One of usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s The Top Ten Design Mistakes for blogs is Classic Hits are Buried:
Hopefully, you’ll write some pieces with lasting value for readers outside your fan base. Don’t relegate such classics to the archives, where people can only find something if they know you posted it, say, in May 2003. …
Also, remember to link to your past pieces in newer postings. Don’t assume that readers have been with you from the beginning; give them background and context in case they want to read more about your ideas.
So to comply with Nielsen, I’ve added a popular post page accessible from the top navbar.
I haven’t paid much attention to web stats for this blog — mostly because I’m painfully aware of the shortcomings of webstats. (How many hits are we getting? is a question that I frequently get at work, as if that directly measures the impact of your web communications.) For me, a successful post doesn’t just get hits. It fosters some discussion. Or it just let’s me get something off my chest.
But I got curious this weekend and went through the reports to see which postings were most visited. (Not that that necessarily means they are the most popular.) I had to do a little weighting as the older posts had a lot more hits from spam and robots. (Akismet spam filter is on pace to have deleted 50K spams comments this year.)
I wasn’t surprised that some posts got a lot of visits: postings about organic lawns, global warming and gardening, helping pollinators and of course the classic Garden Footwear Review.
I was happy to see that some of my snarkier posts were visited often, and surprised that some of the music posts were high on the list. (After ‘Ellis Hollow blog’ and similar, the search string leading most often to the site was ‘supertheory of supereverything lyrics’.)
My favorite posts — picture dumps and bloom day scans — didn’t rise to the top. But judging from comments, they are among the most appreciated. That confirms my preconceived notion that the web is a visual medium, and gardeners looking for entertainment love to look at pictures of plants.
Interesting… sometimes I feel like I shouldn’t even be a blogger, because when people start to talk about webstats my brain fogs up. (I know what page hits are; I actually buy some internet advertising as part of my “real job,” but that’s as far as my knowledge goes.) However, I have literally no clue how to find out which of my blog posts is the most read, or even to deduce how many people might be checking out my blog without leaving a comment so that I know about them.
Now you have me curious, though… I would really get a kick out of knowing which kinds of posts that other people read more on my blog. So how do you find out? Is this a Typepad thing that Blogspotters don’t have, or is it an independent page that I can visit, like Alexa, that tracks blog postings instead of actual company pages?
I’ve got to admit, I’m with Kim on this one. I may not be AFRAID of some aspects of technology, but I sense that my computer snickers behind my back regularly. But I don’t seem to have enough time to post all I’d like and read all the blogs I link to (let alone discover NEW ones), so stats like this are best left in my curiosity queue…for a day when I track down that elusive “extra time”. Fun to read about the results you and others are observing, though.