Hi all! WordPress.com has brought a few changes to its editor over the last week. Have you all noticed, too? First, the ditor now shows my writing in the fonts I have chosen for my site. Second, the “Preview” button now opens a new tab with a preview of my post. Until now you could only have the editor OR the preview open. Now you can have both, making it easier to go back and make alterations while viewing the preview. I am all for both of these changes! No doubt there are tons of other things, that have changed behind the scene, too.
Now that my reapplication is in, I have had a little bit of time to look over my blog as a “blog”, not as an “application tool”. Although I had worked with web sites in the past, I had never blogged, ever! This was a new experience for me. But I must say, I have thoroughly enjoyed it so far. All for one small detail that has started to happen recently…
SPAM!
Yup, I have started to receive spam comments. My guess is there are people out there who create bots that crawl all over WordPress sites posting spam. The good thing is, Akismet has successfully caught them all! Not a single spam comment has fallen through the filter, for which I am very thankful.
Every so often, I briefly check my spam comments to make sure there is nothing there that is a true comment. But then I found a feature I could turn on in my wp-admin dashboard. That was, I could have posts turn the comment section off automatically after a certain amount of time has passed after I publish a post. So, currently, I have my pages/posts turn off comments after 30 days. (You can go check my old posts and see this feature is working.) Hopefully this will start to reduce the amount of spam I get?
Popular Day and Hour
In the “Insights” section of my dashboard, I can see different statistics compiled by WordPress.com (or, more accurately, by Jetpack, I think). One of those items is “Most popular day and hour”. This is what it said for this site…
That is very interesting… Almost a third of all views have been on Wednesday! And the 9pm hour seems to be the most popular. The hour makes sense, because I often post in the evenings. Posts will end up at the top of everyone’s reader and get read more right after I publish. But why Wednesdays?
That’s when I realised, something smells fishy… So I went and checked when I usually post. Perhaps I have posted on Wednesdays the most?
Out of the 33 blog posts so far, 6 have been posted on Wednesdays. That would mean 18% of my posts were posted on Wednesdays… Nope, there goes that theory…
So, I really don’t know why, but I seem to get the most views of my blog on Wednesdays… Maybe I should consider posting then more often?
Popular Topics
Another thing I realised is that I seem to get the most views on posts that are either related to technical aspects of using WordPress.com, or have the “Automattic” tag. I enjoy writing about WordPress.com and some of the more technical sides of their applications.
I plan on continuing my blog even after my application is over and (hopefully) I become an Automattician. Maybe I could take a more technical direction with my blog once I’m through? I don’t know yet, but if you have any comments, I would be more than happy to hear them. (But hurry! The comments section on this post will close in 30 days!??)