Tag Archives: site news

Thoughts

A bit of site maintenance

I made time tonight to do a few things that I’ve wanted to get done for some time:

  • Introduce a new section called Faves, which displays my shared items from Google Reader. This is where I’ll showcase the posts I find really interesting and worthwhile to read from the various blogs and feeds that I’m subscribed to. I’ve been sharing blog items in Google Reader for months, and until now, they only showed up in a little box in my sidebar, but I wanted to present them a little better by dedicating an entire site section to them. They will all have links right back to the original items, and I’ve also included Feed Flares (through FeedBurner) that will allow you to subscribe to their particular feeds, Digg them and save them to del.icio.us right from the site. Yes, you’ll be digg-ing and bookmarking the original items, not my site/feed, not to worry about that. The intent is to promote these stories and their authors.
  • I did away with the Mobile and News sections. Judging by the stats, very few people were using them.

While I’m on the subject of site updates, I also wanted to let you know that I put together a unified/single feed for all of my content. I used the My Networks feature of my FeedBurner account (gotta love them!) and put together a single feed that gathers my ComeAcross, Zooomr, YouTube, del.icio.us, and Twitter content and packages it in nice little, eatable nibblets — well, they’re XML nibblets anyway. Rick, thank you so much for telling me how to do this! And, just in case you were wondering, I didn’t include my three Dignoscentia feeds. Since this will be a commercialized feed, it just didn’t feel right to include content I didn’t want to commercialize at all.

And yes, you can still subscribe to individual feeds for all of this stuff. Just navigate to the various site sections using the menu at the top of this page, and choose whatever feed you want. Not sure yet if I’ll feature this single feed anywhere on the site (other than this post), because I don’t want to confuse people. Many still don’t know what feeds are (sad, but true), so I’ll just wait a little longer and give it some more thought. Want to know the fun part? The URL for this unified feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Raoul. Beautiful, isn’t it? 🙂

Standard
Thoughts

Updated blogroll and links

Finally found some time to update my blogroll and links sections with the blogs and sites I think are worthwhile to read (I check them daily myself.) So in case you’re looking for a few interesting blogs to add to your feed reader, check out the sites I’ve highlighted.

On a related note, sorry for the less-than-regular posts, I am trying to complete some consulting projects. I’m also going through my photo library (18,000+ photos) and uploading the better ones to photo sharing sites. As both of these activities are time consuming, my free time has been significantly reduced. On the bright side, I get to make my clients happy and share good photos with the world, so it’s not that bad.

Standard
Thoughts

Who we are

➡ Updated 3/9/08: This post reflects the state of the site back when it was still called ComeAcross and I’d just started it. That’s no longer the case, as I’ve combined all of my content since at this domain. For more on that switch, have a look at the About page.

If I asked you who you were, it’s only fair to tell you who we are, or what my site is. If you already know, hang in there, you might learn some new stuff.

I’m Raoul Pop, and I launched the site with Ligia, my lovely wife. She doesn’t post much, because she works behind the scenes. She takes great care of me so I can keep on writing and working.

I launched the site on May 3, 2006 — not quite 5 months ago. Here’s why some of the content is older than 5 months. That same page has an explanation of the ComeAcross name.

So far, there are about 20-30 loyal feed readers for the Blog, about 10 or so for my Photos feed, and a couple for my Videos feed (although I suspect those are just my own subscriptions). There are about 8-10 really, really loyal Podcast subscribers, who’ve hung in there with me even though I haven’t published a podcast since May. Thank you! Who are you folks?

I started checking stats with Google Analytics on May 31, 2006. From that date until today (October 25, 2006), ComeAcross has had 8,927 unique visits and 16,055 page views. 14.75% of those visitors were returning ones. While most people were from the United States, if you look at the map below, you’ll see they’re coming from a lot of other places: Europe, South America, the Middle East, the Far East, and of course, Australia and New Zealand. A big, American HI to everyone! Google has been my biggest referrer by far (Sergey, Larry, thank you, and thank you), and I’ve also had significant traffic from Digg, StumbleUpon, and Yahoo.

ComeAcross Stats - Executive Summary

The top five keywords that people use to find ComeAcross so far are:

  • HP dv6000
  • Davison Inventegration
  • War between Israel and Lebanon (I don’t know why that post struck a chord, I didn’t think it was that good)
  • Funny animal photos (always a hit with folks, I gather)
  • Lasermonk (don’t know why this keyword is so popular)

ComeAcross Stats - Marketing Summary

The top five pieces of content on ComeAcross are:

ComeAcross Stats - Content Summary

I couldn’t have accomplished this without two wonderful products/services: WordPress and FeedBurner. They’re both fantastic, each in their own way, and amazingly useful. I am truly grateful for their existence, and the fact that they’re both free to use, easy to use, and feature-packed is a testament to the ingenuity of today’s web developers, thinkers and dreamers.

ComeAcross was once a dream for me. I dreamt that I could have a site where all of my content from my disparate sites was drawn together, and made easily accessible to anyone who wanted to read it, view it or search it. That dream is now a reality, and thanks to you, my readers, ComeAcross is shaping up very nicely.

I really do hope you’ll continue to read ComeAcross, and if you like it, spread the word. I’d like the site to continue to reach new readers, every day.

Standard
Thoughts

Who are you?

If you’re reading this, first, I thank you, and, I kindly invite you to say hi. Write a comment on this post, and tell me what’s up, who you are, and if you want, when you started reading it. Do you like the site? Do you like the posts? Are there some things you’d like to see? If you don’t feel comfortable writing comments, write me an email. C’mon, let me know who I’m writing for. Thanks!

Standard
Thoughts

555 posts and counting

I hadn’t looked at this particular stat in some time, but today I noticed that according to WordPress, my site’s platform, I’ve published 555 posts. Cool! This post makes 556, and we can call it my little pat on the back. I’ll let you know when I hit 1,000. I’ll probably have a little party then.

Standard