Seen as its the start of a new month I thought I’d post a follow up to my post on the site overhaul. It hasn’t actually been a month yet, but the tracking statistics are based on calendar months. The short story is that visitor numbers are up, with 446 visitors recorded since the Piwik instance went live (13th Jan) until the end of the month. This beats all my previous records and is only for part of a month. My old GA figures were putting me at around 300 visits per month, though this had slipped recently. So, either there is a large difference in the way the two systems measure visitors or my push to actually put up some content is working! The fact that roughly half my visits are coming from search engines and are coming to newer posts on the site supports my theory that the push is working.

Having said that I’ve slacked off a bit recently (this is only my second post this week). This is mainly because I’ve been putting a lot of work into SwallowCatcher, managing to get a release out earlier this week. Hopefully, in the coming weeks I’ll be able to balance both projects.

In terms of the other action points I had for the site:

• Google Ads are still here. This is primarily because AdBard have not approved my account yet. I’ve even queried this via their support address and had no response, so I don’t know what’s going on there.
• Flattr is here! And its actually making me some money, with a total of three flattrs last month. Please, if you like my stuff consider flattring me, it’ll help pay for the site and encourage me to produce more content and software.
• I have a new theme! Although its just an off the shelf one for now, I haven’t modified it.
• More pages: well, I’ve posted the project section and a project page for SwallowCatcher. There’s still more I want to do and I haven’t got around to doing a proper profile page or online CV yet.
• More content: well that speaks for itself. The last month has been a time of unprecedented blogging activity for me. I’m really quite enjoying it and its made its way into my mental todo list for each week, which is a good sign.

That’s just about all there is to it. For those that are interested in SwallowCatcher, since I released on Tuesday I’ve been working fixing some of the issues identified in the release notes and those that people have reported to me. I’ve also been using it day to day to download my podcasts and fixing any issues I encounter. In fact, tonight was the first time I’ve opened my laptop in the last two days. The laptop’s primary use for the last few months has been downloading podcasts when I’m at uni. Now SwallowCatcher is just about filling that niche! I’ll hopefully post an officially updated version sometime over the weekend, with the announcement again going out here.