Fruit flies like a banana, time flies like an arrow.

A year ago, on Jan 7th, 2009, ChinaBlog.cc came online. I’d like to make an annual review here and share some thought about my experience of authoring this blog.

1. Posts: I posted 112 posts and 10 pages last year as of 01/06/2010. They received 133 comments in total.

2. Visitors and pageviews: In November, Chinablog.cc had 2222 visitors and 3957 pageviews. According to a technorati survey, I have above median level visitors, but slightly less than median level PVs.

Here are unique visitors and pageview stats of 12 months from google analytics.

As shown, in the second half of December, web traffic is much lower than average, probably because of holiday season.

3. Subscriptions: As of 01/01/2009, I have 34 subscribers as shown by feedburner.com.

4. Traffic source: 50.9% visitors are from search engine (90% of these are from Google; thanks, google!); 36.8% are from referral sites (32% of them are from google images search; wikipedia and facebook are also top referrals); rest are direct traffic.

5. Traffic ranking:

Google Pagerank: 3 (gained on Oct. 30, 2009).

Current (Jan 4th, 2009) Alexa ranking: 1,710,157. It had reached 3xx,000 with cs-weekly.com domain. This number is not accurate, because I had alexa plugin myself, which generated lots of traffic to alexa stats. I guess any rank below 300,000 makes no sense.

My goals: 300,000 -> 150,000 -> 90,000 -> 25,000 -> 10, 000 (last two are hard to reach). Some example sites: chinasmack.com is now at 27k (and rising); yeinjee.com now at 61k; chinapage.com at 78k.

6. Post popularity:
Most viewed posts:

• 1. Ten types of residential houses Chinese people live in
• 2. Mo Li Hua (Jasmine Flowers): the symbol of Chinese Music
• 3. Chinese juggling: challenge the limits of humankind

Most commented posts:

• 1. Top 8 Most Popular Chinese Food with Recipes
• 2. Why no year of the Cat?
• 3. Siheyuan: the Chinese Housing Dream

7. Map: This is the geolocation map of all visitors around this small planet. Briefly, Singapore is the city of Chinablog.cc readers; and United States has most readers among countries.

8. Domain name: When I started this blog, it was originally easternstory.com; I switched to cs-weekly.com on Jan 15; later, when google page rank reach 2 in may, I switched to current chinablog.cc. Never changed since then. WordPress theme: I used three themes so far: Corporate by oripearl -> iNove by mg12 -> Arthemia by colorlabsproject

I’ve learned a lot about HTML/PHP/CSS during these months. It’s really enjoyable to tweak themes to fit your need.

9. Book Review: A nice literary agent approached me in September and asked me to review a book about China. I happily read the book and wrote a review. I posted it on amazon.com as well as on my blog. It is now the most “helpful” review for that book on amazon.com. I had felt flattered for quite a while by this invited book review. I think when I have more time in the future. I will do more book reviews.

10. Copyright warning: On July 22nd 2009, I received a copyright violation notice from an Australian horse owner. He claimed I should not use an image of his white horse in my post. I removed it immediately and decided to only use Creative Commons images or my own images from then on. I think this is very important for the long term reputation and legal existence of a website.

Summary: That’s pretty much for my first year of blogging. I still haven’t achieved amazing traffic or readership, but at least I have successfully posted continuously for a year, I haven’t abandoned this blog and am making progress. That’s good enough!

Wish I can keep posting on and on. See you after another year~