Status of my blog after two months

When I started this blog, the official IBM Lotus Notes/Domino blog was coming out, so my first idea was using it. After checking out the code behind it, I opted for my own template, since I was planning to do a lot of customization. So I needed a very basic, simple structure rather than a complete solution. At that time, I was also very busy at work, dealing with Semantic HTML and Search engine optimization (SEO). So I used my own blog as an experiment to see how much success I would have, both from visitors as from Google, described as the Billionaire Blind user. So here is a description of how things went.

Measuring success

Together with my blog template, I also made a tracking database wich collects visitor information. It's a fairly simple database, which collects hit counts, but also collects information on individual visits by setting cookies. Later on, I will enhance this database with an Ajax application to display more meaningful information from the data recorded.

Getting spotted by Google

It took me about three weeks to be spotted by Google, and from then on, I was in the top five of the first page for some combined searches. Unfortunately, it was about an article that I wrote by accident, about the troubeles I encountered at work with the upcoming Internet Explorer 7. At this stage, I know from my tracking application that I attract about 10 visitors every day. Most of them come from Google searches.

An important milestone

The most important thing in Web 2.0 community building is getting noticed. And a few days ago, I got blogged, so this is a very important milestone in the history of my blog. Thanks to you, Rob, and I hope I can share with you many valid tips on building web appliciations with Lotus Notes/Domino.

The next steps

The number of people subscribing to my blog actually surprises me... And I planned to reward their confidence in my blog by offering them exlusive access to my downloads, which I will enable soon. My next project will be: Photo galleries, driven by Lotus Notes/Domino, and rendered with Ajax like this one: Lightbox.