Well it’s been a Year…

I was just realizing as I was renewing my domains that it’s been a year since I started blogging. And saying it’s been an interesting year is putting it mildly.

I redesigned TheHavens.net from a family website to a blog January 11th.

But I was warned that a friend was quiting his job with Fullsystem and I might want to look at new hosts so at that time I looked at 1&1 and Dreamhost and started a RSS News Feed site called I Vant Info.
Trigger happy at heart (ok I sometimes get into a posting frenzy) I had already done 160 posts by the time I decided to get litwc.com for the blog in the beginning of February. That was also soon after I changed hosts from Fullsystem who I had been with for around 5 years to Dreamhost. (Remember LITWC97 for $97 bucks off a year of hosting)

I went two and a half months or so before picking up LivingintheWhineCountry.com so I was good on that front but I also had started putting in Ads so that I could have the hosting paid for by the time the bills came up.
I was trying to think of what interesting things have happened over the last year:

• Eric Copple killed a friend of my sister and another girl a previous Halloween and he was arrested in May for the murder. July they arraigned Copple (he pleaded Not Guilty) and I mentioned that CBS/48 Hours had contacted me wanting to interview me (I barely knew the girls if at all) or my sister (she didn’t want to be involved). The next day Eric Copple went to court again, reiterating that he wasn’t guilty. and I later posted about how in a number of ways I hoped he would get death as it was debated on what type of sentence they would try for. Finally at the beginning of December he plea bargained Guilty for Life in Prison. The last article I wrote about that whole sordid story was a follow up about how the one girl/lady who survived has been doing.
• I wrote a few different articles about tattoos… but one article I wrote about some of the worst tattoos I’ve seen (nsfw) ended up being picked up by a number of sites and at the height I had gotten 13000+ Visitors in one day. With some random ones possibly taking off too like my one of different crashes.
• I’ve also written a number of other articles that have gotten a large number of traffic. Including one about a “different” alarm clock that seems to of attract spam bots… and they continue trying to leave messages to this day. I find it interesting that one of my shortest posts…. turned out to be the most attractive to them.
• I’ve done a couple I was here things that got distributed pretty good. First I went to Wordcamp and wrote a very bad write up (was mainly notes I had done on my piece of junk palm) and then a month later I was asked by EA to come over to Redwood City for an early look at Battlefield 2142.

I’ve written a number of other posts and they all have seemed to been looked at at least once at some time or other, but it’s interesting which ones become the most interesting.

Some stats: There are currently 1,294 posts and 369 comments, contained within 199 categories (Yes at times I feel I over do it…), have had over 154,052 Visitors and 177,478 Pageviews according to Google Analytics over this past year. Of all that traffic 100,774 Visitors was from people coming to look over my I love tattoos but… article (nsfw) with most coming from skoopy.com. Looking at the graphs it was a huge spike and then a few minor jumps afterwards with a gradual lowering. I still get more visitors now then I used too and I have more people getting my feed, but for the most part I get a few hundred visitors a day (500 give or take 100). I noted I have Ads up to pay for hosting. Well here are some stats, According to Google Adsense I’ve had 240,803 Pageviews, 913 clicks and have made $123.44. So it looks like I pretty much have hosting paid for (what I wanted it for). I tried Yahoo Ads for a short period (a couple months) and only made a few cents. and I’ve made a few dollars off the TLA, Amazon Associates code, and the one ReviewMe article I wrote. I hadn’t gotten paid on most of those but that means the domains are paid.

What does all this mean to me? I’ve been able to go on vacation for a week on Kauai, a couple of weekends up in Tahoe, and a great weekend in Santa Cruz and blog about it. I got to broaden my reading and searching on the internet and end up passing on about a number of very interesting things. I got to be one of the first breaking news about some very interesting events. I even got to be mentioned in a few other bigger blogs which gave me a nice warm feeling.

Tags: Family, Hosting, Interesting, Site Update