2006 / February 3rd/ Warpspire: A few landmarks
Well, at the end of January Warpspire hit a few major landmarks, so I thought I’d document it if not for my own sake. January, of course, was a historic site for this site with the release of Hemingway, it’s flurry of success followed by the addition of Hemingway to wordpress.com has skyrocketed my readership and inbound links.
Some interesting statistics:
- More than 1/3 of my blogs total comments were made in January alone.
- Warpspire, for the first time ever, broke 10,000 unique visitors in a single month*.
- By the same token, I also broke 100,000 pageviews in a single month
- Hemingway for WordPress was downloaded around 1,500 times. I approximate nearly 1,000 people use it on wordpress.com
- According to Technorati my site is not only in the top 1,000 blogs — but linked to nearly 1,000 times. This may be attributed to the widespread useage of Hemingway, generating much of the backlinks.
*Based on Measuremap+AWStats
Charts and Graphs
In case you were wondering what the definition of exponential growth was.
Now this is the one graph I really care about: my readership. Again, exponential growth. The initial sharp hiccup in late October was joining 9rules, and there is a disctinctive gain in slope around early January, when Hemingway was released.
Why optimize for someone else’s keywords? I chose to create my own, driving Search Engine traffic up some 1000’s of percents to this blog by simply dominating my own keyword :) Next step: Top 10 for “Hemingway” on Google. I’m currently sitting in the top 20… not too shabby for a theme :)
Summary
Joining 9rules allowed me to expand my readership beyond what I could possibly imagine. Traffic-wise, 9rules has really sent me very little compared to other referring sources. But readership-wise, 9rules has brought in an amazing amount of new commentors and feed-subscribers.
When I released the WordPress port of hemingway, I had expected the interest to be high, but nothing near what I’ve seen. I’ve seen it adopted to other platforms, modified to personal tastes (what I was hoping for when I created the theme) and all around appreciated by the masses. And, to be fair, I didn’t expect it to be so popular. It’s only got about 10% of what it will be, just you wait and see. This is only the begining of Hemingway, and once I find some extra time in my schedule I’ll resume work on it. For now, school and work prevail.
Okay, okay. I promise, no more self-promotion threads for a while, I know no one likes to read them, but it’s fun for me to look back on my blog and see how it was doing at a point in time. If you’re itchin’ for real articles, here’s a few I’ve got on the burners:
- Refused: The Shape of Punk to Come (Review)
- Taking a web application from an idea to a working app
- Possible bursts of love for: Migrations, Validations, Associations, and/or Rails in general
- Possible bursts of love for: Behaviour.js, Prototype.js, FlashObject, with examples of some of my own modifications and frankensteins.
- Building Poetry with meaning; what I learned
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All my little projects that I leave scattered around the web. Some for profit, all for fun.
February 3rd | #
Congrats Kyle! That is definitely quite a leap in January. Hope it continues to grow.
February 3rd | #
Congrats. That’s a heck of a lot better than having some Typo trophy, eh? You were robbed bro, Hemmingway rocks.
February 3rd | #
It’s no surprise when you see a guy with great content and a great look. I’ve been seeing all kinds of versions of Hemmingway out there. Man, I need to finish my Wordpress templates I’ve been working on! ;)
February 3rd | #
Cool beans, glad to see it’s doing so well. :)
February 3rd | #
Congratulations – keep it up ! :)
February 4th | #
[...] auf Warspire findet man einen Bericht von Kyle Meath, der über die Vorteile berichtet, die sich aus der zur Verfügung Stellung des Wordpress-Templates Hemingway ergeben haben. [...]
February 4th | #
i’m using and/or love your template. i’m developing it towards my tastes! But even more impressive is your site? Run all on wordpress? I’d love to see how you do it.
February 4th | #
Interesting to read some landmarks of your theme.
The theme has a special charme for me.
It’s time to think beside the ways of blog design to create a new one and go a step further.
Congratulations.
February 5th | #
Not too shabby, Congrats on that mate, hope continues to grow!
February 6th | #
Kyle, you got Mullenweg’d! I wonder why he didn’t send a trackback… of all people I’d think he would. O_o
February 6th | #
Heh, interestingly enough, Darren Rowse ended up sending far more traffic than Matt did. Though, always great to be noticed :)
February 8th | #
Congratulations.
But what about bandwith?
March 3rd | #
Congratulations.Good work. I like your articles.
April 15th | #
any updates on this? until jan it was really great work. good luck and congrats
from Germany.
June 13th | #
Nice…
June 14th | #
This one makes sence “One’s first step in wisdom is to kuesstion everything – and one’s last is to come to terms with everything.”
June 14th | #
Interesting…
June 14th | #
interesting
June 15th | #
Nice!
January 6th | #
Refused: The Shape of Punk to Come
you were going to review an album that’s almost a decade old!?
May 1st | #
[...] Theme Updates: Keep changing the look of your blog every month. This will invite visitors to check your blog’s new look every month. They will look [...]
November 27th | #
[...] impressed with the results Kyle presents reflecting the traffic generated after the release of his theme for WordPress; Hemingway. As he [...]