First 500 Unique Visitors

As of today, my blog has been seen by 528 unique visitors(according to AWstats) since it was launched in October 2006. It’s not a hell lot, but the numbers seem to be growing pretty fast. There’s already more than 150 unique visitors tracked by AWstats for the period of 1st to 8th December, so I’m quite happy and blessed to know that people are reading about me. Maybe I’m just another attention-seeking exhibitionist.

I’m sure some of you are interested in the amount of money this blog generates and I’ll be frank - it generates around $5 from October till now. I know it’s not even enough to cover my domain registration fees (around $8) and my web hosting fees ($4 a month). However, it’s a small price to pay, since I’m becoming more dedicated to Internet Marketing recently and I believed this blog played its role in providing motivation. Thanks to that, my progress is pretty steady now and I’m learning a lot of new stuff, since I’ve been out-of-touch with technology for some time already.

With that said, learning might be a good thing, but I did something stupid with this blog when I was playing around with permalinks options, which basically means changing the link structure that wordpress is using. I was changing the url structure happily, then I believed Googlebot happened to be spidering this blog at that time, so the links were changing and viola… Error 404 pages were served. To Googlebot, it meant just a single thing: tons of broken links detected on the site. Conclusion? Thanks to my mischievious fingers, maybe this site will be getting a penalty from Google. With that said, I’m a good live example to warn wordpress users: it’s easy to change permalinks structure, but make sure you know what you’re doing, instead of changing here and there.

Anyway, beside messing around with permalinks, I have been reading up on CSS and trying to make all my pages Valid XHTML Transitional. However, I ignored this blog for a good reason… I’m going to give this blog a facelift to celebrate my first 500 unique visitors. Haha, actually, I just think my blog is untidy and ugly, so I’m just finding an excuse to change layout. Don’t be surprised when you see a change of layout over the week, you are still browsing the correct blog. Oh and I don’t proclaim myself to be a good designer, so if you don’t like the new layout when it’s out, go ahead and rant at me in the comments. Rant all you want, but at the end, please include some ideas on helping me improve.

I’m thinking of blogging about simple CSS tweaks, Wordpress workarounds and other slightly technical stuff, but I’m still thinking if I should create a category called ‘Technical Stuff’. I don’t want to scare people away into thinking that it’s rocket science, when it’s actually quite simple to change things here and there, especially with wordpress. Also, I noticed in some forums where people are experiencing problems in working around some issues and no answers were given. I have answers to a few of them, so people will probably be interested if I blog about these issues. The only thing holding me back is the fear of my blog being too intimidating for the general internet marketer, yet these are issues that most internet marketers will likely be facing.

Regardless, I hope to get some comments on whether I should go into them, examples like: 

• Preferred style of permalinks and why
• How to display wordpress title without seperators
• Simple CSS to remove redundant white spaces in UL, headers, etc

These are just a few examples of possible issues to blog about, but I think I need some comments before proceeding. Your comment can be as simple as: ‘Bring them on! That’s what I wanted to know’ or just ‘Its a stupid idea’. Come on… I’m appealing to your better nature to leave some comments and if you suggest I should blog about it, maybe you can help suggest a category title also. Thanks a lot in advance :)