Some stats

Inspired a little by Jeremy’s post on his blog’s first birthday, I thought I might have a little dig into the numbers for this blog. It’s only been going since November 2006, so about six months and frankly was going nowhere until barcampukgovweb mania gave it a bit of a bigger profile, which then was further extended in the wake of the Civil Surf affair. Anyhow, here’s the facts:

  • Feedburner says I have 122 susbcribers here
  • The site itself has seen 8,422 hits
  • Best day ever was March 11th with 423 hits
  • Best referrer (ie the place that people come to DavePress from) is Twitter (298 referrals) followed by Civil Surf (thanks Simon – 297 referrals)
  • My top posts in terms of visits are 8 Tips for Beginner Bloggers, Public servants must blog and my About page

Backburner

Things have been relatively quiet here on DavePress, but don’t worry, I have been busy. I’ve been working on a few projects – as well as the social reporting stuff with David – which I will hopefully be able to report on soon.

In the meantime I have been trying to bookmark the interesting stuff I have been seeing recently, so they pop up in the blog every evening.

Normal service to be resumed shortly!

Redesigning DavePress

I have been wanting to give this blog a redesign almost ever since I started it. For some reason I just haven’t taken to the Mandigo theme I was using – a bit dark, maybe? I do think that darker themes are less forgiving of some of the clutter that we bloggers like to fill our sidebars with.

So, I have settled on PopBlue, by Bob, which is a much lighter theme and hopefully the single sidebar will focus attention on the content rather than the widgets and other crud. I ‘designed’ a quick logo, using an icon from the free Crystal Clear set and a bit of text.

Couple of jobs to get done though, including:

  •  Sorting out the CSS for images so that text floats nicely  around them in posts (any help gratefully received…)
  • Making blockquotes stand out a bit more
  • Replacing the standard search bar with my Google CSE one

So, there is plenty to be done…