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Monday, August 4, 2008

Investigating the cause of a collapse

After a two-day spurt following the link from David Morgan-Mar's LiveJournal, Da Blog fell back to essentially the levels it held prior. Which could mean one of two things. It could mean the people who came here weren't interested in my writing long-term, which probably means the comment I received saying "I can't imagine why you don't have a job" is a minority opinion.

Or it could mean everyone is reading off the RSS feed (and not being moved to comment) or the-zaniak's LiveJournal feed. the-zaniak left a comment the last time I brought up the LiveJournal feed, leaving what seemed to me to be a good enough justification for what seemed to me to be redundancy: aiding the addition of Da Blog to people's LiveJournal friend lists.

But the more I think about it, the more I don't like it. There are several inferiorities of the LiveJournal feed to the Blogger-provided RSS feed. I don't know this for certain, but it appears that the LiveJournal feed allows people to leave their comments on the LiveJournal feed, and not on Da Blog. I'm not paying attention to comments left on the LiveJournal feed, so you're going to need to head over here to comment. For you, LJ updates only at certain intervals (as opposed to every post) and might not be updating with every single post. (It omits the post that caused that spurt of popularity in the first place, but does include older posts.)

Also, it appears that Blogger allows me to add to the RSS feed an element that cannot be included in the LiveJournal feed. That's something I've been thinking about and that I may have more on later in the week.

Oh, and if you don't like my writing, feel free to let me know as well. You don't even have to engage in constructive criticism; just telling me I suck should be good enough for me to keep my ego in check. But don't overdo it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Three points:

1) If you remove the ability for your blog to appear on the livejournal feed, you will lose me as a reader. It's nothing personal, I just don't have the time to go to 100 different websites; I use livejournal because it makes it easy to read a variety of people's sites.
2) I always leave comments on the original post, not the LJ Feed.
3) If you head here, you can see how many readers are using the syndication feed. It is one. That one is me.

So at this point, I think you're only talking to me about possibly losing me as a reader, because you don't like me commenting on the feed, which I don't do anyway. :P

Morgan Wick said...

I admit to not being terribly "hep" as to how LiveJournal works. For all I know commenting on LiveJournal could automatically become a comment on Da Blog. However, I am fairly sure someone could subscribe to Da Blog using the LJ feed but not using the LJ apparatus and not get counted as a "reader". Don't ask me why they would do so. More to the point, someone could read Da Blog off of someone's friend list and not get counted as a reader AND could comment on posts without being recorded with it, completely innocently.

And you don't need to worry about me taking away the ability for Da Blog to appear on LiveJournal. For one thing, I don't even know how I would do so, or if I could do so. Like I said, I like the concept in theory. If it was possible to make it so that blog posts didn't have their own pages but automatically redirected to Da Blog I'd like it even better, but I doubt that's crucial.

This is probably the last time I'll post on the subject of the LJ feed, and it's worth noting that I wrote this post before actually taking a look at the most up-to-date numbers; my complaining was not based so much on an actual lack of readers as the lack of comments on my Dresden Codak review. In the wake of that review, though, I did get 16 visitors on Tuesday, 18 on Wednesday, and 17 on Thursday, all improvements over two weeks prior. (Part of that appears to be linking to YWIB&YSFB.) Today I'm up to 17, and since the spurt I've never fallen below 7.

Tomorrow you can probably expect another spurt of some kind. I think.