daverea.com

Hrmph. It appears I’ve missed a Project 52 deadline for the first time this year. Rest assured, fickle reader, that it was not for lack of trying. Actually, as I put the finishing touches on a thousand-word entry yesterday, I decided it just wasn’t worth bothering with. The post was more or less a rant about the similarities between Apple Computer’s business model (of late) and the health care legislation that’s currently looming over our country like the tidal wave at the end of The Abyss.

I wrote the post late Friday night, and read through it a few times yesterday, tweaking here and there. And then I read through it a couple more times. And then I asked myself, “why bother posting this?”. The answer wasn’t because I wanted to make a point, or share my conclusions, or push my point of view – it was because a new week was about to start, and I didn’t have anything else chambered up. So I flushed it. In the grand scheme of things, no one who reads this blog would have their mind changed by a bitchy post relating geek issues to Obamacare. And no one new would have visited the site just to see my rant. Why bother?

We had plenty of excitement in the afternoon, either way. After I nuked the rant, Kelly and I jumped in the car and headed out to Geneva Bike, in hopes of walking in with a gift certificate (a Christmas present from my parents) and leaving with a new pair of cycling shoes for me. Of course, you can’t go to a shop like this and not browse around a little – and that browsing landed us in front of a wall of ladies’ road bikes. As Kelly eyed one in particular – a Trek 2.1 left over from last year – I wandered off to play around on the 29′ers. A few minutes later, I found her (and the bike) bolted into a trainer, getting fitted! Long story short, after the bike was set up and we talked it over, it ended up coming home with us…

As much as I love mountain biking, I’m hoping that Kelly’s new wheels will give me a little more excuse to get out on the road with my trusty old Trek this season (after Craig tunes it up, of course). Stay tuned here; I’m sure we’ll have experiences to share!

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.