I wrote a post in early March entitled ‘One month in…‘ which provided some observations about the site’s progress at the end of its first month. At the time I suggested I wouldn’t be writing these every month, and I won’t do it forever, but I’m going to continue for a while at least because they do serve as useful milestones, if only for me.
1. In terms of post count I’ve exceeded my target of at least 15 per month, with 17 being published during March, up from 9 in February. It feels about the right ratio, one every two days, especially as I’m still striving to avoid simply regurgitating content from other sites.
2. Amongst March’s posts there a couple of particular highlights achieving the most significant reader volumes. Firstly, accounting for over 59% of all pageviews in March, was my response to and follow-up reflections about the FlowingData challenge to improve the design of some pyramid graphs. Secondly, was a pair of posts assessing and re-designing an iPhone application.
3. The growth of traffic to the site has been fantastic with a 30-fold increase in unique visitor levels representing 55 different countries/territories (62% from the US). Hello to the person who visited the site from Mauritius – was it really interesting enough to drag you away from this?!
4. Along with the significant growth in visitors, I have also been very grateful for a rapid growth in my RSS feed subscribers from 17 to 167. I have learnt a lot about the reliability (or otherwise) of such statistics but with nothing else to go by it does at least support the sense of the site’s steadily growing exposure.
5. In response to a number of requests I established an accompanying Visualising Data Facebook page so that readers can follow my posts there. It is clear from reading about the subject that the social web is a massively important factor in reaching potentially interested users out there so I am keen to pursue this.
6. I’ve made one or two cosmetic changes to the site (such as the title and some of the WordPress templates) and I have also installed a number of plugins to help enhance the usability of the site both for the benefit of readers and myself. These improvements will continue over the next month along with my long-planned changes to the site’s home page and the addition of a number of permanent pages providing extra resources and details of my consultancy services.
7. I’ve resolved many of the technical issues that have emerged over the first couple of months relating to issues like posting comments, links within RSS feeds and some of the bookmark sharing features. There exists, however, an ongoing issue with my hosting service and their MySQL database connections which I urgently need to deal with. This occasionally causes the site to hang so needs resolving ASAP.
Until next month, thanks for continuing to visit and read.