I’ve been busy lately. Here is a summary of my future plans:
- I will wrap up the visitor experiment soon.
- I will not be blogging as intensively in the coming weeks, but probably about twice a week.
- I will be forking the tech part of the blog to a separate and more professional site.

Check back for more details on the new tech blog soon. I will also write a couple of tech posts before the transition, as it will take some time to get the design done.

I am sorry I left you for almost a week, Firefox

Yes, I gave up on Safari. Two days ahead of time I am switching back to Firefox to get some real work done, faster.

Even though Safari is the faster browser, I work faster with firefox. The bookmark handling, the awesome bar and other features are just so much better. Firefox even has better drag and drop functionality, which really is a bit surprising given how Apple promotes that feature in it’s applications.

Here are the things I want Firefox to adopt from Safari:

• Speed
• Smart page for new tab (I like Opera’s speed dial even better)

Short list, I know, but Firefox really is ahead on most of the features I use. What I really would love though, is a browser that uses the WebKit rendering engine, but is compatible with Firefox extensions. That would be awesome.

Now I will probably stay with Firefox until Chrome is released for Mac, unless I decide to try Camino first. I am open to new browsers, but I feel like I will stay with Firefox for a long time, maybe until someone can match or beat the awesome bar.

Therefore the visitor experiment is heading towards something like “how to get most possible visitors with the least amount of extra work”, which is also useful to know, of course.

If you feel like helping, I will just like to inform you that my site is digg-proof, and can take as much traffic as you can trow at it. Feel free to try to prove otherwise

Now I am going out for the night, so surprise me with some amazing numbers, great tweets or just silence in the meantime.

- @thomassnielsen

The point of this is to get higher rankings, which (hopefully) translates into more hits on your site. Since part of my traffic already is coming from Google, I hope this has a visible effect.

How I did it
There are many ways going about SEO, in fact there are even tons of books about the subject. SEO can be your work if you are good enough. I am not, so I did it the easy way. Since I use WordPress for my blog, I just installed and configured the All in One SEO pack plugin.

If you haven’t got a clue at all about this, you don’t even have to configure it, the default config does wonders to your site ranking (or at least the developers of AiO SEO say so).

I am excited to si if it helps getting more hits through google. -10 internet points to the first person going to this page through Bing.

Statistics 16.09.09

A short update in a break from my studies: Here are the first results from Google Analytics. When I startet the experiment, I had close to no visitors. The graph shows a healthy start, with a double in visitors the third day.

My goal is simple: As many as possible. Can I go beyond 100? 1.000? 10.000? I don’t know. Let’s try. I have also seen that most of my traffic so far is from Facebook, Twitter and Google. Apparently many people like my cinnamon rolls. Direct traffic is also a measurable part of it, probably mostly me and my friends.

I have more tricks to come, but I will try to spread them out during the experiment. For now I am sticking with twitter and facebook, trying to let you share my blog with the world.

safari logo

No, I am not going traveling again. I am going to try Safari as my default browser at home for a week. I’ve used Firefox since version 1.5, and I feel like I want to try something new. The main reasons I went for Safari is speed and Mac integration. Safari 4 on Snow Leopard is insanely fast.

I will post how it goes in about a weeks time. Will I miss flashblock, or all my other extensions? I know the one thing that will bring me back to firefox occasionally is firebug, but I am not an active web developer for the time being, so it won’t be that often.

What I miss already:
While I wrote this article I found some things I already miss:

• The awesome bar (searching directly from it and smart-searching my history and bookmarks)
• Google Gears (really Google? No support for Safari on Snow Leopard? Shame on you!)

Wish me luck.

Google Analytics

The third stage of my visitor experiment is about getting statistics. I have already set up a basic stats page, but I want more info. Therefore I have now installed Google Analytics, a tool I’ve used in almost all of my previous website projects.

Google Analytics gathers a lot of important statistics for your site: Where did they find your site? What did they search for to get there through a search engine?

All of this can be used to further target your work towards sites you know give you visitors.

I will be sure to update if this information proves valuable.

Experiment

This article is the announcement of a spontaneously started experiment. I will in the following month try to get as many visitors to my blog as possible. If it succeeds, I will post my techniques and results. All the techniques will be fast and easy to adopt, since I can’t spend much time on my blog for the time being.

Stage 1: Spread the word
Part 1 relies on you. Please spread the word of my blog and my experiment as you read this. Use the buttons below if you want to share this experiment post. I will update on the experiment as we go along, and all the posts will be tagged with visitor experiment.

Stage 2: Check in regularly
If you use twitter, please follow @thomassnielsen. If you use an RSS reader, follow my RSS feed (or chose a feed based only on category or tag).