although some of those are responses from me). This is a fairly small number compared to some sites that regularly crack the 100 mark, but (apart from one occasion) my site has tended not to have internal conversations starting up in the comment section. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Although one of the reasons I am soon shifting this blog to Wordpress is to encourage more comments, I am more interested in getting comments on a wider number of posts over a longer period, rather than getting heaps of comments on a small number of topics. I have also been lucky that I haven’t attracted much by way of spammers, trolls or flame wars (so far).

The day which received by far the most visits to the site was the time that www.crikey.com.au kindly linked to this post hoeing into the PM for his misunderstanding/misleading comments about immigration laws.

The other period which drew higher visitor numbers was around Budget time, when I did a few posts giving some of my views and descriptions of happenings around that event. I'm sure it was no coincidence that it was also around this time that The Domain from Online Opinion kindly started including me in their page sampling Australian political blogs.

I didn't increase the capacity of my Stat Counter until a few months ago, so I can't say definitively which post has been downloaded most often, but the most popular page in recent times has been this one on the ID Card (by a reasonably clear margin).

Another relatively popular page was the entry on the death of Joh Bjelke-Petersen (and the sequel). I don't do as many purely personal lifestyle ones as I used to, as they seem to receive fewer visits and perhaps are unnecessarily indulgent – it is a political blog after all - but I quite like this one about a neighbourhood park and this one about playing cricket.

A final item of interest is some of the search terms people have used that have brought them to this blog. The most frequently used has been "Chen Yonglin", followed by "mulesing" and "Cornelia Rau". More fun are some of the stranger search terms that somehow led people to my site – unexpected ones such as "Panus Angelicus lyrics" and "2005 contact email address of Indonesia Geothermal Association"; ones with unfortunate connotations such as "no danger of intelligence in Australia", "background purple" and "399 swear words"; the rather worrying pair of "senator who lost his seat due to a discovered diary" and "senator live suicide"; and the truly inexplicable " I want to make an appointment for circumcision in Victoria Australia".

posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Sunday, August 21, 2005 Permalink
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