Blogging about Blogs
Encouraging New Bloggers
Thursday, March 5th, 2009Yesterday, I received a pageview from a new domain, StuffImThinking.com. Intrigued, I clicked through and found a brand new WordPress blog with one entry and one item in the blogroll (yours truly).
The ALT text for the link says, “Brian Greenberg’s blog (I don’t know him, but I do read his blog!)”
Well, Mr./M s. StuffImThinking – I don’t know you either, but I’m glad you take the time to stop by around here. Good luck with the new blog – I’ll return the favor and check in once & a while myself. We micro-bloggers need to support each other, after all…
Categories: Blogging about Blogs | 3 Comments »
Some Template Updates
Saturday, February 14th, 2009I’ve been playing around with the template here at Familygreenberg.com. And is often the case when I do that, I call upon my small but loyal group of regular readers to throw some feedback my way. Here’s what I think I’ve done. Please tell me if you see anything differently on your end:
- Header Image: Inspired by Jeff Porten‘s “images of things in his life” and Ilya Burlak‘s “horizontal image that doesn’t take up a lot of space on the page” styles, I give you the new Familygreenberg.com header image!
Categories: Blogging about Blogs | 4 Comments »
Blog Schwag
Friday, February 13th, 2009In the mail today:
My complimentary copy of Drink, Play, F@#k, as promised by the book’s publicist, Martin Wilson, in the comments of one of my previous posts.
This marks the first time anyone’s ever sent me anything because of something I’ve written on my blog, so first of all – as the kids might say: W00T!
Secondly, my mission is now to uphold my part of the bargain, which includes reading the book and posting my review back here at I Should Be Sleeping.
Watch this space…
Categories: Blogging about Blogs, Random Acts of Blogging | 3 Comments »
An Annual Meme Tradition
Sunday, December 21st, 2008Over at Burlaki on the Thames, Ilya reminded me of a meme from last December, which was originally suggested by Jason Bennion over at Simple Tricks & Nonsense. Still with me? Well, whatever…
Here’s the deal:
Repost the first sentence of the first blog entry in each of the previous year
Categories: Blogging about Blogs | 3 Comments »
The Best Bad Food Revue Ever…
Monday, December 15th, 2008Matthew Baldwin over at Defective Yeti is one of the funniest writers I’ve come across. In a recent post, he described his opinion of Nabisco brand Cracked Pepper and Olive Oil Triscuits
Categories: Blogging about Blogs, Random Acts of Blogging | Comments Off on The Best Bad Food Revue Ever…
You Like Me! You Really Like Me!!
Friday, November 28th, 2008My friend and colleague, Ilya Burlak of Burlaki on the Thames has conferred upon me the “I Love This Blog” award:
His rather flattering nomination reads as follows:
Brian at I Should Be Sleeping is a man of many interests and a great wit, with a curious and critical eye and a disposition for distilling complex issues into easy to understand concepts. His serious fare is moving and insightful and his lighter stuff is tongue-in-cheek hilarious. I know him in person, too, and he is a great guy to share company with.
Right back atcha’, Ilya. I really appreciate the kind words.
Anyway, with awards come responsibilities. In this case, these:
- Post the award on my blog.
- Link to the person who gave me the award.
- Nominate at least 4 others.
- Leave a comment on their blogs so they can pass it on.
#1 – check. #2 – check. #3:
- The Vast Jeff Wing Conspiracy: Jeff Porten provides a mix of politics, technology, and general wackiness that basically served as a template for this blog back in May of 2005. We agree on almost nothing politically, and can often be found proving that point repeatedly in each other’s comment forums. My only complaints with Jeff’s blog are these: first that he doesn’t post enough, and second, that his RSS feed is broken, so I’m often late to the party on his newest posts. Get right on that, Porten!!
- Defective Yeti: Matthew Baldwin, contributor to the Dallas Morning News, is one of the funniest guys on the web. And, as they say about Arizona in the summertime, it’s a dry wit. Beyond that, describing it is an exercise in futility. Just go check it out, why dontcha…
- Indexed: Jessica Hagy perfects (invents and then perfects?) the art of symbolic commentary with Indexed. A blog written entirely as charts & graphs on index cards, the humor and insightfulness to space ratio is incredibly high.
- Lifehacker: The holy grail of tips & tricks. Mostly about technology, but occasionally about work, life, etc.. I read it for the technology tips. A great feeder source for my Cool Links page, as well as the occasional piece of freeware that does something super-useful and/or super-awesome.
- Whatever: Gotta give a nod to Scalzi. I used to be a frequent commenter on his site, but dropped off completely after one too many run-ins with the proprietor (John and I don’t mix well, and it led to him saying some not-so-nice things about me in the public forum of his blog. As he often says – his blog, his rules – but that doesn’t mean I have to participate if I feel uncomfortable). Anyway, the fact that I don’t write there doesn’t mean I don’t read there, and John is an excellent writer who always keeps my attention, even if it involves biting my virtual tongue now & again.
I hasten to note that two of the blogs I read most often – Burlaki on the Thames and Simple Tricks & Nonsense are not on the above list because they either nominated me, or nominated each other. It strikes me as silly to turn this into a circular, mutual admiration society. That said, they are two excellent blogs, and if you’re looking for something great to read on a regular basis, you can do much worse than to check those guys out.
As for #4 – I agree with Ilya, that’s kinda stupid. A comment on their blogs would, by definition, be unrelated to whatever entry I commented on. So, I’ll just count on one of them (Jeff) reading about this here, and hope the other three check their ping-backs. If not, another accolade goes by the boards. So sad…
Categories: Blogging about Blogs | 4 Comments »
Claiming my WordPress Blog on Technorati
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008A long time ago, I claimed my Blogger-based Blog on Technorati. Now that I’ve migrated to WordPress, I need to claim my new blog as well (hat tip to Scalzi for inadvertently pointing this out to me).
At any rate, claiming a blog on Technorati involves typing in the URL, and then putting this link on the front page of your blog:
…which I’ve now done.
They tell me I can delete this post after the registration is complete, but I think I’ll leave it here for all those who have switched blogging providers recently and want Technorati stats on both blogs. Quite the public servant I am, amn’t I?
UPDATE: I think I found a bug in Technorati. Here are the stats for my two blogs, as well as a query of my root domain (www.familygreenberg.com):
Site Authority Favorites Rank Root Domain 5 0 1,103,858 Blogger Blog 4 0 1,284,225 WordPress Blog 4 0 1,284,225 How, pray tell, can two blogs have the exact same rank? I always wondered if that was just a random number generator….
Categories: Blogging about Blogs | 1 Comment »
Familygreenberg.com Health Check – August & September Edition
Sunday, October 5th, 2008I’ve gotten away from my monthly features here on I Should Be Sleeping – the Health Check and the How People Found Me posts. This disturbs me (even as I know that it disturbs little, if anyone, else), and so I offer this as an attempt to get “back in the game” as it were…
I’m going to skip “How People Found Me” once again, because I’ve found that Google changes so frequently, that once you get past the first or second of the month, the cute/interesting queries that brought people to my site no longer register highly on Google, which makes it tough to track them. But the health check, that I can do retroactively. Here’s what the last couple of months have brought:
Metric July August September Jul-Sep Chg Visits 2,196 3,079 (+40.21%) 1,422 (-53.82%) -35.25% Pageviews 3,724 5,262 (+41.30%) 1,999 (-62.01%) -46.32% Pages/Visit 1.70 1.71 (+0.78%) 1.41 (-17.74%) -17.06% Avg Time on Site 1:17 0:59 (-23.95%) 0:57 (-3.18%) -25.97% Bounce Rate 74.86% 49.89% (-33.36%) 82.07% (+64.51%) -8.79% % New Visitors 87.11% 92.11% (+5.73%) 84.81% (-7.92%) -2.64% August was a fantastic month, almost exclusively because of one of those link aggregators called StumbleUpon. Someone “stumbled upon” my 20 Most Overrated Movies post, and it generated a whopping 1,622 links, over a span of just three days. On this site, that’s enough to send the stats into the stratosphere.
Correspondingly, September was a lousy month. Not only was it a big let down from August (to be expected, given the unsustainability of a “Stumble Upon”), but it was also down 30-40% from July in most categories. This, despite 21 posts (relatively high for me, I think) and a variety of topical posts (politics, sports, etc.). I’m not sure what to make of this. Either I’ve become boring, or my loyal readers have become busy, or Google has been so inundated with posts on these topics that I’m not rising to the top of as many queries as I used to.
In any case, I’m motivated to do better. I know, you’re all a flutter in excitement. Try to contain yourselves… ;-)
Categories: Blogging about Blogs | 1 Comment »
Apparently, I’ve Upgraded to WordPress 2.6.2
Sunday, September 21st, 2008Nothing should be different on your end.
Unfortunately (fortunately?) nothing seems to be different on my end.
Categories: Blogging about Blogs | 2 Comments »
Familygreenberg.com Health Check – July Edition
Monday, August 11th, 2008Metric June July % Change Visits 1,140 2,196 +92.63% Pageviews 1,800 3,724 +106.89% Pages/Visit 1.58 1.70 +7.40% Avg Time on Site 1:21 1:17 -5.00% Bounce Rate 82.89% 74.86% -9.69% % New Visitors 89.56% 87.11% -2.73% Now that I’ve lived through the dark times where my blog wasn’t functional at all, I’m happy to return to my regular self-indulgent feature, the monthly Health Check. If you are not so happy, I totally understand. These are mainly for me, although I suspect there are a few out there who are geek-nation enough to read it anyway.
That said, I can’t help but be pleased with the July stats. Granted, the bar was a low one to jump over, since I hardly blogged at all in June, but I hasten to note that Visits, Pageviews, Pages per Visit and Average Time on Site are all at the highest levels since I began tracking this kind of thing back in May, 2007. Bounce rate is also at its lowest level ever, so not only are more of you visiting, more of you are staying. All of which is, of course, awesomely gratifying.
What was it Sally Field once said? “You like me! You really like me!”
(NOTE: The truly hard core will realize that my other monthly feature, “How People Found Me” did not return this month. That’s because it took me until the 11th day of the month to get the stats together, and by now, the Google results are all stale. Suffice to say, Billy Joel queries are up, given that he performed in July and I blogged about it extensively. Also, there were almost 100 different ways that people Googled “can’t get into Webkinz” and wound up at my site. I’m a public service to those with small children & lots of hi-tech stuffed animals. So proud. So proud. Next month – full-fledged self-indulgence. I promise!!!)
Categories: Blogging about Blogs | 1 Comment »