randomfire

Running two blogs and two photoblogs means that I've got enough options to choose from. For the purpose of this project I'll look at the Life of Jalo. After all, it's the only blog that has regular posts (daily pictures for three and a half years straight).

During the last almost year that I've been collecting Google Analytics stats from it the number of daily visitors has risen from a bit under thirty a day to about fifty a day. Visitor loyalty is quite good since less than 25% of visits are new.

The most popular posts during the time frame have been the front page (~24% of pageviews), the image of 08.10.2007 (1.35%), and the first ever post (1.21%).

Quite clearly, visitors mainly visit the site quite regularly. The spike of October 8 last year is explained by the huge spike of visitors caused by a link on a popular pet forum by a friend. I have no idea how many of the visitors in the spike continued to follow the photoblog.

As such, LoJ isn't exactly primetime material since it is a photoblog that follows the lives of our dogs, currently four retrievers. Based on the comments, the most active visitors are friends and other retriever owners. Including shots of dogs training for hunting and hunting probably doesn't increase general appeal. And quite puppy pictures appear only when there's a puppy in the house.

Most of the visitors are from Finland, but slowly LoJ has been gaining an international readerbase. It has been bilingual (Finnish and English) from the start. Finland still dominates the statistics, but the US has lately passed other European countries for a clear second place.

Those are my statistics for the project on blog statistics. It'll be interesting to see what kinds of stats others have.

A recent mini-discussion on Cody Redmon’s photoblog on image sizes got me to look through the statistics I’ve gathered on Google Analytics on our various sites to see what kinds of resolutions people are using.
Many photography enthusiasts and early-adopters probably have large screens and resolutions available to them and are probably vocal in promoting [...]

Continue reading Sizing images »

While I was reworking the layout for this blog and its photoblog child shutterclicks I was also thinking of ways to activate myself with my photography. Specifically my photography of other things than dogs ;). I’ve always found various challenges to be a good motivating factor - often taking the images but then forgetting to [...]

Continue reading 2008 challenge »

Today Brian Auer over at Epic Edits posted a poll on how would you pay for fine art?. Of course, he’s setting up a blog/site to sell fine art photography, so figuring out pricing is quite important. But the poll came at an interesting time since today at lunch I’d just been discussing differences in [...]

Continue reading Pricing prints »

One of the reasons randomfire’s been so silent during the summer and early fall has been my attempt to massage WordPress so that the Picture-a-Day part would behave like I want it to. I finally gave up and moved my photoblog portion over to Pixelpost and am now publishing it as randomfire: shutterclicks.
Now I just [...]

Continue reading Moving… »