Friday, June 09, 2006

Second year of existence

The OracleAppsBlog has now been in existence for two years. Its amazing to think its been going that long now. The blog has been much more successful than anticipated and I believe still has much more potential for growth of this blog and other related Oracle and ERP blogs . This year has seen the addition of 125 new posts and 1,400 new members as well as the introduction of the forum (with 155 topics posted to date) and wiki modules. I’m highly impressed with the functionality provided by the forum and I’m hoping that it will be used more this year. Sadly, I don’t have much time to devote to answering the questions but its nice to see other members helping me out in this area. The wiki will open up opportunities for members to document collaboratively.

I’d like to see more contributions by level 2 members this year so I’m going to do my best to get more authors and make it easier for existing authors to post. At the moment the documentation for level 2 members needs a bit of enhancement so that it’s clearer how to post blog entries, this was actually requested last year and I still haven’t got around to it!! Hence I’ve decided to take a blog break next week and focus on getting that done. One action I have taken to help blog authors is to purchase a group license for Blogjet, a really nice blogging software client that helps you edit and post blog entries. Also, if you have an article you want to contribute but don’t have the time or know how ot write it up into a blog entry, send it my way and I’ll do the work for you.

I thought it would be nice to take a look at some stats from the blog for this year. I’m not into comparing but rather like to see that the the blog has grown in terms of traffic, members and content. I’ve started playing with a number of different statistical tools this year so I can’t pull out last years stats for everything. Incidentally, reading this post on blog addiction it seems I’m pretty much there. Here’s the stats:

• Technorati Rank – 84,835
• BritBlog Rank – 16
• Top Blog Sites Rank – 26
• Google Page Rank – 6
• Alexa Rank – 156,085

According to Statcounter, SiteMeter and MyBloglog I’m averaging about 350 visitors a day and 580 page views a day. Both of those tools only work on the main page and the pic below shows what going on at the back end as provided by the Urchin stats of my webhost pMachinehosting. As you can see I’ve had a about 5 million pageviews in total this year and am averaging about 15,000 page views a day. Of course, some of this traffic is from bots and not humans so MyBloglog, Statcounter and Sitemeter are probably a bit more realistic.

I understand that the ExpressionEngine Commerce module is being released some time this year which I’m sure will make EE one of the most attractive CMS (Content Management Systems) around. I will certainly be implementing the commerce module although I’m not quite sure what I’m going to sell, I’m more interested in implementing it just to see how it all hangs together. The polling module has also been broken for a while so I hope to fix that shortly so I can get more interaction from readers in that area. The site certainly needs a redesign that will produce a consistent interface and theme between the blog, wiki and forum module. At this time last year I thought I would do a redesign myself but due to time contraints I’ve decided to hire someone to do it. It’s quite difficult to find decent web developers who know ExpressionEngine and are not busy so we might have to wait a while!!

Of course, if you have any suggestions for improvement I welcome them. I wanted to thank anyone who has made any sort of contribution to the blog to date and I hope to see more growth and better content in the coming year.