My website usually has fairly low traffic, given that much of it (or this weblog, for that matter) isn't all that well known and I host few big files. Normally, the monthly bandwidth usage for winterdom.com is between 4.5 and 6 GB.

However, bandwidth usage during october jumped to 16.28 GB! That was a surprise, so I started looking at what might have caused it. From my adsense stats and my usage of Google Analytics, I knew that traffic had increased a bit during this last month on the weblog, but not on the rest of the site, which is normal given that I don't update it often and it is mostly used to host the downloads for my samples.

Also, the RSS subscriber base hasn't changed much in the past few months, and is usually pretty stable, right now between 900-980 subscribers.

A few interesting things I noticed:

• The number of people visiting the site certainly increased, a bit more than I had thought, actually. Usually my weblog didn't got more than 500 pageviews a day, but since October 16 I could see that going a bit above 1000 pageviews.
• As far as I can see, the increase in the number of visitors has not translated into more RSS subscribers, or at least not to the main RSS feed hosted by feedburner.
• The largest usage of bandwidth during october was, apparently PNG image files, accounting for well over 12GB of traffic this month.
• A significant amount of traffic driven to my site during october came from the Visual Studio Express site on MSDN; apparently someone over there liked my Visual Studio Color Schemes .
  The rest of the traffic sources are pretty much the usual ones, like the Windows Workflow Foundation community site, Scott Hanselman's weblog (always a good source of visitors), a few pages scattered around blogs.msdn.com, and  Damien Guard's site.

It's pretty obvious at this point to me, that the most popular entries on this weblog are, by a large margin, my various posts on Visual Studio Color Schemes and my old post about Inconsolata. I'm not sure whether that's a good think or simply means that the "serious" posts I write on technical topics aren't nearly as interesting as I thought they could be .

Anyway, looks like I may want to start considering hosting a few of the screenshots I post on my various posts on a separate site (like flickr) or at least stop posting them as large PNG files. Might as well go over Jeff Atwood's Reducing Your Website's Bandwidth Usage post and see what else might be useful there.

No rush, though, I would still need to serve about 4GB more a month to go over my hosting plan's monthly quota, and I doubt that's going to happen anytime soon! And even so, I suspect the current spike in traffic won't last too long.

Weblog, Bandwith Usage

Larry O'Brien posted an interesting piece as a response to Jackob Nielsen's post on Articles vs. Blog Postings. Jackob Nielsen's opinion was that experts should spend their time writing longer, complete articles instead of blogging. Larry shoots down Nielsen's theories based on his own experience, and I'll agree with Larry this time, if not for the same reasons.

I'd first like to point out that articles and blogs are not at odds with each other; you can do both and still get good results. I've written articles for magazines in the past and I'll say it is a lot of work and can usually take a lot of time. Personally, I admire those that have the drive, guts and patience to do that month after month. Blogging can certainly take a lot of time as well, particularly if you write the occasional long article, but not anywhere on the same scale. I favor blogging now not because it takes less work, but because I find it more useful for myself.

A lot of what I write about on my blog is about stuff I've learned (or am learning) during my own projects, and it's a great resource that I constantly search and refer back to when needed. So, while I try to write so that other people will find my blog useful, my primary drive has always been personal benefit: it provides not only the constant reference (so that I don't forget things), but it's also an excellent way to learn at the same time. When I force myself to write about a topic, I need to make things a lot clearer on my head and thus end up with a better understanding of what I'm writing about.

Monetary gain [1], or leads, while useful, have not been the main motivation for having this blog for me. To be honest, while I've gotten some work from my blog, it hasn't been all that much (I'd sure appreciate any leads ). Then again, that might be because I don't have all that many readers...

[1] Yes, I do have some ads on this blog through Google adsense, but if I told you what those ad clicks have amounted to, you'd be laughing

Blogging, Articles

I've been playing the last couple of days with my blog's dasBlog theme and I've settled on a new design for now. There's still some tweaking left to do, but I'm happy enough with the results for now

dasBlog

I mentioned in the past that I had been evaluating Google Reader as an alternative to Newsgator. When I repaved my machine to move to Vista, I decided to skip the newsgator installation and take the plunge.

I'm happy to report it has been going well, and although I miss some of the Newsgator features, I now have a somewhat lighter Outlook around . One thing I missed from Newsgator was being able to "tag" (or add to a folder) a feed right away as I subscribed to it, but this week it just started happening with Google Reader:

Much better! The only thing I've noticed is that sometimes the Google Reader page won't quite load and some features just "don't work", but a refresh usually fixes that.

Blogging, Aggregators, Google Reader, Newsgator

Looks like we'll now have to invent a whole new term: Hanselmanning a site Just a small link in Scott's piece on programming fonts to my entry on Inconsolata pushed up my traffic yesterday enough for it to surpass even a regular weekday's traffic. Event today it shows.

Not enough to cause any problems (given how low my regular traffic is), mind you, but I still thought it was curious.

Blogging