Ryan McFarland

I reinstated the links to five “related posts” on the post pages.  I might add a tag cloud page.  Are there any tweaks you’d like to see on this site?

1. 1,585 posts - 6 new
2. 2,746 comments - 4 new
3. Technorati Authority: 50 (up 1) rank: 154,301 (improved 3,808)
4. Google Page Rank: 3
5. Alexa: 273,310 (improved 5,363)
   
6. Page Strength: 4
7. Feedburner subscribers: 35 (down 2)
8. BlogTopSites: 208 (improved 10)
9. Blog Juice: 1.6
10. RealRank: 627 (decreased 115)

I am experimenting with a module on zieak.com that will automagically crosspost my entries on my personal site right to my myspace profile blog also.  Facebook has a service that lets you import an RSS feed from your site as notes so my posts already show up there.  It seems that there is a mass exodus finally moving from myspace to facebook so this feature is probably a few years too late.

1. 1579 posts - 16 new
2. 2742 comments - 6 new
3. Technorati Authority: 49 (down 4) rank: 158,109 (down 14,209)
4. Google Page Rank: 3
5. Alexa: 278,673 (improved 11,814)
   
6. Page Strength: 4
7. Feedburner subscribers: 37 (up 2)
8. BlogTopSites: 218 (down 40)
9. Blog Juice: 1.6 (down 0.1)
10. RealRank: 512 (decreased 38)

1. 1563 posts - 15 new
2. 2736 comments - 18 new!
3. Technorati Authority: 53 (down 9) rank: 143,900 (down 24,654)
4. Google Page Rank: 3
5. Alexa: 290,487 (improved 42,868)
   
6. Page Strength: 4 (down .5)
7. Feedburner subscribers: 35 (up 7)
8. BlogTopSites: 178 (down 43)
9. Blog Juice: 1.7 (up 0.1)
10. RealRank: 474 (improved 40)

Thanks to Catea for pointing out that my blog is six years old today.

You can see that i’m finally the number one result for a search for “Ryan McFarland.” I have a few ideas that will let me ensure that it stays that way.

I changed the template so that now with each blog post it says the author of the post (which is always me) using the Wordpress php author tag.  Now when splogs pick up my posts they will have my name associated with the post.  Generally those spammy blogs that you might see links in the comments every now and then (until i remove them) don’t carry much weight in the search engines.  But having them use my real name and link to zieak.com will undoubtedly help with future links.

With nearly a year spent taking (mostly) weekly measures of various site statistics it finally is time to take a look at the numbers for zieak.com.  Hate my weekly site stat posts?  Here they are for one year summarized into just a few graphs.

First is Alexa rank.  Alexa measures the popularity of a site based on visits made by people using their browser plugin. The lower the number the better.  You can see the point where Alexa released the Firefox plugin. The gap in the line is during our month-long trip to Cambodia, Vietnam and Bali. In January i starting writing for DIYlife so one segment of my writing disappeared.

Post and comment count.  Generally just a slow rise in the number of posts and comments made.

The next two graphs are Technorati scores.   The authority is a count of blogs that link to zieak.com over the past few months so the higher the number the better.  When a popular post becomes too old to count toward “authority” then the number slips.  The second graph is the Technorati rank.  The lower the number the better.  At this moment it appears that zieak.com is the 120,000th most popular blog out of the 12 million or so blogs that Technorati tracks.  Top one percent!

Next is a comparison of Feedburner subscribers.  This is an approximate count of people that watch the rss feed for new posts.

Finally, a comparison of blog ranking services.  Google’s pagerank vs. SEOmoz’s page strength vs. TextLinkAds’s BlogJuice. Page strength has occasional components that are broken but the pink line gives an overall impression of zieak.com’s search engine worth on a scale of 1-10.

1. 1548 posts - 15 new
2. 2718 comments - 19 new!
3. Technorati Authority: 62 (down 6) rank: 119,246 (down 12,504)
4. Google Page Rank: 3 (down 2 — finally got the Google PR slap)
5. Alexa: 333,355
6. Page Strength: 4.5
7. Feedburner subscribers: 27 (down 3)
8. BlogTopSites: 135 (improved 7)
9. Blog Juice: 1.6
10. RealRank: 514 (improved 11)

As Tiffany noted, i have made a few slight site tweaks. Here’s a comparison of the old image and my new one. The new image was done by using a pen and red chisel tip Sharpie which was then scanned and edited in a graphics program. I had to erase the backgrounds and make them transparent .gif images. They were all resized but i resized the scanned image so that they retained a relative similarity to each other. Some were reduced forther to make the site flow a little better. I need to do a bit more tweaking and i’ll be happy (for a few months).

How could i forget the background image for the post date?

Before: After: