Miscellaneous

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Many of my new followers, and much of my new traffic these days, are coming from a post I wrote a month ago. Some of you may know that in my last life I taught middle school math for eleven years. Relatedly, I really like data. Disclaimer: This post is long. And it has lots of numbers. And no pretty pictures (though I did throw in a graph!). But it's my story of how my post went viral. I find the whole process fascinating. Basically, I'm awestruck.

For many months while I was in the process of putting together the room (and even for the nearly two years before that) I talked about it a lot. Many friends and family members knew the plan and were eagerly awaiting news about how The Boy liked his Secret Room. They would ask, "so has he gotten his room yet?" in hushed tones when he wasn't close enough to overhear. After the big reveal, I wrote my blog post to share the story including before and after pictures with friends and family. I'm completely overwhelmed by the response.

A little more back story. I've been blogging for almost 8 months now. A month ago I had a handful of blog followers. I was networking within the quilt blog world. My typical blog traffic had crept up to 20-40 pageviews daily when I was posting regularly, and my very few high traffic days (with a max pageviews = 272) came on days I shared a quilting post in a quilting Facebook group.

Late in the day on August 5, I posted about The Secret Treasure Room. I shared the link to my friends and family on Facebook and I tweeted my post URL. My husband also tweeted about my blog post. His tweet got retweeted 20 times. This caused the most pageviews I'd ever had, 325 that day and 526 the next day. Wow! August 7 was back to normal. Okay, that was fun.

August 8, I noticed a little jump in traffic and found out I'd been linked to on The Radish. The following day I was linked to from Metafilter, resulting in a total of 3,149 pageviews for August 9. Wow!! This was what I considered "crazy traffic."

August 9, I was contacted by Robbie Gonzalez, a senior editor at io9.com asking permission to republish my whole blog post. The io9 page went up on August 10 which caused another 3,000+ pageview day on my site. (there have now been 266,661 pageviews on the io9 page.) Over the next two days, traffic trended down toward "normal." Again I thought, this was fun!

On the morning of August 13, I woke up and checked my email. I had 5 new blog subscribers by email and 4 comments on my blog. Yay! Then I realized... this isn't normal. I took a look at blog traffic, and at 8am I had already over 5,000 pageviews. Before noon it was over 10,000. The post had been picked up on Viralnova. In total August 13 and 14 averaged over 36,000 pageviews a day. I also started to see it in my feed on facebook as friends shared the viralnova post of the room that my friends' friends had reposted. The whole thing was very surreal.

All the while, many other smaller sites were linking to me as well, but overall traffic died down until August 21 when I was linked to from the Fox 8 Cleveland site. Following that, Scott Gustin, National Content Editor for Tribune Broadcasting (consisting of 40+ sites in many major cities) contacted me about running the story on their other sites. (Side note: Having a lot of web traffic is a little like going over on the minutes on your cell phone plan.) I gave permission for them to use my photos and credit me, but asked that they not link back to my blog, because we just couldn't handle that volume of traffic.

Nine days after the post, linkback traffic started coming from sites in languages other than English:

The month preceding the post (July 5 - Aug 4)

  • 2,106 pageviews
  • referrals from 45 sites

The month following the post (Aug 5 - Sept 4)

  • 176,998 pageviews
  • referrals from 188 sites
  • Here's the overall traffic in graph form:
from Google Analytics
from Google Analytics, August 5, 2014 through September 4, 2014

Thank you to all my new blog followers and to everyone who has visited my little corner of the web.

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Six months ago I started my blog.

Time really does fly. When I was about twelve I was with my mother and my grandmother, and they had a little conversation that went like this:

Mom: Is it true the older you get the faster time flies?

Grandma: Oh YEAH!

Mom: Then it must just be whipping by for you.

So so true.

I spent much of the second half of 2013 wanting to blog. The Husband kept asking me why. In sewing and quilting I find so much inspiration in seeing the work of others. I wanted a way to share what I was doing with friends and family, inspire others in their own projects, and motivate myself to get things done a little faster than I typically tend to. In January he helped me get setup to start my blog.

Six months in and I think I'm achieving those goals. I've also all but abandoned my plans to work on programming. (It's still on the bucket list, it just isn't high enough priority at the moment.) More and more time has been spent in front of my sewing machine, or organizing fabric and sewing related supplies. I've made progress on some old WIPs and UFOs. At the moment I have a small quilt top (table runner) completed and ready to quilt. Now that The Boy's birthday has passed, I'll have to get focused on that project.

I'm loving WordPress and the Tiny Forge theme and figuring out how to do what I want it to do. It's only a matter of time before I decide to learn enough code to personalize the theme more. For now, I'm so pleased with how well it works for me.

If you're new to my blog, here are some of my works in progress. I hope to turn these into finishes soon!

 

4th of July table runner
4th of July table runner
The beginnings of two Roman Stripez quilts.
The beginnings of two Roman Stripez quilts.
2006 Shop Hop by the Bay Mystery Quilt
2006 Shop Hop by the Bay Mystery Quilt

 

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Way back in another life I once worked with clay. I took a class in college and learned to throw on the wheel. It was addictive. I also had a few friends who were always up for heading over at 2am to throw. It was great. I made lots of little pieces (never quite graduating to impressively large works). Then when I was a yearbook teacher and therefore was required to take some art classes including ceramics (yeah, figure out how that was going to help me teach yearbook) I got back into it. If I had infinite time, I'd totally be doing it now, but that isn't really in the cards at the moment. So... without further ado, here's a selection of my creations, most were thrown on the wheel, with just a couple hand built. All were done between 1998 and 2003 I think.

pitchersceramics set1detail glaze1ceramics set2

raku fired
raku fired

ceramics set3ceramics set4detail glaze2Thanks for looking!