DiNaRa | Technology Bloggers

Some would call today an unlucky day, as it is Friday the 13th, a day renowned for its link to bad luck. It is not an unlucky day for Technology Bloggers though, as today we are celebrating our first birthday!

I want to use this post to thank everyone who has been instrumental in creating this fantastic community blog we have, and also to showcase the blogs fantastic achievements, just 1 year in.

Traffic

The first thing I want to say about Technology Bloggers, is how blow away I am by the traffic we have received. Excluding December, every single month, the number of people visiting the blog has grown.

In June 2011, we received just over 1,200 visitors, in October 2011 we received around 3,400 visitors, and last month (March 2012) Technology Bloggers had almost 7,000 people visit the blog. Don’t believe me? Check out our Google Analytics:

Technology Bloggers traffic statistics from April 2011 to April 2012

Awards

Top blogs often receive awards, and I am proud to announce that Technology Bloggers recently received it’s first award. Last week Technology Bloggers was named the British Gas Blog of the Month!

We were awarded the British Gas Blog of the Month for our work on educating people about smart meters, and how they are changing the way we use our electricity, along with our work on environmental issues. Special thanks go out to Jonny regarding his series Can We Improve the Health of the Planet?

Other Achievements

After just two weeks of the blog being live, I wrote an article about our achievements, I did the same four months in. As today is the blog’s first birthday, I thought it right to do the same sort of review today, and compare it with our past reviews.

Two weeks in Technology Bloggers had 14 articles, which had been written by our 4 writers, four months in the blog had 65 articles written by 15 writers. 1 year in, this is Technology Bloggers 205th article, and we currently have 47 writers! That means we publish an article, on average every 1.78 days, and each writer has written on average, 4 articles. Many of our writers have written just one article, whilst some like myself, Jonny and Ron have written significantly more – we average 47 articles each!

Two weeks in, Technology Bloggers had had 85 comments posted by 22 different commenters. By 4 months, we had had 788 comments posted by 120 commenters. When this article went live we had had 2,849 comments contributed from over 500 commenters! That’s a lot of comments! Special kudos to Jonny, Alan, Anna, DiNaRa, Peter and Neil, for their outstanding contributions to Technology Bloggers commenting community 🙂

14 days in, and at 4 months, I wrote about Technology Bloggers Alexa rank. To be honest, it isn’t very accurate, and I have given actual traffic statistics for the blog, but I thought I should mention it anyway, as I have done in the past. 2 weeks after its launch, Technology Bloggers was ranked in the top 1,400,516516 of sites on the internet, by Alexa. By August 2011, Alexa believed we were in the top 165,351 of sites on the web. Today our rank is 85,826, which is a very respectable rank, but nothing to become to obsessed about.

Technology Bloggers is still a Google PageRank 3, which is very credible for a 1 year old blog, however again, is nothing that accurate or to be obsessed over.

Across social media, since August we have had 41 new likes, taking our Facebook page up to a total of 52 likes, and 45 more Twitter followers, taking us up to 69 Twitter followers. Our RSS feed is also well subscribed to.

Basically, Technology Bloggers is doing really well, and that is something we should all be proud of!

Dofollow

Technology Bloggers started out as a dofollow blog, and it will remain dofollow for the foreseeable future. It is a community blog, and so that everyone can benefit, the blog should be dofollow.

Thank You

Now it’s time for me to say thank you to everyone who has been a part of the blog this year. Thank you to everyone for your contributions and efforts, which have helped make this blog the fantastic community blog that it is today!

We have already had community awards, and will have one every year. In this article I would like to pay special thanks to Jonny, Ron, Alan, Chadrack, David, Marc and Peter who have all played a massive role in ensuring Technology Bloggers is where it is today. I have no doubt that without these people, the blog would not be as good as it is today, and the community would be noway near as strong.

Here’s to the future success of Technology Bloggers!

Well done everyone and thank you, lets keep this community alive, so we can all continue to benefit 🙂

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Just over a month ago I wrote a post that questioned why would you turn comments off?

The article was rather short, as I basically posed a question and then asked for responses. To quote me exactly I said

The real juicy content in this article will hopefully be in the comments!

Scroll down ↓

and so we scroll down… 😉

DiNaRa claimed that some bloggers may not no how to turn comments on. Fair point. Although if ever I don’t know how to do something blogging related, my first point of call is blogging forums and search engines, and usually I will have my answer in a matter of hours/days.
I see where you are coming from DiNaRa, but I do not promote lazy bloggers.

Raymund from Canon Toner said how he turns off comments only on pages, like the about page, the contact us page, the ‘advertise’ page, etc. He then went on to say that he would turn off comments on “any page that does not invite discussion” a fair point. We don’t allow comments on any of our pages. Why? Well they are part of the fixed structure of the blog. Got an issue with them? Use our contact form.
Raymund, I agree.

Joshua said how he would never turn of comments. Comments are vital, even if they are (as he puts it) ‘annoying’. He says how its our blog, and you can rule it how you like.
I agree with all that Joshua said, but if bloggers decide to ‘lock down’ comments, then they are unlikely to get many loyal readers.

Jakk from Technology Blogged mentioned how some sites turn of comments as they would rather people would interact via social media, partly as this requires a lot less management. He also said how “If you recieve over 1000 comments a day, and have limited resources, turning them off is the only thing you can do.” I disagree. Using multiple spam filters (like we do here) and having multiple comment moderators can easily solve this problem. Too much traffic? Don’t complain, put ads on your site, and use the revenue to pay for better hosting.
Jakk I see your point, but I disagree – again, I don’t promote lazy blogging.

Barbara used a great analogy: “Turning off comments in a blog is like refusing to speak to your partner in a real relationship. Who would do this?” apart from knowing a few people to whom this might actually apply, I think that it’s a great little quote.
I agree with you too Barbra.

Here are some more great responses:

Thanks also to everyone else who left a comment, but wasn’t mentioned. There were loads of other great responses, so I urge you to go and check them out! Click to view the comments on ‘Why would you turn comments off?’.

So, do you agree with my opinion?

Did you miss the article and want to add your view now?

Comments are open to all, as usual 🙂

Technology Bloggers

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