Site news
by Volker Weber
In my continuous quest to accomodate more visitors without racking up too much traffic volume I have profiled my site a bit during the last days. It turns out that the monthly archives generated heaps of traffic from Google referrers. Each of those pages net more than a meg due to the included images. Thus I have deprecated the monthly archives to simple link pages to the individual posts in order to keep them accessible for search engine spiders. Once Google has updated the search index most of the referrers will rather jump directly to the individual posts than the monthly archives. That also means that browsing the monthly archives is no longer viable if you are looking for anything particular. Please use the search box instead.
With the monthly archives gone for good there was a need to supply more than the dozen posts on the front page for people to catch up when they haven't visited the site for a few days or weeks. So I have added a new archive page that lists all posts for the last 30 days. Find it on the right hand margin under archives, and use it sparingly. I don't want this to be the entrypoint. I am probably going to make this page only available if it is referred to from the site.
I have also added a large ad at the bottom of the front page that seems to be working very well. Thank you all.
Comments
Hm, you are definitely spending a lot of thought on how to keep the traffic load small while still increasing your visitor count and, in general, your reach.
And to be honest, you probably come up with ideas, which the usual web designer won't... Ever thought of publishing this as a consolidated book or at least article in some magazine? I guess there are a number of web-sites that could rather apply some of your design ideas than spending some thousand bucks on a more powerful machine.
Just my two cents,
What would be cool though to browse older entries are links to the next and the previous entry (within the pages should individual entries). Thus it won´t be necessary to constantly switch between entries and the archive page when reading lots of older entries. But the 30 days page is definitely a good idea.
