How to be an Original

Review week 20-2008; Goals, blog and productivity habits

On Sundays I’m looking back on the past week. How did I perform towards my goals? How did my blog do? And how am I keeping up with my productivity habits?

Blog performance

No statistics at all this week. I’m dropping Technorati as a metric on this blog, and FeedBurner has been bouncing up and down with incomplete statistics all week long. The numbers are so unrealiable that it’s even hard to figure out it should’ve been. All I’ll say is: they’re moving in the right direction.

I also joined the blogging pack at the Authority Blogger forum. It’s an idea inspired by this post by Michael Martine at Remarkablogger. It actually has evolved into something totally different than Michael meant in his article, but nevertheless it’s an interesting project.

Progress towards goals

I cleaned up the table in this section. So much so that the table is no longer there. It was taking up a lot of space for only two active goals at this time.

Renovation Project
Status:
Overdue, since 02/2008.
Progress this week:
Fairly good progress this week. Painted walls the walls this week (2 coats).
Planning next week:
Installing radiators for heating and making a design for a construction with sliding doors and the windowsill.

Semi Marathon training
Status:
On schedule. Deadline is October 12, 2008.
Progress this week:
I did only one run this week, a short 3 kilometer interval training with an average speed of a little over 11 km/h. I started using MyAsics this week. Not the shoes, but the website. It’s a service provided by Asics, and provides training schedules, logbooks and much more. I’ve set up a training schedule for the semi marathon. Based on my fitness level and four training days a week, my optimum end date is somewhere in August. Enough time to meet the deadline, and there’s room to make up for delays.
Planning next week:
Buying proper running shoes in a shop specialized in running gear. And running according to schedule, 4 times next week.

Productivity Habits - weekly review

Nothing really special to say about this topic at this point. Maybe next week.

Review week 19-2008; Goals, blog and productivity habits

On Sundays I’m looking back on the past week. How did I perform towards my goals? How did my blog do? And how am I keeping up with my productivity habits?

Blog performance

I’ve been working a lot on Scraping Pennies this past week. There are still a couple of things I need to do on the design, but it’s live now! So if you’re interested in my fully transparent experiment on making money online, do follow that link.

The stats.
FeedBurner is again not reporting all subscribers. This time it’s the Google Subscribers who are missing in action. And that hurts the stats a lot, because most of you use Google Reader or iGoogle as the feedreader. I corrected for the missing stats, to find out the subscribers are stable. No change there.

Visitors increased, as did Technorati. I did not look into new stats for How to be an Original this week. But I will drop Technorati as a metric. It doesn’t fit the purpose of the blog.

Statistics week 19-2008
Average RSS subscribers: 960 +0
Average daily visitors: 226 +27
Technorati Authority: 146 +2

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Review week 18-2008; Goals, blog and productivity habits

On Sundays I’m looking back on the past week. How did I perform towards my goals? How did my blog do? And how am I keeping up with my productivity habits?

I’m a day late with my weekly review, but that’s no excuse not to do it. I will focus on the past week and not include today (because I did a good run today, but you’ll read about that next week).

Blog performance

The post on Monday was short. I think some of you may even have thought that I published that post by accident. I didn’t, but I intended to write a post at first. I had found the poem and the picture to go along with the message I was trying to get across, but I couldn’t get it on paper the way I wanted it.

So I decided to do something I normally don’t do, and that was to just hit publish with only the poem and the picture. They carried the message I wanted to say anyway, and I thought it might break the pattern I was in. And it did. It took away the pressure of having a post on Monday, and gave room to find other quotes and put the message across. It turned out to be my post on Passionate People.

With that post I also redefined my blog. I will change some stuff around the blog, but it will still be my voice (even more so) and the topics that I have on my mind. I will change the categories though, so they fit the new blog definition better. I’m also going to introduce tags, to better identify the topics that a post is about. You’ll notice the difference in the coming weeks.

The stats.
Quelle surprise! Last week I really stopped caring about Technorati, and now my Authority is up. On a closer look though, it’s mostly because of sploggers so they’re not even “real” links. I’m going to drop this statistic from my weekly reports.

Feedburner was not doing a great job reporting the correct number of subscribers this week, leaving out several sources. So I had to do a little intrapolation to get to the correct stats for the subscriber numbers. And they’re moving in the right direction.

Visitors are stable, again without any stumbleupon traffic. I noticed that the time spent on the blog increased a lot in the past couple of weeks. Hmm, that might be a good statistic to start reporting.

Statistics week 18-2008
Average RSS subscribers: 960 +10
Average daily visitors: 199 -5
Technorati Authority: 144 +5

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Review week 17-2008; Goals, blog and productivity habits

On Sundays I’m looking back on the past week. How did I perform towards my goals? How did my blog do? And how am I keeping up with my productivity habits?

BREAKING NEWS!
Today, a Dutch bloke that goes by hard to pronounce name of Lodewijk, supposedly broke a chain of over 100 days of not running. Today at about 6:07am he tweeted ” off for a morning run“.

So he said it, but did he also do it? Stay with us to find out, after the break.

Blog performance

I’ve been thinking a lot about blogging the past few days. I already wrote about my feelings in Birth of a Blogger, and my decision there is right, but incomplete. Even after deciding to start another blog, I’ve been not so satisfied with myself. I’ve got the feeling that I’m holding myself back by the way I defined this blog. Anyway, I’ll post about it this week. I started to write here, but it was getting too much to fit into a weekly review.

The stats are looking good. Subscribers up again (when will I break through the glass ceiling of 1000 subscribers?). The daily visitors are nice, especially when you know that there is NO stumbleupon traffic there this week. They used to be my biggest source of visitors, but what you see here is search engine traffic and referral traffic from other blogs. Technorati is still on a downward slope. Oh well, it’s great skiing on slopes.

Statistics week 17-2008
Average RSS subscribers: 950 +19
Average daily visitors: 204 -50
Technorati Authority: 139 -8

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Review week 16-2008; Goals, blog and productivity habits

On Sundays I’m looking back on the past week. How did I perform towards my goals? How did my blog do? And how am I keeping up with my productivity habits?

Blog performance

I hope you enjoyed the post about passwords. I had that post in draft for a while before I decided to finally finish it and publish it. I have more posts like that…draft status, needing more time to really finish them. This week I probably won’t be publishing a lot too, because the renovation project (see next section) needs a lot of attention this week also.

Here are the stats: subscribers up, the rest stable.

Statistics week 16-2008
Average RSS subscribers: 931 +18
Average daily visitors: 254 -7
Technorati Authority: 147 -2

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