Summary: The first week of my 90 day blogging challenge

A week ago I posted a challenge to write a blog post for the next 90 days. I wrote every day and didn’t break the challenge so at least that’s good. The first week has passed and here are couple of insights.

I had no problem to choose the topics for my blog posts, but the writing itself took more than expected every time. Now I have dropped any estimations and will try to avoid writing late at night. I also learned few new grammar rules and a couple of new words too, but nothing crazy.

Communities

I was most surprised about the reactions and popularity of some blog posts. When I thought an article was “meh” and even a bit boring, it gained a lot of traffic and climbed the ladder of social sharing and vice versa. If we count the comments in this blog, then the most discussed article was by far Scala in Vim (5 here and 9 on reddit), but if we count all the comments from communities then the absolute winner is Servers are fun: Ansible – 24 comments on Hacker News, 6 on lobsters and just 2 on this blog. The post reached the front page of Hacker News and was also the most viewed post from this week. The rant about Octopress was also quite popular and sparked some interesting discussions (reddit, lobsters).

The reactions from communities were totally different – what was well received in one community, was rejected in another, and each day this behavior exchanged or varied. I couldn’t predict this even if I tried.

Traffic

There were totally 10,744 page views which is quite a lot for my blog. You can see Google Analytics screenshot from the last 8 days below.

Most of the visitors came from English speaking countries: United States, United Kingdom and Canada. Readers from my motherland Latvia are ranking only in 10th place, probably because just a few of my friends on Twitter and Facebook are into technical stuff.

Top referrals were reddit, Hacker News, lobste.rs, Twitter, feedly and others. No surprise here. Currently there is almost no inbound traffic from search engines so there is definitely a room for some improvements in this regard.

Conclusion

It was fun and interesting experience, a little bit different from writing just once in a while. Sometimes I felt a bit pressured to write something, but once I started it went on naturally.

In the end almost all articles were much bigger and less personal than I thought I would write during these 90 days. I guess that the small and personal blog posts will come in handy for unproductive days.

Stay tuned!