Welcome to Popular
Now I’ve got today’s actual post up I’d like to say hello to any newcomers who’ve arrived via Bob Stanley’s Times article on this project. I see some new faces in the comments boxes already, which is just fantastic – any undertaking like this needs refreshing occasionally. I hope you stick around and wade in to any new entries (as well as restarting debate on old ones, of course).
Also a reminder for old and new alike that next Friday night it’s Club Popular, where we play only #1 hits all night, and next Sunday afternoon (the 4th) we’re invading the Hangover Lounge, at the Lexington in Islington, where Mr Stanley and I will be spinning some of the mellower #1s, and the regular DJs promise “number one themed” sets. Hope to see some of you one or both of those.
the stats show the difference between an audience of band’s fans reading a twitter link to a post on that band, versus the reader’s of a national newspaper reading a full article about the community surrounding a focused pop-culture blog.
we got ~3500 visits from the Pete Wentz link, but they bounced right out again, so only about the same additional page views.
the ~300 visitors that came from Bob’s article produced ~7000 new page views, and dragged up the average time spent on the site from 90 seconds (dragged down by web crawlers and failed searches of course, ahem) to over 5 minutes
Hello you!
(btw, those numbers are a bit up in the air and hard to pin-down, but in the right ball-park)
it’s great to have new/fresh input but I’m having comments are being added so thick and fast that I’m having trouble keeping up.
Edit: just figured out that if I click on the RSS button in the latest comments box I can catch up
i’ll temporarily increase the ‘latest comments’ list in the sidebar to show the 20 most recently commented posts.
20 posts works better as a general policy, I think. It’s always irritating when you come up with (what you think is) an interesting thought about an old post and nobody can see that you’ve put it up after 15 minutes.
it depends how active things are of course. one option we have is to provide a ‘bulletin board’ view of pages which instead of listing posts in traditional blog style, most recent first, lists them by most recent comment. i’ll see what magic WordPress I can summon
NEW FEATURE ALERT
i’ve dropped ‘Latest Comments’ in the sidebar back to 8 posts. BUT, even though commenting on multiple posts has died down a little, there is now a little [more] link that gets you to a new ‘bulletin board’ style page view of our posts that shows 20 at a time and can go back as far as you like
re ♯6 Many, many thanks for this – there have been some fantastic posts recently (from Marcello and others) that I might have missed in the rush