Another milestone! Three million views

Sometime in the past couple of days (end of April 2013), this blog hit three million views!

It passed two million views in early August 2012, so it’s only taken nine months to go from two million to three million. In September 2011, this blog cracked the one million views mark since I started blogging in 2008. As I said when the total views passed half a million sometime in 2010, I can’t even comprehend that number, so three million is mind-boggling.

My weekday average number of views is between 4000 and 5000, and my monthly average is more than 110,000 views. I’ll do a full analysis at the end of this year, as I have done in previous years (see below for links).

However, despite the number of views and the overwhelmingly positive comments (‘OMG! You saved my LIFE!’), I make no more than ‘pin money’ from the ‘donate’ button in the sidebar (http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2011/05/11/if-only/); I also pay WordPress to NOT have random ads on this blog (my choice).

I mainly write this blog for me — I can’t possibly remember all the things I learn, so when I write instructions they are primarily to backup my brain ;-) Think of this blog as a dumping ground for all those random bits and pieces I learn each day. And yes, I definitely use my own blog to ‘remember’ how to do something I may have only done once or twice before.

The fact that others (all three million others now!) find it useful too, is very humbling.

See also:

• 2012 blog stats: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2013/01/07/2012-blog-statistics/
• 2011 blog stats: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2011/12/31/2011-blog-statistics/
• 2010 blog stats: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/2010-blog-statistics/
• 2009 blog stats: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2009/12/31/revisiting-another-year-of-blogging/
• 2008 blog stats: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2009/01/04/looking-back-on-the-first-year-of-this-blog/

[Links last checked May 2013]

2012 blog statistics

In August 2012, this blog broke through the two million views mark since I started blogging in 2008. By 31 December 2012, it had had more than 2.55 million views. Some 1.29 million views (more than half) occurred just in 2012. These figures don’t include any visits I made to my own blog (yes, I use my own blog for stuff I can’t remember!).

I wrote far fewer blog posts in 2012, so many of these visits were to posts I’ve written in previous years. I’ve written a total of 1525 blog posts since 2008, of which only 122 were written in 2012.

Surprisingly, I only have 187 followers who have signed up to receive email alerts each time I post a new article, so I have to assume most readers are ‘hit and run’ readers — those who have a problem with Word or whatever, find one of my posts via Google etc., read the post, get what they came for (or not), and leave without checking out anything else.

Here are some graphs and tables for the 2012 statistics for this blog, as well as come comparative ones for ‘all time’ (‘all time’ is actually 2008 to 2012 — I started this blog very late in 2007, but didn’t really start posting until January 2008, so the 2007 statistics are so low as to be insignificant).

Total views by month/year

Average daily views

The average views per day has nearly doubled since 2011 (from 1867 in 2011 to 3527 in 2012). The graphs above and below are for the full seven days per week, though most views occur on business days.

As I mentioned above, most views are during the five business days, probably as a reflection of the need to find answers to Word questions and the like when people are stuck with a problem at work. The weekends and major public holidays (particularly in the US) see a notable drop in views.

Top 20 posts

Some posts are just more popular than others! Those highlighted in blue appear in both lists — the top 20 posts of all time (2008-2012) and 2012 only. Those without highlighting only appear in one of the top 20 lists. The numbers on the right are the number of total views for that post in the time period.

Long tail

As expected, there’s a significant ‘long tail’ for this blog’s views. I can only extract stats for the top 499 posts from WordPress, but even for those posts the long tail is very evident. In the graphs above and below, the top 50 posts, and especially the top 20, gained the most views. Everything else was a poor cousin to these top posts.

When I extracted out the views just for the top 30 posts for 2008-2012 and 2012 only (both below), the long tail was still evident, though not as pronounced. Again, the top 10 posts garnered the most views, with posts 11 through to 30 tailing off and flattening out.

So, there you have it. Five years of blogging, 1525 blog posts published, 2.5 million views (with more than half in the past 12 months).

I guess I must be doing something right, even though the monetary return is close to zero. One other change this year was removing all the individual links to the donate option from each ‘how to’ post and putting a new link at the top of the right sidebar. I did this as a result of a bizarre mix-up with my PayPal Donate button code being used by someone else. Since then I’ve received the princely sum of $1.99 in donations… So I guess moving that Donate button away from the bottom of a helpful post has not been very successful. I use that money to pay my annual bill to WordPress to keep this blog free of ads and to have the convenience of adjusting the style of this blog.

As in 2012, I’ll be writing posts more sporadically in 2013, and NOT ‘almost every day’ as I did in 2008-2011. I still have a day job that I’m committed to, and paid work always comes before unpaid work.

See also:

• 2011 blog stats: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2011/12/31/2011-blog-statistics/
• 2010 blog stats: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/2010-blog-statistics/
• 2009 blog stats: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2009/12/31/revisiting-another-year-of-blogging/
• 2008 blog stats: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2009/01/04/looking-back-on-the-first-year-of-this-blog/

[Links last checked January 2013]

Milestone! Two million views

Sometime between 5pm 2 August 2012 (my time) and 7am 3 August 2012, this blog hit two million views!

In September 2011, this blog cracked the one million views mark since I started blogging in 2008. As I said when the total views passed half a million sometime in 2010, I can’t even comprehend that number.

So to have a further one million views in less than 12 months is mind-boggling! I must be doing something right ;-)

My weekday average number of views is between 4000 and 5000, and my monthly average is more than 100,000 views. I’ll do a full analysis at the end of this year, as I have done in previous years (see below for links).

However, despite the number of views and the overwhelmingly positive comments (‘OMG! You saved my LIFE!’), I make no more than ‘pin money’ from the donate button at the end of many posts (http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2011/05/11/if-only/) and I pay WordPress to NOT have random ads on this blog (my choice).

I mainly write this blog for me — I can’t possibly remember all the things I learn, so when I write instructions they are primarily to backup my brain ;-) Think of this blog as a dumping ground for all those random bits and pieces I learn each day. And yes, I definitely use my own blog to ‘remember’ how to do something I may have only done once or twice before.

The fact that others (all two million others!) find it useful too, is humbling.

See also:

• 2011 blog stats: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2011/12/31/2011-blog-statistics/
• 2010 blog stats: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/2010-blog-statistics/
• 2009 blog stats: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2009/12/31/revisiting-another-year-of-blogging/
• 2008 blog stats: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2009/01/04/looking-back-on-the-first-year-of-this-blog/

[Links last checked August 2012]

Intermittent posts for the next month or so

In just over a week’s time, I’m heading off to the US for my annual pilgrimage to the WritersUA Conference, where I’ll meet up with my fellow technical communicators from around the world. I’m also attending a 5-day quilting workshop in southern Texas beforehand.

When I return, I *know* I’ll have a lot of work to do and to catch up on.

So what with long flights when I’ll be totally out of touch, attending and speaking at workshops and conferences, and driving around Texas and Arkansas and into Tennessee, my blog posts over the next month will be sporadic at best.

However, I’ll try to post about each of the sessions I attend at the conference for those who can’t be there.

See also:

• http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/writersua-conference-only-a-few-weeks-to-go-2/

[Links last checked February 2012]

 

The saga of this blog’s PayPal ‘Donate’ button

The last day of 2011 started innocently enough. It was a weekend, and one of the last days of my Christmas/New Year break. I was pretty relaxed…

Then I got an email from PayPal with We’ve limited your PayPal account in the subject line.

(My highlights: I can’t send or withdraw funds, so in effect they’ve frozen my account, though I can continue to receive payments; they *may* remove this limitation — then again, they may not!; no, my PayPal account is a validated business/merchant account, NOT a registered charity or non-profit — that statement is just plain wrong!)

I glanced through the email quickly, then went directly to the PayPal website from within my browser (I didn’t click the links in the email in case it was some sort of phishing scam).

Once I’d logged in to PayPal, the first page had this:

So I clicked the Update Now button and got taken to the Resolution Centre page, which had this (my highlights to show what I *can’t* do with my PayPal account):

I got angry — this is MY money, and now I can’t touch it!

I went searching on Google for other instances of PayPal limiting people’s accounts and mostly found stuff about dispute resolutions over eBay payments, non-delivery of goods etc. Nothing seemed to fit my situation. So I decided to contact PayPal by phone — they are open for phone contact every day of the week except Sunday, and as this was a Saturday, I gave it a try.

I spoke to Tim in Arizona. He knew straight away what I was calling about and said it was because I’d started using a PayPal Donate button on my website (this blog) recently and that I needed to be a registered charity to do that. What the…? I couldn’t recall a single thing on the PayPal web page where you create buttons where it said you could only use the Donate button if you were a registered charity. However, I did recall a pre-Christmas incident that went viral on the internet about some stuff Regretsy.com did.

Tim agreed that the purposes for which I was using the ‘Donate’ button seemed fine (I use these small donations to pay annual WordPress fees to keep this blog free of ads, use my own CSS etc.) and he said that would’ve been what he would’ve chosen under the same circumstances. However, he said that PayPal wouldn’t lift the freeze until I’d submitted the documentation requested (things such as my Australian Business Number, Certificate of Registration for my business, letterhead giving me authority to act on behalf of my company, and two pages of information about my purposes for using the button, my expected transactions [in dollars] per month, and my company’s mission statement).

Tim also suggested that I use a different sort of button on this blog — still select  the ‘Donations’ category, but instead use my own image. I tried that, but WordPress.com blogs won’t accept FORM code and there was no email code I could use like that of the previous ‘Donate’ button.

I was also to remove the existing PayPal ‘Donate’ button from all blog posts that had it — some 68 of them (how do I know? ‘cos I spent about two hours replacing them with the old e-junkie code I’ve used for much of the life of this blog).

Update:

Five hours after receiving the email from PayPal, one phone call later, documentation filled in, scanned, and uploaded to PayPal, and 68 blog post updates later, I get a phone call from Dee at PayPal in the US to tell me that my use of the ‘Donate’ button is acceptable based on the documentation I’ve sent in, and that my PayPal account would be unfrozen in minutes. She also said she’d send a confirmation email and that I could continue using this button and that that was it as far as PayPal was concerned.

Note: Nowhere in this email does it explicitly state that I can continue using this button. I only have the account reinstatement and Dee’s word in a phone conversation that I can.

So, with that, I’ll start using the PayPal ‘Donate’ button again. But this was five hours of worry and panic and phone calls and updating blog posts I could have lived without on a holiday Saturday. Plus another couple of hours changing those 68 blog posts back.

BTW, after all this, I went back into PayPal to the ‘create buttons’ area looking for information that restricts the use of the Donate button, and found NOTHING. Here’s the popup for the ‘What button should I use?’ link:

And part of the Regretsy saga documented an email received by them from PayPal, which clearly states there is no right or wrong way to use the Donate button or the circumstances under which it can be used.

If PayPal does have restrictions on the use of some of their buttons, then they should make that absolutely clear on their website, in the place where people are going to create these buttons. There’s NOTHING there.

Update 2 January 2012: In today’s email I received a request from PayPal to complete a survey about the limitation process. So I did, and had my 2 cents’ worth to say in the only Comment field they offered. I wonder if anything will come of that.

Update 23 January 2012: Today I get ANOTHER email from PayPal limiting my account and telling me I have to submit doco again! This time I called the Australian support centre straight away (1800 073 263) and spoke to a nice man in the US (Chris) who looked my history over and said that the limitation would be lifted within 24 to 36 hours, and no, he didn’t know why I was limited again. Unbelievable.

Update 24 January 2012: Some 28+ hours after limiting my account and me making the phone call, the limitation was lifted.

See also:

• http://netprofitstoday.com/blog/thinking-about-using-that-paypal-donate-button-to-your-blog/

[Links last checked December 2011]

2011 blog statistics

In September 2011, this blog cracked the one million views mark since I started blogging in 2008. As I said when the total views passed half a million sometime in 2010, I can’t even comprehend that number.

As in previous years, some people read more than one post, and a few may have read every one, but there seem to be a lot of ‘hit and run’ readers — those who have a problem with Word or whatever, find one of my posts via Google etc., read the post, get what they came for (or not), and leave without checking out anything else. As at 29 December 2011, the total view count is 1,265,000, which doesn’t include any of my views (yes, I use my own blog for stuff I can’t remember!). Some 680,000 (more than half) of those views occurred in 2011.

Here are some graphs and tables for the 2011 statistics for this blog, as well as come comparative ones for ‘all time’ (‘all time’ is actually 2008 to 2011 — I started this blog very late in 2007, but didn’t really start posting until January 2008, so the 2007 statistics are so low as to be insignificant).

Total views by month/year

Average daily views

The average views per day has doubled since 2010 (from 890 to 1868). The graphs above and below are for the full seven days per week, though most views occur on business days.

As I mentioned above, most views are during the five business days, probably as a reflection of the need to find answers to Word questions and the like when people are stuck with a problem at work. The weekends and major public holidays (particularly in the US) see a notable drop in views. The graph below is for the daily views in December 2011. Weekends are indicated with the (1), weekdays are indicated with the (2), and (3) shows the weeks immediately before and after Christmas.

Top 20 posts

Some posts are just more popular than others! Those highlighted in orange appear in both lists — the top 20 posts of all time (2008-2011) and 2011 only. Those without highlighting only appear in one of the top 20 lists. Some, like the ‘Header row won’t repeat’ one, were written in 2010, so I didn’t expect to see them in the Top 20 for 2008-2011 as they haven’t been around long enough to gather the numbers sufficient to put them in the ‘all time’ list.

Long tail

As expected, there’s a significant ‘long tail’ for this blog’s views. I can only extract stats for the top 499 posts from WordPress, but even for those 500 posts the long tail is very evident. In the graphs above and below, the top 50 posts, and especially the top 20, gained the most views. Everything else was a poor cousin to these top posts.

When I extracted out the views just for the top 30 posts for 2008-2011 and 2011 only (both below), the long tail was still evident, though not as pronounced. Again, the top 10 posts garnered the most views, with posts 11 through to 30 tailing off and flattening out.

So, there you have it. Four years of blogging, 1400 blog posts published, 1.2 million views (with more than half in the past 12 months).

I guess I must be doing something right, even though the monetary return is close to zero, especially considering I spend between two and ten hours each week writing blog posts.

However, in 2012 I’ll be writing posts more sporadically, and NOT ‘almost every day’. I still have a day job that I’m committed to, and my paid work always comes before unpaid work.

One million views

Wow! Sometime overnight between 19 and 20 September 2011, this blog passed the one million views mark.

WordPress.com keeps stats on how many visits your blog has, what posts people are reading etc. I usually do a summary at the end of each year, but seeing as though this was such a milestone, I thought I’d share. In case you’re wondering, I started this blog at the beginning of 2008.

See also:

• 2010 blog stats: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/2010-blog-statistics/
• 2009 blog stats: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2009/12/31/revisiting-another-year-of-blogging/
• 2008 blog stats: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2009/01/04/looking-back-on-the-first-year-of-this-blog/

[Links last checked September 2011]

For those who asked…

I’m fine — I’m just taking a short break from blogging every week day. My brain is pretty fried with some heavy client deadlines and I’m all out of hints and tips for the moment.

Once my brain has recharged and I’ve got something to say, I’ll be back! Though perhaps not every day of the working week, as I’ve been doing for the past (nearly) three years.

If only…

Most of my step-by-step instructional posts have a ‘Buy me a coffee if this tip helped you, saved you time etc.’ link at the bottom.

The link goes to a shopping cart (E-junkie.com), and the amount defaults to US$5 (you can change the amount), which can be paid to me via PayPal. In the interests of full disclosure, I pay $5 a month for the E-junkie shopping cart facility.

My blog post readership is almost 2000 visitors per day (as at the date of this post). And I get lots of ‘thank you for helping me’ comments.

So you might think that I’d make a little ‘pin money’ from this blog, right? You’d be dead wrong.

Let me do the sums for you.

I’ve had close to 750,000 visits to this blog since I started it in 2008, and my readership has steadily grown to nearly 2000 visits per day:

• If 10% (75000) of those visitors ‘bought me a coffee’ for the default $5, I’d have made some $375,000 by now! (I wish!! I won’t even do the sums for 50%…)
• If only 1% (7500) of those visitors bought me a coffee, I’d have made $37,500. That hasn’t happened either…
• Let’s try 0.1% (750) — that would have earned me $3750. Nope.
• 0.01% (75) for $375? That’s getting closer…
• Reality: About 40 people have bought me a coffee (and not all have paid the default $5 — several have paid less; none have paid more), so I’ve received around $200. I’ve paid out more than $250 to E-Junkie.

So if anyone or any snake-oil company tries to convince you that you can make money from a blog, they’re dreaming! I’m a professional writer but there’s no way I make money from this blog. The figures may look good (‘you only need 10% of people to pay’), but based on my experience 99.995% of people WON’T pay for information that’s helped them. Maybe advertising works, but I can’t take advertising on a WordPress.com blog — and I wouldn’t want ads anyway.

This is not to complain, just to add a dose of reality to anyone setting up a blog with the aim of making money from the information they provide. I provide quality information (as evidenced by the many positive comments I receive), I have a good reputation and a reasonably high profile in the technical communications profession, and I blog very regularly — typically, I post every work day. My posts are invariably practical, with step-by-step instructions and relevant screenshots. Each post takes me between 15 minutes and 3 hours to write, so I spend a minimum of one and up to 15 hours per week of my own (unpaid) time writing posts for this blog.

I sure haven’t quit my day job, and based on the ROI of the coffee thing for the past two years (average of $100 per year), it’s not going to happen any time soon! Of course, you could take up the challenge below and all prove me wrong! ;-)

And for those who are wondering… yes, I DO donate to other people’s blogs when the information they have provided has helped me, and they have a donate option available.

Update: I’ve now changed many of these ‘donate’ links to a PayPal button.
Update October 2012: I’ve now shifted the ‘donate’ button to the right sidebar as a result of this: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2012/10/05/a-different-sort-of-scam/.

Word 2010: Publish to a blog

One of the ‘save and send’ options in Word 2010 (and possibly Word 2007 as well) is to publish to a blog post.

If you already have a blog, you just have to enter its URL and your username and password, when asked. Then you decide if you want to post now or post as a draft. It all sounds very easy — and it is.

But it’s crap there are some issues with it that I found in a 5-minute test of the process.

Issue 1: More than one blog with a single blog provider

I have more than one WordPress blog registered under my username and password, as I suspect do many people. My blogs are titled differently and have different URLs. One is this blog you’re reading now, another is my personal blog, and I have a couple of basically inactive ones I use for dumping information. When I first created a WordPress account and blog, I gave it a name  (let’s call it ‘Rhonda’); subsequent blogs under that username have names like ‘CyberText’ and ‘Travel’ (also not its real name).

So, I use the Word 2010 ‘save and send’ interface to create a link to my blog in Word 2010. I enter the URL for the CyberText blog plus my username and password. And when the blog account link is created, my CyberText blog gets listed as ‘Rhonda’, NOT ‘CyberText’ as I wanted and expected.

Next I thought I’d try creating a linked blog account for my ‘Rhonda’ blog. I enter its URL (different URL to the CyberText one, but same username and password), and now I get the second blog listed… as ‘Rhonda1′!! I guess if I continued creating links to the other blog accounts, they would be listed as ‘Rhonda2′, ‘Rhonda3′ etc. What use is that??? I want to see the blog names, as reflected by the URLs.

When I tried to edit the account listing, there’s no option to change the name displayed in Word. You can only change the URL, or enter a different username/password. Why can’t I edit the displayed name of the blog so I can easily distinguish one from the other?

What I can’t understand is WHY Word lists my ‘CyberText’ blog as ‘Rhonda’ in the first place. The URL is totally different to the ‘Rhonda’ blog. It can’t be going on the username/password combination as Word 2010 allows me to create multiple blog accounts from the same credentials.

BTW, when I used Word 2010 to post a draft to the ‘Rhonda’ blog (really the CyberText one), it correctly posted in the CyberText blog. That was good.

Issue 2: Really bad HTML from a well-styled Word document

The test draft blog post I did from a Word 2010 document was really simple and it used an existing test document I had already created. Here’s part of that document as it displays in Word 2010;  it uses outline numbering for headings and all numbered headings are left aligned at 0 cm with a 2 cm tab between the outline number and the heading text; all text in the document uses default Word styles:

And here’s how that same content looks when published to my blog from Word 2010:

Pretty darned ugly, huh?

So what’s going on here? Well, I checked the HTML in the post and found a couple of things:

• Word’s nasty additional markup created in its ‘save as HTML’  in previous versions seem to be stripped out. This is A Good Thing.
• The STYLE tags created by earlier versions of Word in the ‘save as HTML’  option are also gone. This is also A Good Thing.
• However, Word does NOT deal well with outline numbered headings when it publishes a Word document to a blog post. I may be maligning Word here — this could be a WordPress issue, not a Word one.

Here’s what the HTML looks like:

I don’t know where the 56 pt left margin came from — all the heading styles were left aligned with the margin in the Word document.

And the OL/LI stuff is where it’s trying to convert the outline numbers in the headings into a number sequence in HTML — and failing badly.

So, maybe this ‘publish to a blog’ was a good idea, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. Didn’t anybody at Microsoft actually test this with REAL documents? Sure, while not many people will publish a document with outline numbering, there are plenty who will. Think of all those scientists and engineers, lawyers, government types, etc. who use outline numbering in their documents — publishing those documents to a blog will cause all sorts of bother for them until this process is improved dramatically.

I’ll continue writing my blog posts in a text editor or directly in WordPress. This feature in Word is still in its infancy and is pretty useless for me as it has been implemented.