Traffic for the last 30 days

Site Update: Where We Are and Plans For The Future

This post may contain affiliate links. Please see the disclaimer for more information.

Regular readers may have noticed some changes around here of late. Certainly, I’ve been giving the site more love. It’s been moved to a new host and I’ve been playing around with the layout. You’ll also notice from the message above that I’m experimenting with affiliate links. The latest addition is some (hopefully minimal) AdSense ads.

This is all part of my new longer term plan to turn this site into something more than just a place to document my projects. I want to build the site both into a resource for the community and into something that can hopefully make some money to support me doing more projects.

A Change in Perspective

In turn, the plan for this site is part of a larger change in perspective that I’ve had this year. For a long time, I’ve wanted to start my own business. This is something I’ve always been open with – even with my employers. This desire wasn’t driven by wanting to make tons of money, I just wanted the freedom to set my own agenda. The problem was I could never come up with an idea compelling enough for me to want to lay aside other projects in order to work on it.

As time went on, I realised what I actually want is to get paid to work on my own projects (actually I’d happily do it for free if I didn’t need money to live). The problem is no-one is going to pay me to do that! By building up this blog into something that brings in some income (however modest), I will actually be achieving that goal. I may never be able to live off the proceeds, but having the exposure will hopefully open up other opportunities.

My Ultimate Goal

The explanation for why this has come to the front of my mind this year lies in my discovery of the Financial Independence (A.K.A FIRE) movement. This is my ultimate goal. Unfortunately, I’m a long way away from that. It would have helped if I’d discovered it 10 years ago. However, 20’s me didn’t really care about money beyond having enough to live comfortably and not being in debt.

The main tenet of FI is that having enough money set aside to support your (hopefully reasonably minimal) lifestyle buys you the freedom to spend your time as you like. It’s really not about the money. Money is just the means to that end.

If only this guy had known about Financial Independence

FI is a long term game. However, for me there would be no functional difference between being fully financially independent and getting paid to work on projects and document them on this site (aside from the need to keep doing it, to ensure a steady income). So with that in mind, it would be nice if I could eventually make enough from this blog to be able to do it full time.

In the meantime, I’m intending to use any proceeds from this blog (after hosting costs), to both finance future projects and to put towards the FI fund.

Wait a minute, did you say AdSense?

As in Google AdSense. Yes, I did. However, I didn’t come to this decision lightly.

This is a blog about self hosting, DIY electronics and Home Automation. Google really doesn’t fit in around here. I don’t like the tracking inherent in Google’s Ad platform and I don’t like being dependent on an external service to serve content on my site.

I’ve thought long and hard about whether I would run ads at all, never mind Google ones. I’ve also investigated other Ad networks and specifically talked to someone at Mediavine. Unfortunately, not only do I not yet meet their traffic requirements, they also require the use of Google Analytics, so I wouldn’t be any freer from Google.

Ideally, I’d like to host my own ads (if I have to have ads at all), for products that are actually useful and relevant. As a (very) small publisher this seems to be out of reach right now. However, if you’d like to advertise here, feel free to get in contact!

So Adsense is here for now. I’m treating the period of the next few months as a trial to see how well it does. I’ll be sure to report back on whether I think it’s worth it. Given the content of this site, I’m assuming that anyone in my audience who doesn’t like the ads has the technical chops to block them. I don’t mind this, my content is still free for you. However, please don’t complain about it unless you’re willing to buy me a coffee! 🙂

Current Status

To have any chance of success in my efforts, I need to bring more traffic in to the site. The main way to do this is of course to produce more content on a more regular basis. This is something I’ve struggled with in the past. Although I’m improving here, I still have a long way to go.

Traffic for the last 30 days
Site traffic for the last 30 days

In order to benchmark to my progress, I’m publishing some of my traffic stats. As you can see from the graph above, I’m getting some reasonably decent peaks when I publish an article, with massive drops in between.

Over the time period above:

  • There were approximately 3500 visits
  • Maximum daily traffic was 886 visits (corresponding to my last Home Assistant article)
  • Minimum daily traffic was 10 visits, but on non posting days is usually somewhere in the 20s or 30s

I’m not going to bother with any further breakdown, such as traffic sources, etc. That can get really boring!

Where to Next?

My immediate goals are what I’m calling the “100-100-100 Challenge”, these are as follows:

  • Achieve an average of 100 visits per day on non-posting days (with a proportionate increase on posting days)
  • Gain 100 followers on Twitter (I’m actually 3/4 of the way there!)
  • Earn $100 (NZ) in blog related income (after fees and tax)

These seem fairly modest and achievable. In addition I’m trying to set up a blogging schedule so that I can produce one post a week – which will certainly help with the above goals.

That’s pretty much it for this update. As always, if you have any feedback on my plans or on the changes to the site, please leave a comment or get in contact.

If you liked this post and want to see more, please consider subscribing to the mailing list (below) or the RSS feed. You can also follow me on Twitter. If you want to show your appreciation, feel free to buy me a coffee.

Reviving this Blog

Its been almost four years since I updated this blog and in that time I’ve been busy with life and family. I’ve still been working on blog worthy stuff, but all my spare time has been taken up with actual projects, rather than writing about them. Most likely this has just been a matter of priorities. I could have made time to blog, but wasn’t interested enough to do so. I’ve always kept the site running and software updated and I’ve watched the daily hits go down from several hundred to single digits.

Recently I’ve been thinking that I would like to get back into it. Its taken me a little while to set aside the time, but this post is the start of a new and (hopefully) sustained run of writing. How long this continues will really depend on the response I get, if I see people reading and responding to what I’m producing then I will feel justified in setting aside time for it.

I’m making this a little bit of a fresh start and with that in mind I’ve done some work on the site. All the old content will remain in place, since it still gets a few hits. However, I’ve updated the theme and added the option for readers to subscribe by email, since this seems pretty popular nowadays (you can still subscribe by RSS and that’s never going away). Also, the site is now only accessible by HTTPS thanks to Let’s Encrypt.

Content-wise I’ve tried to get a head start and currently have two further posts written and ready for publishing. These will be posted later this week and I’ll try to keep up the momentum. In terms of topics I’ll be covering there will be lots of stuff about self-hosting your own cloud services, some embedded stuff and general software and Linux stuff. I have a list of posts I want to write and I’m open to suggestions in the comments.

Let’s see how this goes…

I’m back!

Although I’ve not actually been anywhere.

With my last post nearly a year ago I thought I’d revive this blog. I don’t actually know why I stopped posting, its just been a busy year and blogging hasn’t really been top of my list of things to work on after busy days at work.

From a tech perspective I’ve mainly been working on setting up a MythTV system and general home server. MythTV has been working great since October and I’m still working on interesting stuff some of which I hope to share in these pages over the coming weeks.

I’m also planning on sharing some more photos here and writting some shorter posts. I want to change the style a bit so that it is more like the old ‘life-steam’ metaphor (yes I know everyone is using Facebook and Google+ for this now, but I just don’t like them). The long technical posts will still remain but there will be more frequent shorter posts like this one. The basic idea is to make the site look a little more lived in rather than the barren desert we’ve had recently!

Anyway, that’s all for now. Catch you again soon.

SwallowCatcher 0.2.0 Released

Download SwallowCatcher 0.2.0

Download SwallowCatcher 0.2.0

After what seems like ages I’m proud to release a new version of SwallowCatcher – version 0.2.0, codenamed “The Black Knight (Come On Ya Pansy!)”. The reason behind the version number jump is twofold: 1. Bigger numbers are better, 2. I think the new features in this version and improved stability warrant a new version. Notable new features in this release include support for more URL schemes, cover art support and the ability to browse show notes from directly within the app.

I’ve had several contributions to this release both in the form of  bug fixes and in code and artwork. In particular I’d like to thank Nick Clark (@nrlucre on identi.ca) for contributing a great icon and Luke (~nobugs on Gitorious) for contributing bug fixes and adding itpc:// and pcast:// URL scheme support. Also, thanks to everyone who’s given me feedback and sent me bug reports.
As always, please check out the project page and the gitorious page where you can download the source code. Feedback and bug reports can again be submitted via identi.ca, email or via the comments on this post.