Post 300 – milestones

Last week I emailed Jonny to let him know that I had just published my 150th article. I thought it was about time I checked up on the rest of the blogs stats, to see if we had any other milestones coming up, and as it turns out we do! In fact, we have a lot.

For starters this is post number 300 and today the blog turns one and a half!

The blog launched on the 13th of April 2011, making it 1 year and 6 months old – 549 days old today. That means that we post a new article on average every 1.8 days, averaging 3.9 posts a week. Basically we publish around 4 posts a week. Not bad.

This is my 151th article, which means (as I mentioned above) I have just hit my 150th article milestone. Go me!

I started this blog with the aim of it being a community project. Yes I understood that for at least the first 6 months I would be contributing almost all the articles, but as time progressed, my aim was to develop the blog so that we have a range of writers who contribute great content, so that almost every day you can log on and read something interesting written by a different writer.

When we started, way back almost a year and a half ago, we had just 11 post categories: Blogging; Computing; Internet; Media; News; Search Engines; SEO; Social Networking; Technology; Updates; and WordPress. Since then categories have been split down into Specialist Post Types and Topics.

New topics that have been added and filled thanks to new writers include: Apps (notable contributions from Ron and Steve), Browsers, Business (notable contributions from Andrew), Charity, Software, Tablets, Gadgets, Smartphones, Games, VoIP, Media, Science (notable contributions from Jonny), and Environment (again notable contributions from Jonny).

So a year and a half in how does it look in terms of the writer balance? Take a look at the image below, the people represent the articles our writers have written.

Considering on an average blog around 90% of the content comes from one main writer, with guests occasionally writing a post or two, I wouldn’t say we have done that bad.

For your interest, around 50% of the content has been written by me, around 16.5% by Jonny, Ron and Alan have jointly written around 6.5% and other writers make up for the other 27%.

Jonny is soon to reach a milestone of his own, as he will soon have written 50 posts for the blog.

In terms of comments, our count currently stands at 3,445 meaning that very soon we will hit the 3,500 mark. With 300 posts and 3,500 comments, we currently average around 12 comments a post.

So to recap the important milestones:

• This is our 300th article
• Today the community is one and a half years old
• Christopher’s 150th article went live last week
• In three weeks time (hopefully), Jonny will publish his 50th post
• The blog has had nearly 3,500 comments – currently we have had 3,471

In terms of other stats…

• Alexa currently ranks us in the top 70,023 of sites on the net, meaning that there are less than 70,023 sites visited more than ours
• Alexa also ranks us among the 11,500 most visited websites in the UK
• We have a Google PageRank (on our homepage) of 4
• 227 people follow @TechBloggers on Twitter
• 256 people like Technology Bloggers on Facebook
• 17 people follow Technology Bloggers on Google+

This is a mementos post. With so many milestones converging around the blogs 1.5th birthday, I felt that we needed something to celebrate. So, I have made something which I think fits the bill!

May I introduce to you, Technology Bloggers new logo!

That’s right, we have a new logo! I have been meaning to update it for a while now, as many of the people who were in the old logo weren’t actually part of the community. Equally, there were many valuable members of our community that were missing from the logo.

Unlike the last logo, this one actually has a design theme. Every avatar that is featured in the new logo is a member of the Technology Bloggers community. The stem of the T (the upwards bit that looks like this ‘|’) is made up of all our current writers. Any writer with an avatar features in the stem of the T. The top of the T (the cross-wards bit that looks like this ‘-‘) is made up of avatars of commenters. The commenters featured are the commenters who have left the most comments to date.

You may notice that four people feature twice in the logo, me, Jonny, Alan and Ron. The reason is because we are both top contributors and commenters, and that is why we join the writers part of the logo to the commenters part of the logo. The logo was one layer short and looked a bit distorted, so I needed another row of writer avatars (which I didn’t have) so I had to work out what four avatars to use to plug the gap, and as we have jointly contributed the most comments and articles, I thought it should be us.

This is almost certainly not the last logo update, but it is our new logo for the time being. I hope you like it – I think having avatars from actual members of the community in it makes is better and I hope you do to.

The logo was designed on the 6th of October and launched publicly on the 13th of October.

Another milestone – our second ever logo has just been released 🙂

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