I’d like to thank Colin Walker (FF), Sarah Perez (FF), Corvida (FF & Twitter), Steven Hodson (FF),  Louis Gray (FF), Shey Smith (FF) and Mike Fruchter (FF) among many many other great people for being enthusiastic about the development and direction of my site. 

Also, I’d like to thank SheGeeks, Google Tutor and LouisGray.com for giving me the opportunity to guest-post on their sites.  I consider it an honor and a responsibility when writing content for another site, I always try to do the best I can.

Finally, I’d like to say that I am receptive to requests for those who would like to try guest-posting here on Scribkin.  I know my site isn’t huge by any stretch, but everyone likes to see their name outside of their own blog, and you may reach a different group of folks than you might otherwise..

Let me know if you are interested!

The second week, I let myself settle back in to my FriendFeed addiction and ease back in to Greader.  I will admit that my new iPhone has been a constant source of distraction during this time as well.  First I went crazy downloading free applications from the iTunes store, and then I stumbled across some really excellent games!

Anyway, I did manage to work on something that had been nagging at me for a while.   One day a month or so ago, I asked FriendFeed to re-arrange a list of design styles (used in architecture and interior design) from most favorite to least, based on the words themselves.  This is what I asked:

“Arrange these words in the order which you most like them: ancient, rustic, quaint, industrial, gothic, retro, contemporary, modern and futuristic”

As you can see from the link, I got a number of replies, including some mystified folks who wanted to know what I was going to do with the data.  In fact, I didn’t really have a plan.  But it nagged me that there was some potential to the raw results that could be made into table form.  So being bored earlier this week, I copied the comments into a text file, imported that into OpenOffice Calc as a comma-delimited list, and cleaned up the results.   Then, I messed around with what sort of graph would give me the trending I was looking for.

I’m no Statbot, so it took me a while to find the right one.  And when I did, of course I had to play with the 3D options and fonts until it looked good.  Here is the result:

There you go.  As you can tell, there is a nice progression for certain styles, Most people loving either modern or ancient styles most, and trending to liking quaint and to a lesser extent gothic and rusting least.  Retro and industrial make a solid appearance in the middle.  I thought it was interesting that futuristic was so spread out, it seems to affect everyone a little differently.

You might also notice that some terms don’t appear in the 8th or 9th column.  That is because not everyone chose all 9 terms.  I also left out chocolate since it was only voted for once, and wasn’t actually one of the terms on the list and/or could be considered statistical error.  Sorry Bwana.

Update: You can now download the OpenOffice document yourself and generate new charts!

design-styles.ods
design-styles.xls

If you operate a blog, and that blog supports sending a trackback, I have a simple request for you.  I have adjusted the trackback URL on this article to point to (what I think) the Disqus service will use.

Next time you post, please include a link to this article (no need to link to anything other than the standard article URL) and we will see if the Disqus trackback feature works as advertised.

Thanks!

Related articles

• Disqus Now Includes Trackbacks with Commenting System

PS – Shey Smith is doing something similar on his blog.

PPS – According to this article I am not doing the trackback correctly.  Trying again.

I was re-reading yesterday’s post about RSS Reset and, since I included the live FeedBurner counters in my post, I noticed that many of them seemed slightly higher.  I decided to drop them in to FeedCompare and see the trending. …

FeedBurner

As you probably know, FeedBurner feed stats aren’t extremely reliable. FeedBurner tries to separate what is a subscription from what is a bot or a browser, but it’s mostly an educated guess. The means that the numbers can swing up and down, sometimes wildly.

But I took a screenshot, so if it never gets this high again, hey, at least it was for one glorious day!

Here’s a look at my recent subscriber stats.

Other Stats

I took some screenshots of my Ultimate Google Analytics WP plugin. This should give you a taste of my recent blog stats.

My percentage of new visitors has remained in the 70% – 80% range consistently.

My daily visits vary greatly on if I have posted an article that day, or late the day before. The blog is new enough, that I see a huge jump after I post an article, especially if the post is stumbled.

FriendFeed being on top is new. StumbleUpon was the big traffic-bringer, but along with my increased activity on FriendFeed, comes more clicks! And I welcome them. By the way, Twitter has never sent me jack sprat for traffic.

Rising Sources is sort of a silly stat for now — the biggest percentage differences are from entries that go up a click or two. Woo.

People apparently love the bookmarklets.

Falling content is another somewhat-useless stat for now.

Up until recently, my top page was always the most popular. But I guess recently links from other blogs directly to my bookmarklets and FriendFeed posts have superceded that.

Update

After Louis linked up a stat article of his from December last year, I thought I’d add my own FeedBurner graph showing growth over time.