automaticable

1 month ago today automaticable and I (and 3 other Wegner brothers) started an interesting new relationship. When automaticable.com was birthed we had a handful of posts to import from our old Blogger days, but we pretty much started from scratch. So what do we have to show for it? Read on for an overview of our first month.

I am going to use the numbers we have from Google Analytics for most of this post, but I have noticed that their numbers are a bit inconsistent with the blog stats we get through Wordpress. No matter, though, it is all still impressive to me!

To start off, one of the stats I am most proud of is we had over 1000 visits in our first month! To complement that, we had 342 unique visitors come to the site, so I can breathe a sigh of relief knowing I didn’t count for the majority of those visits.

Obviously it is content that has driven all of this traffic, so let’s find out what brought everyone here. Of our 62 total posts, our most popular titles include:

• Scott releases Wosaic 0.1 beta 1. This post brought in a lot of outside traffic because it is a unique program built from scratch that can build a photo mosaic from your personal photo album or even Facebook or Flickr albums! Keep your eyes peeled for new versions to be released soon.

• Kyle reviews Electric Sheep. Check out this little known but impressive screen saver that combines user ratings and AI-based evolution to create new and beautiful screen savers on a regular basis.

• Love Linux? Customize your dual-boot! People are searching all the time on how to customize their GRUB menu in Linux, and Scott has provided a great post on how to do just that. This post definitely brings out your inner-geek, but this is what you get for reading a blog from a computer science major.

So where are all of these people coming from? Let’s start internationally. I was surprised to find we have quite the international crowd, with most of our new international friends coming from Germany and Great Britain (willkommen and hello!). Since we are located in the States, it is only natural that most of our traffic comes from within the US. Although the majority of our traffic came from Illinois and Georgia where automaticable’s authors are from, we have readers in 38 of the 50 states! That amazes me and I am very happy to see we have such a geographically diverse audience.

I guess it is important to figure out how people are finding us as well. Although about 40% of our traffic comes directly from people typing in our URL, that leaves 60% from other means. Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon, as well as our blogs being posted in our Facebook profiles resulted in almost 40% of our traffic coming from referring sites. Participating in the comments of some of our other favorite blogs has also brought some traffic. The most surprising aspect of this is the remaining 20% of our traffic; we have had over 175 visits from searches alone. I guess that means automaticable has been pretty useful to a lot of people!

Although there is more data I could present here thanks to Google Analytics, I think this is probably a deep enough dive. Let me know if you have any specific questions in our comments, I love talking about this stuff. Thanks to everyone who has made this first month as awesome as it was, and here’s to the future of automaticable!