Cooking With Technology

Traffic Sources

I’ve had this blog going for a while now, and am definitely starting to notice trends from the sources of visitors I receive.

• Traffic that originates from google results in users that spend a decent amount of time reading about what they were searching for. They rarely comment, and rarely come back.
• People that visit via RSS are likely to comment and spend a good amount of time reading about the article, as they are usually my friends, family, and people who occasionally appreciate what I share.
• Traffic originating from news portals where my articles have been posted generate the highest quality traffic. The users are interested in the topic, have some amount of experience with it, and leave great comments. I really like these visitors, especially the ones that come from debian-news, tuxmachines, and fsdaily.
• Visitors coming from Digg are, in general, /idiots./ They have little knowledge about the post they are reading about, which is fine - I post so others can learn from my experiences. What is not fine however is when they leave comments with viewpoints that make no sense or are based on snap judgments from reading a third of an article.
• Stumbleupon users rarely stay on the site for more than a second, but when they do, they too leave decent comments. I’m guessing this is because they only stop to read what interests them, so the user who spends time reading a post is a user who likes the topic already.

The quality of my readers seems to be dependent on the domain of the topic. Visitors from within the topic’s domain are of higher quality, and I really do appreciate them. Visitors coming from more mainstream locations, and I’m generalizing here because I only have experience with Digg, are of lesser quality. I guess it is the same as in anywhere - people that seek you out are more likely to have a genuine appreciation for what they can take from communicating with you, while people who are fed what you have to say are more likely to troll or ignore you.

IT Filter

Along with the common acceptance of ‘lolspeak’ as a method of legitimate communication, IT websites are a scourge of the Internet.

I really enjoy reading their articles, I do. You can gauge an author’s technical competence by how well they describe the concepts they are covering, so I play a little game. I first read the article, taking note of all the areas they introduce then gloss over (exposing their lack of knowledge). For each occurrence, I tally a point on an invisible scrap of paper in my head. At the end, I read the author’s credentials. You’ll generally find that the number of points tallied equals the number of times ‘expert,’ ‘authority,’ and ’specialized’ appear in their biography, with any points left over being assigned to each of their degrees and certifications.

If I ever write for a website or paper, you know what my biography is going to say?

“Robert Peaslee is an author. If you have no idea how to verify whether everything he writes is made up, you probably shouldn’t be reading his articles.”

PS,

We need a firefox plugin to filter IT websites.

Rubber Ducks Proven to Make Geeks Happy

It’s a rubber duck. I found it one day after work protecting my car. Why he was out of the water, we may never know.