Or, I Got Fireballed On My Blog’s First Day Out and all I Got Were These Lousy Statistics.
I decided on the name Methodtree back in December. I registered the domain and threw up a temporary homepage. I also installed Wordpress, knowing I’d want a place to write. I called it Branches and left it at that. Other priorities took over.
After I got back from SXSW and found myself needing to write down some thoughts that had been percolating, I logged into Branches and spat it out. I didn’t really expect anyone to read it, though I did throw in some outgoing links to friends’ sites, expecting a few of them to find me in their referral logs. I also included a link to Daring Fireball. It was attached to the phrase “websites that I admire.” Then I went to bed.
When I checked my stats the next morning, I did so mostly because I had just installed Mint and wanted to see it in action. I didn’t expect to find this:
Let me tell you what it does to your self-confidence to have your very first post out of the gate be picked up by Mr. Gruber. It spikes it off the chart. It makes you go back and re-read your post, making sure every word is properly chosen. It makes you wonder if it was really smart to publicaly announce that kind of promise to yourself about the goals you’re going to meet in the next year, and what kind of a schmuck you’re going to look like if you fall short.
It also makes you wonder if sometimes it’s not a good idea to properly design your site before throwing it out there, just in case someone happens to think you’re worth the attention. I appreciate the Getting Real ethic and all, but in this case, it would have been nice to use something other than a stock (albeit nicely designed) Wordpress template.
So, first project on the list: finish methodtree.com. Can’t have a web design company without a respectable website, you know?
Interesting aside: having 100% of your traffic driven to you from a Mac Nerdery blog produces some entertaining results in your browser statistics.
Internet Explorer at 2% … in fourth place … after Camino! I’d give up my right mouse button to see these kind of stats persist for all of eternity.
March 22nd, 2007 at 1:07 pm
I know what you mean. As a small blogger (in desperate need of the time required to make a non-standard template for myself) I never know quite what to do when I get linked. The best response I have is to just push myself to blog more.
I mean, the post that got all the attention wasn’t hand crafted. For me it’s usually just really good note-taking or the occasional musing on an issue. The challenge is to keep writing without getting hung up on the fact that your audience is getting bigger as you go.