DavePress

Inspired a little by Jeremy’s post on his blog’s first birthday, I thought I might have a little dig into the numbers for this blog. It’s only been going since November 2006, so about six months and frankly was going nowhere until barcampukgovweb mania gave it a bit of a bigger profile, which then was further extended in the wake of the Civil Surf affair. Anyhow, here’s the facts:

• Feedburner says I have 122 susbcribers here
• The site itself has seen 8,422 hits
• Best day ever was March 11th with 423 hits
• Best referrer (ie the place that people come to DavePress from) is Twitter (298 referrals) followed by Civil Surf (thanks Simon - 297 referrals)
• My top posts in terms of visits are 8 Tips for Beginner Bloggers, Public servants must blog and my About page

Things have been relatively quiet here on DavePress, but don’t worry, I have been busy. I’ve been working on a few projects - as well as the social reporting stuff with David - which I will hopefully be able to report on soon.

In the meantime I have been trying to bookmark the interesting stuff I have been seeing recently, so they pop up in the blog every evening.

Normal service to be resumed shortly!

…not to write another blog post about blogging for a while.

I do need another area of obsession though. Wikis? Social networks?

Any other suggestions?

I have been wanting to give this blog a redesign almost ever since I started it. For some reason I just haven’t taken to the Mandigo theme I was using - a bit dark, maybe? I do think that darker themes are less forgiving of some of the clutter that we bloggers like to fill our sidebars with.

So, I have settled on PopBlue, by Bob, which is a much lighter theme and hopefully the single sidebar will focus attention on the content rather than the widgets and other crud. I ‘designed’ a quick logo, using an icon from the free Crystal Clear set and a bit of text.

Couple of jobs to get done though, including:

•  Sorting out the CSS for images so that text floats nicely  around them in posts (any help gratefully received…)
• Making blockquotes stand out a bit more
• Replacing the standard search bar with my Google CSE one

So, there is plenty to be done…

Light blogging ahead as I am going to be at the Online Information conference this week. I won’t be taking my laptop with me, but will be twittering my thoughts via my Palm, so do check that out.

I know, I know. It seems like I start a new blog every 5 minutes. But this is different. This time, I’m staying put.

The whole FEconnect thing didn’t work for me, in the end. This was a big shame, because the blog proved pretty popular quite quickly. But what I realised was that there wasn’t any FE content on there. When I thought about it more, I realised there probably never would be. I’m better writing generally about web 2.0 and social media, how it can be applied to community building and online collaboration, without the added hassle of tying it into a specific sector.

So, DavePress. Non-sector specific. It’s just about me, and what I think, what I am interested in. I’m hoping that all the people who read LGNewMedia, FEconnect, and the various other bits I have done will tune in here and find stuff that will interest them. I’m sure they will.

The blog is still being built, but I will start adding content from now. Hope it’s useful.