They Grow Up So Fast

13-07-2011

A while ago I posted an entry saying that I had a lot of things on the go. As is normally the case these days. One of the things that was being delayed due to everything else was my brother's website. Thankfully the delay didn't last as long as I had feared and shortly after that post Half Baked Potatoes was born.

This site was never meant to be anything to me, other than a little side coding project. My brother was going to maintain it. Admin it. Keep it nice and clean. As stories were submitted he would approve or reject them, etc. New ideas/features he would come up with, discuss, trick me into coding.

You know, that age-old family tradition .

I got a little involved with the admin side of things, as did the lady friend, when there was a build up of submitted stories. We both now approve and reject stories alongside the brother.

After setting up all the other little tricks, such as a Twitter account and a Facebook page that updates the wall posts with entries from the site, word of the site spread. My friends, unknown to me until recently, visit the site on a regular basis to see if anything new has been posted. One of them has even requested some sort of email-notification system to be put in place so he can keep up to date.

Apparently having an RSS Feed, a Twitter account and a self regulating Facebook page just isn't enough for him. Bastardo .

For a while now I have been hooked on the stats of traffic coming into The Bauble. As well as its page rank on Google. Every week I check the analytic to see what the weekly breakdown of visits is. On average I have roughly three hundred to four hundred hits a week. That isn't bad considering this is purely a blog about everything and anything.

Being the sucker for stats that I am I added analytics to Half Baked as well. For a site that has been around for less than a year it has grown quickly. For starters if you use the following search term in Google "half baked potatoes" you can see that Half Baked is sitting pretty in the middle of the first page.

It took me nearly three years to get to the bottom. The fact that I am sitting on the top means nothing now. NOTHING!!!

The real indication of how fast his site is spreading is the weekly hit count. Something happened over the weekend it would seem. He went from around twenty-thirty hits a week to five hundred last week. Over that even, closer to six hundred. In a week. Stories about being wasted and doing crazy shit have attracted double the hits of my blog.

If I wasn't so proud of the site I'd be seeking to kill it .

I can't even attribute this increase in traffic to bots trawling the net. The stats don't lie. There are people coming from all over America and spending upwards of ten minutes a night on Half Baked. In fact the total number of visits from Ireland last week was matched and then some by the total number of visits from the States. That's not bad for a little site from Ireland.

Of course the brother does put a lot of work into generate traffic for the site. Forum posts, random comments, he nearly works at it like a full time job.

Rat bastard! How dare his site be doing better than mine

Blue_jester

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