Saturday 5 May 2007

The Power of PZ


Duo Quartuncia is just a week old, but it got one hell of a kick off. The graph shown here is my hit count on Friday May 4, courtesy of sitemeter.

PZ Myers, of the Pharyngula blog, picked up my story on "Darwin is Dead" is Dead. He wrote just four lines (at "But Darwin is still dead anyway") and linked back to me for the details. Pharyngula must be the most popular science related blog on the net, and as a result of this post, my hit rate suddenly went through the roof. The graph tells the story.

I was up late that night, just to see where all my visitors were coming from. I have had visits from Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, South Africa, Phillipines, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Saipan, India, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Poland, Netherlands, Belgium, England, Ireland, Scotland, Spain, Portugal, France, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Bratislava, Latvia, Turkey, Canada, USA, Dominican Republic, Australia, and New Zealand. Thanks everyone.

This blog is still very new. I am at presenting considering ways to improve the presentation and design. If anyone has suggestion, or just wants to say hello, please do so. I will be very grateful for any suggestions!

3 comments:

  1. Well, hello! I came over from Pharyngula and I like what I see/hear. Your writing is good and I'm interested in your topics. I've added you to my Science Notes list of science blogs so that I can visit again. Duas Quartunciae is a clever name--two cents' worth, indeed! in Latin. When I'm not too lazy I add Technorati tags to my posts so that everyone can find them. I haven't figured out how to create neat "previous posts" links, so the only way to page back in time is the monthly archives. But recently I picked up the Technorati tag cloud widget. Unfortunately, it only goes to the most recent year's posts. But it is getting me comments on random posts from the deep past, so I know people are looking.

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  2. Welcome to my little corner of the blogsphere, and thanks for the comments! I've popped over to check out your blogs as well; and I'll be back.

    I think I'm still a bit new for the cloud widget to mean much on this blog. There are not enough posts to give a realistic distribution of the tags I'll be using.

    Generally, however, I'm interested in whatever useful utilities I can supply. I want to avoid having a "busy" blog with too many gadgets lying around, and I'd like to keep the loading of the blog as fast as possible. I'm keen to identify what widgets give the best value for my visitors. Cloud widget might be useful.

    There's a minor glitch in your blogroll, where a closing "/a>" appears as part of the name of Duas Quartunciae.

    When I get the time, I'm planning a general clean up of my template, to do the right things with header tags and a few other things.

    The links to older posts seems to have come for free with the template I have chosen. I'm using "Minima Stretch" by Douglas Bowman / Darren Delaye, but I'm also tweaking it myself. For example, I've add the capability to have abbreviated posts on the front page and the rest on the post pages.

    There are classes in the template for blog-pager-newer-link and blog-pager-older-link; but I don't know enough css or html to be sure of how they are working.

    There are several things I'd change about blogspot, if I could. I'd like to drop the astronology nonsense form my profile. I'd like to put a proper description on my feed. I'd like to allow a few more tags in comments.

    But overall, I'm pretty happy with it.

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  3. I got a flood of visitors to my blog once a while ago when PZ linked to me.

    Somebody else named this phenomenon a "pharyngulanche". It can be fun.

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