I'm not quite sure how many people read my blog (see footnote). I can be sure that about a thousand people take the PL/SQL Challenge every working day. They take the time to visit the site, read the question, think about it and come up with an answer. I assume most will actually check the correct answer the next day (and maybe think about that too). So if I can phrase my article or concept in the form of a question for the Challenge, I can reach a much wider audience that I do through my blog. And they will think about what I wrote.
So far I've had one question published (25th of Jan 2010), taken by 1090 people with a typical time of 2 minutes and about two thirds got it all correct. And about 200 submitted a survey afterwards. That is a lot of eyeballs. I've got another one coming soon and I recently submitted a third.
So if you've got something you want people to know, whether you have an existing blog or not, if you can phrase it in the form of a PL/SQL question, go submit it. Alternatively, just go and play. The challenge awaits.
Footnote:
Google Analytics talks of about a thousand page views last month (though misses a week when I did something and lost my old stats). Blogger stats says about 2,700 which is more comforting. I expect some will pick me up through an aggregator and won't get counted and I'm not sure if a bunch of people who take my feed online, eg though Google Reader, are counted individually or not.
2 comments:
Hi Gary,
Just a quick note: If you hook your blog up to feedburner (feedburner.google.com), you'll be able to track how many people reach your content through RSS readers.
Regards,
John P.
I did when I first started. It currently reports six. I think when I tried a fresh template for my blog, it went back to a default feed :)
Images on my posts are more significant since the feed(s) only have the image URL, not a copy or thumbnail. Picasa tells me that an image on my Apex/PDF post has had 313 views, so I know that over three hundred people have viewed that post.
There might be some, using offline readers, who read the post but didn't get the image. Probably not too many though.
Images on older posts have had more views, so I know I do get a few hundred eyeballs on some posts. How many of them simply skim the post is a different matter.
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