daverea.com

Fifty-two weeks for the year, and fifty-two posts to go along with them – that’s the plan for DaveRea.com at least, and with a little luck, a few reminders and at least a handful of marginally-meaningful 11th-hour postings, I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to handle it. With the goal set, then, I’m just left wondering what to write about…

For ideas, I figured I’d take a look at what’s popular in DaveRea.com’s 497 existing posts. To start, that meant reviewing the site’s stats via the stellar WordPress.com Stats Plugin. By a pretty large margin (read: by a factor of 10-to-1) content like reviews and how-tos wins the page-view popularity contest. My review of the Lumiquest 80/20 takes the crown, with over 1,400 page views since I started collecting data in January 2009. Shortly behind, my info page for running Linux on my HP 6710b notebook tips the scales at 1,300 visits. You have to inch down to the #7 position before reaching an opinion piece – my commentary on the idiocy of Rochester’s gun “buyback” programs, which weighs in with 130 viewers.

So apparently y’all like information. But page views isn’t the only metric of what’s popular – in fact, I suspect it’s a better indicator of which content sits at the confluence of popular search terms and the portions of the site that are easily-indexed. Comments, I suspected, might give a better view of which DaveRea.com postings are most interesting – or at least which ones motivated you to saddle up to the keyboard and talk back. As it turns out, I must not motivate you all that much!

There are a shade over 300 comments spread across the posts and pages here, and it seems the majority of those comments are nearly-evenly split between informational pages (the 6710B post wins here, 10 comments), opinion pieces (such as my rant on Apple’s iPod access restrictions, 14 comments) and posts about life events (such as when I went to work for GM, with 10 comments).

So in the end, the message I take away is that info-posts, reviews and how-tos are good, and make for a good fit with the search engines. As hesitant as I am to post opinions on controversial things, those posts seem to earn some popularity too. And since there are at least a few readers here who care about what’s going on in my little corner of the world, throwing in some life updates for good measure doesn’t go unappreciated. That said, what do you want to see here? If you have a preference, hit me up in the comments (tchyeah, that worked real well last time, huh?) and let me know.

It’s New Year’s Eve 2009 – just – and as of a few minutes ago, those of us in the Eastern U.S. began the final day of the final year of the first decade of the 21st century. Not that there’s any significance to any of that – but it makes for a nice lead-in…

After I punch the “Publish” button on this one, DaveRea.com will enter 2010 with 497 posts. Despite the frivolousness of our collective tendency to assign significance to arbitrary milestones (you know – odometer readings, anniversary multiples, centennials and the like) I’ll do my best to make my 500th post a special one.

In the mean time, I’ve got some New Year’s enjoying to do – Kelly and I plan to ring in the new year with friends this time around, a departure from our boring-by-comparison celebrations of the past few years, which usually consisted of one or both of us falling asleep long before midnight, then groggily stumbling to bed while mumbling our happy-new-years to each other while sleepily brushing our teeth. Actually, to be honest, I can’t even remember how we welcomed 2009, and my new year’s eve post from last December isn’t much help.

Nobody from DaveRea.com’s vast* commentariat bothered to answer my questions last New Year’s Eve, so (apart from this post’s title), I won’t bother asking any here. I will, however, mention a few blog-oriented resolutions… First among them being my participation in Project52, wherein I hope to post at least one entry per week here throughout 2010. We’ll see how that goes. I’d also like to give DaveRea.com’s underpinnings a bit of an overhaul – the theme is tired, the database has been neglected at the back of the fridge for a few too many months, and a most of the stuff I currently accomplish with plug-ins has been merged into the WordPress core code. So migrating to a fresh install with a new theme will probably happen sometime soon too…

At any rate, if perchance you’ve stumbled upon this site and are (inexplicably) still reading this far down the post, I wish you and yours a very happy New Year. May your celebrations be safe, your memories of 2009 be warm, and your expectations for 2010 be high.

* In this context, the word “vast” really refers to about 6 or 8 people… Maybe…