August 07 Wrapup

Posted by Stropp on September 2, 2007

I started to get my blogging groove back during August, and had one of my more productive months on the blog. I still didn’t get a lot of gaming in though. However, there was quite a lot of MMO news to make up for it, with the biggest news being Blizzards announcement of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

On the beta front, even though I’ve signed up for a few, I haven’t had any notifications that I’ve got in. That’s probably not a bad thing at this point in time seeing as I have been and will continue to be pretty busy.

I was hit a bit with the flu in the middle of the month, but not hard enough to keep me out of work for more than a day. A good thing since contractors don’t get sick leave. Unfortunately, working all day with a bug took a lot out of me so I didn’t get much done when I got home at night. Happily, it’s all better now. Just hope I don’t catch the Horse Flu that’s shut down the Aussie racing industry.

Most Viewed Post

The most viewed post during August was The Politest Spammer Ever with 2948 views. I was somewhat surprised at this since it was a spur of the moment post inspired by a request by a spammer to post comment spam on my blog and telling me he was just doing his job. The reason for the number of views was that it got picked up by one of the social websites and recieved over a thousand hits in one day, the 24th.

Most Woo Hoo Moment

The discovery of not just one, but two of my articles had been syndicated by two major news portals put a bit of spring in my step. It was certainly something that I wasn’t expecting to happen. Hmmm. Maybe I should go out and buy a Fedora and a reporters notebook. That’s probably more something to do in the City of Heroes.

August Poll Results

The question I asked for the August Poll was Do you PvP?

There were 78 responses to the question with the following results:

• 21 responses for I only play PvP Servers - 27%
• 2 responses for I play PvE sometimes - 3%
• 16 responses for I’m a PvP regular - 21%
• 26 responses for I rarely do PvP - 33%
• 13 responses for I never do PvP - 17%

The most common result from the poll respondants was they they rarely do PvP at 33% of all responses. However, if you break up the poll into two parts, those who PvP and those who don’t PvP or do much of it, you get an exact 50/50 split. I expected the non-PvPers to take a resounding lead, but for the whole month it was neck and neck.

World of Warcraft

After a good start in July, I haven’t done much more with the Rogue, or with World of Warcraft. It’s not that I don’t want to. I’ve simply been more into the single player games lately (see below.)

Single Player Games

I gravitated towards the single player this month. With the release of Bioshock ten days ago, I’ve spent most of my gaming time immersed in this excellent and somewhat ethically challenging game. I’m thinking of putting a review up, even though Bioshock isn’t a MMO. I also spent a few hours earlier in the month with C&C Tiberium Wars.

Stropp’s World Banner

One of the things I was going to look into in August was getting an appropriate banner for the blog. I’ve only looked at a couple of options at this stage. Both are going to cost a reasonable amount of money. I’ve not yet decided wether I’ll go ahead with this idea.

Site Stats

• According to AWStats, Stropp’s World received 9247 unique visitors who visited a total of 12388 times and viewed 27059 pages.
• The number of RSS subscribers reached 173.
• World of Warcraft Addiction is still the top search term.

Blog Experiments

I mentioned in the wrapup for July that I’d been experimenting with Stumbleupon as a tool to get more traffic. Well as you can see by the stats above, it worked. A good portion of those numbers were referred by SU. Of course the trick now is to see if there is a permanent effect on traffic, or if my stats will return to pre-stumble numbers.

Goals for September

• Continue working on regular posts. I got back into regular posting in August. I’d like to keep this up during September.
• Regular Gaming. As with last month, I’d like to become a bit more regular with my gaming (particularly MMO) so that I can increase my game reports. But as also with last month, I’m still pretty busy.
• Experiment with other social networks to build traffic. Stumbleupon appears to have been reasonable successful, so I’ll have a look at some of the other social networking sites like Digg and Redit to see how I can use them to increase traffic.
• Achieve 200 RSS subscribers. I got quite a lot closer to this goal in August, but there is still quite a way to go.

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