Several months have passed since I signed up to Technorati, Blogged, and Zimbio. Of interest was seeing whether these sites could help increase traffic to this website. A week after signing up, I noted that Technorati was the only one to produce any hits. Now, months later, which one was the most effective? Which one is the "winner?" That title goes to Technorati. However, my initial skepticism has also been proven right; even Technorati has failed to produce much more than a handful of visits.

The myriads of websites that give advice on "how to make money online" have a common theme running through them: have lots of quality content on your website that people want to read. So, how does one obtain this large volume of quality content? There are those who have the ability to create/write it themselves. Others have built up their site to the point that they can pay others to write for them. Then there are so-called "community" or "social-networking" that effectively get their users to produce the content themselves. The final option is to steal someone else's content. I have previously noted that there is considerably less original content on the internet than there are websites/pages. Even worse,

One of the first things that is taught in publishing is the importance of white space and visuals. Too much text can be off-putting to a reader, particularly with modern "I want it now" attitudes. A simple picture depicting the main concept that a page wishes to convey could help to not only convey that concept, but also make the page visually more appealing, and thus, more likely to be read. Likewise, having sufficient white space (or blank space if the background is a different colour) ensures that the page does not look crowded.

Earlier it was noted that Technorati had stopped updating its listing for this blog. Well, as of today, it is back up and running (see this blog's page on Technorati here). I received no response from my support request. However, they have fixed whatever problem was causing it to fail.

Technorati has not updated this blog's posts in nineteen days. This is despite me using their manual ping function every time that a new entry is posted. Problems with updating started occurring some time after I started using FeedBurner. Whether these two events are related or not is uncertain. Technorati is certainly updating most Blog feeds.

The announcement made last weekend regarding the RadeonHD for Amiga OS 4 driver project resulted in a spike in traffic to this website. This spike was triggered simply by mentioning this project on two of the online Amiga forums. Other websites quickly picked up on these links and posted their own links to the project page. As a result, the number of visitors over the next few days dwarfed the average visitors per day for the rest of the month (see the plot below). It has since dropped down, and it remains to be seen if traffic levels will drop all the way down to their original level, or remain slightly higher.

The free ideas page has been updated with a new idea. This idea relates to something that I would personally find very useful, but lack the time to implement. I use both Trac and Subversion for all of my personal software development projects. However, I find adding/removing projects very tedious. What would be very useful is a tool that allows such tasks to be performed via a web-browser.

This blog now uses FeedFlare to add "sharing" links to the bottom of every blog entry (see the bottom of this blog entry). FeedFlare is a feature of FeedBurner, which is a tool/service designed to help increase traffic to blogs. The idea behind FeedFlare is to make it easy for people to share blog posts with friends. For example, a Digg user can "Digg this" post, simply by clicking on the "Digg this!" link. No need for them to manually copy the URL. People are more likely to do something if it is easy and takes little time.

Today I decided to have a look at social networking type sites such as Reddit. Reddit allows users to submit links to interesting pages and vote them up or down. The idea sounds good; popular articles should rise to the top whilst unpopular/uninteresting ones will fade into obscurity. Despite the site simply looking like yet another news feed, I decided to take a closer look.

Getting a car that is stuck in mud moving, requires considerable effort. Once the car is in motion, however, greater traction is gained, and the car can be accelerated more easily. Likewise, increasing traffic to a new website is rather difficult and requires effort; but, once a certain level of traffic has been achieved, increasing traffic further becomes much easier.