It’s been five years since Bleistift’s first blog post. Time flies.
Today: a little look behind the scenes – from a web point of view.
Comments and Spam
Visitor numbers have been fairly constant over the years. Bleistift gets about 100 to 150 visitors a day. My guess is that many of them are actually not people, but spam bots …but it’s difficult to say exactly how many are real, human visitors and how many are not. Many spam comments have been left, but over the years there have also been nearly 1500 real comments. WordPress’ Plugin ‘Akismet’ is pretty good at sorting out spam, which means that real comments don’t end up in the spam folder very often. The spam comments Bleistift gets often contain links to web sites selling fake watches or medicine, but some don’t seem to contain links at all or they contain links to unsuspicious looking web sites. I guess some of these comments that don’t make sense, but that don’t link to any medicine,fake watch, etc. websites are designed to probe the spam filter of blogs without giving away who sent them. I think Kevin’s guest review of the Dahle 133 is worth being mentioned here. It’s probably the blog post most ‘attacked’ by spam or the one where spam comments are most difficult to detect by the system – recently it received about 50 spam contents on that blog post that were so ‘good’ that the Akismet plugin didn’t recognise them as definite spam.
Visitors
The origin of the visitors hasn’t changed a lot over the years. You can see this in the table below, which contrasts where the visitors from the last month came from and how that compares to visitors overall since the start of the blog. This information is recorded using Google Analytics. This is a lazy solution and it would be better if I wouldn’t use a third party tool for that. Maybe one day I’ll switch. I probably don’t even have to mention that the best blog around, Lexikaliker, does this the way it should be done, i.e. without third party tools.
| October 2014 | All time | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 30% | United States | 33% |
| Germany | 12% | Germany | 11% |
| United Kingdom | 10% | United Kingdom | 11% |
| Canada | 5% | Canada | 5% |
| France | 4% | France | 4% |
| Australia | 3% | Australia | 3% |
| South Korea | 3% | Spain | 2% |
| Spain | 2% | Italy | 2% |
| Italy | 2% | South Korea | 2% |
| Netherlands | 2% | India | 2% |
When it come to the web sites that send visitors to Bleistift not too much has changed either. Pen Addict was always the site that refers most visitors. If there is ever a spike in visitor numbers I can be sure that this means the Pen Addict has included Bleistift in their Ink Links.
| October 2014 | All time | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| The Pen Addict | 15% | The Pen Addict | 24% |
| Pencil Revolution | 11% | Pencil Revolution | 9% |
| Lexikaliker | 7% | Pencil Talk | 9% |
| Contrapuntalism | 4% | Lexikaliker | 5% |
| Pencil Case Blog | 3% | Dave's Mechanical Pencils | 5% |
| Pencils and other things | 3% | Contrapuntalism | 2% |
| Pencil Talk | 2% | Stationery Traffic | 1% |
| Just another pen | 2% | Notebook Stories | 1% |
| Scribomechanica | 2% | Pencil Wrap (defunct) | 1% |
| Blackwing Pages | 1% | Notebook loves pen (defunct) | 1% |
WordPress
The blog software I’m using is WordPress. It’s quite nice, but some things are not as nice as with other blog software. One example: Another blog software shows links to other blogs by date of the last post and with the name of the latest article. I did install a plugin, so that WordPress behaves in a similar way, but this solution is not that elegant – it takes a very long time for this information to be displayed when you visit Bleistift.
Bleistift is hosted a server I rent. This means it does cost money and I have to update the software myself, but the advantage is that the visitors don’t have to see advertising. Speaking of updating, I should really get round to changing the template so that it’s responsive and looks good on a mobile device …but that’s probably not going to happen any time soon.