EDIT - 324 now. Ouch! :)

I originally was going to have a review about Retire @ 21 go up today, but asked Michael if I could delay it… you see, there’s something I want to gloat about :razz:

A few of you may have seen my post yesterday about the server crashing multiple, multiple times… not a good thing so I thought, especially as I was out the whole day and only knew about it after getting back to a whole host of instant messages saying that the website was down, the world was ending and they were going to kick my ass because of that. Ah, life eh :razz:

The ironic thing was that the article was an article on surviving in the web hosting business… with my hosting crashing every thirty seconds, it did not look very good, for both the reputation of the website and the person that wrote the article, as people a) assumed that I was writing about things I knew jack all about (I do know nothing about web hosting to be honest, but I did not write the article) and b) that TUK was hosted on Kiloserve, and TUK crashing so much must have meant Kiloserve was a bad company. With these two things in mind, I was beginning to think that getting on the front page, with me not knowing about it did actually much, much more bad than good; the website going down multiple times and the reputation dent, despite me being unable to do again about it was not good at all.

After the website came up and started staying stable for a while, I went and added a small note at the top of the article; informing the users of Digg about TUK, the article in general and why I had crap hosting; I do not think this blog has crashed anymore in that time. I also put up a link to the contest and my RSS feed, assuming that if they were going to see the website, they might as well check out the contest. Did not really expect much to be utterly honest, as, well I had no guarantee the blog would stay up and I had no idea whether Digg users were interested in such things.

Before today, the highest daily increase I’ve ever had was around 20 or so subscribers to the RSS feed; this was right after a contest post and although it was a decent sized increase, it was nothing spectacular… as I’ve seen other contests do a lot better in terms of metric increase. Whereas the feed count had increased by fifty or so visitors in the duration of the contest, again, that was nothing spectacular… slightly more than ten subscribers a day, certainly not worth it for a contest with $3,000 worth in prizes. Although I was happy with the buzz and backlinks, ultimately it is the RSS count that people look at - if people are really bothered about your blog, they’ll subscribe.

The increase was a decent 87 RSS subscribers yesterday… which takes my feed count to six subscribers under 400, or 394 subscribers. That may not be huge statistics compared to others, however to me, 400 subscribers is a shade short of 500, and from there… doubling it will not be as difficult, as everyone knows that the beginning of any project is always the hardest.

I’m insanely happy with the increase, and hope more will subscribe sooner rather than later… you see, the more the metrics of this website increase, the more effort I’ll put into promoting it as a brand. :)

The increase also means that I’ve got to watch and monitor the website very carefully, as people will unsubscribe if quality goes down; I’m going to start focusing on producing kick-ass content after the exams next week, as that is the main reason people should subscribe to a blog.

Sorry for the post that isn’t really helpful to anyone, but I do like to see increases in blog metrics; this also makes moving to a new server ever so pressing. The next update will be when I reach 500; you can help me by subscribing through a feed reader or via email if you haven’t already :)

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