Three Months Have Passed

Just over three months ago I began my full-time career as a web developer working for uiNNOVATIONS. The time really does go by quickly when you enjoy what you’re doing!

I had a number of goals when I started in September and have been able to realize a lot of them, including finding some new clients and working on some web sites that I can be proud of. Finding a balance between work and play is still a little difficult but I am typically in the office for about eight hours each day, five days a week.

More Attention for danandsherree.com

One of the big goals I’ve had is to get danandsherree.com traffic back to the point it was in 2007. At that time, we had an average of about 800 unique visitors every day. From mid-2007 to early 2008 we didn’t give this site the love it deserved and that number fell to an average of 300 unique visitors each day. What’s funny is that reaching that high-point in 2007 was never a goal, it just sort of happened after working at this site for so many years.

Building the traffic back up is more difficult than you might think. The wide variety of topics we post about means we typically aren’t top-ranking search results for a specific topic. Writing more on existing topics may create more loyal readers; on the other hand, writing more on new topics may bring in more new readers. What also makes growing readership difficult is our position in the blogosphere: we’ve climbed past the level of complete obscurity into the realm of “you might have been here before.” That’s a big accomplishment in itself, but is also filled with so many others—typically people in the same situation: they’ve decided to make an effort to become more well-known. We’re all fighting for the same thing.

Anyway, here we are in mid-December. In September I set a goal for myself to get readership up to 700 unique visitors each day by the end of the year. In September we were just touching 400 uniques per day. In October I wrote that we were reaching 500 uniques on some days. Over the past week our high was 559 uniques, but we’ve been able to touch 600 a few times recently. I don’t think we’ll be able to touch 700 uniques by the end of the year, but perhaps 625-650.

New Movable Type Plugins

Something I wanted to do more of is writing plugins for Movable Type. I enjoy learning more Perl and more about MT, and plugins let me leave my own special touch on the application. Of course, I’ve already written several plugins.

Over the past few months I’ve had a chance to work on two new plugins:

• Mouthwash is a simple plugin to help keep four-letter words off of your site that I released at the end of October.
• Share is a plugin I’ve been working on recently. I believe it’s ready, but I haven’t released it yet. Share is an “email this to a friend” feature on steroids.

Oh yeah: back in July I released a plugin called Poll Position (and you may have helped test it). That plugin has been popular, with nearly 350 downloads of the free version. But what’s cooler than that? A US Olympic athlete is using this plugin on their site! (Sorry, I can’t say who or provide a link. But how awesome is that?)