leyton.org

A bit of a ‘meta post’ this one. I’ve been doing some tweaking and fiddling to the website over the last few days. Primarily this means there are some new ‘Chicklets’ and items in the sidebar that may be worth a browse. I wanted to just put a short post together explaining what they are, as they may not be obvious to most folk (especially all you RSS readers…)

• Daily Roundup - This is a trial run for Matt Wardman’s daily weblog roundup. There’s a link below it to the textual version, and feed/podcast subscription buttons, and I’d encourage folk to give it a shot as Matt’s putting in a lot of effort.

• Britblog link and “the brown bar” - There are two links to the britblog.com website. The ‘brown bar’ is a ‘popularity’ guage, and seems to mean this website is in the top twenty (it’s currently #16 on the associated technoranki website), but doesn’t have a title since I changed the main leyton.org landing page to a static HTML page). It’s largely self-selecting, so I don’t think it holds much water that my website is that popular. Especially given the amount of transitory search engine traffic I get..

• The Blogflux ‘BF’ mapstats is a link to see where visitors are coming from.

• The ‘Blog Top Sites’ widget is another ranking service. I’ve just added the counter, so it’ll be interesting to see where it comes in the various categories I’ve added myself.

• MyBlogLog’s Recent Readers is next, and is an interesting ‘website community’ tracker. A useful way of seeing who’s reading what websites, but I just wish they had a smaller widget…

• #1 Top Scottish Website? Me? Again, it’s self-selecting, and I imagine if Celtic or Rangers put the widget on their sites, I’d soon lose that position….

• I’ve also recently moved the RSS feed over to the service at feedburner which means subscribers get a few ‘extra’ items, including my interesting links and a few of my flickr uploads (when they happen). There are some other benefits, including a ‘e-mail subscription’, so you lucky people get a nice e-mail if I post something - particularly useful if you don’t bother with RSS feeds (I’d suggest it’s worth your while).

Traffic to the website continues to grow, and it’s both fascinating and terrifying to think so many people - many of whom I’ve never met - read what I write. Whilst I don’t post as regularly as I’d like, and not necessarily to everybody’s taste, I still hope it’s of interest. The frequency I certainly hope to improve… I also hope that some of the widgets, features and changes here are of use/interest. If there is anything people like or don’t like about what I’ve done or changed, I’m all ears. Suggestions are always welcome.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Personal, Technology, Websites, leyton.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.