Fun With My Blog Stats

One of the great things about WordPress, and one of the main reasons I switched my blog over from Live Spaces, is the Dashboard.  The statistics that it shows you are really helpful in understanding what you’re writing about that people actually find useful. (Or at least click on.  There’s no beating comments for real feedback.)

I thought it might be interesting for you subscribers out there (and thanks, guys and gals!) to see which of my posts have gotten the most hits since January when I moved over from Live Spaces.  I am constantly surprised by the changes in the rankings.

Top Posts

1. IE8 and the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar 152 views
2. Why Won’t SharePoint Designer Recognize IE8? 108 views
3. Displaying the First N Words of a Long Rich Text Column with XSL 104 views
4. “Failed to load the workflow” Message in SharePoint Designer with Vista 99 views
5. SharePoint Web Services as Data Sources for DVWPs 93 views
6. Rolling Up Content in SharePoint Using the Data View Web Part (DVWP) 93 views
7. Error When Trying to Delete a Master Page: “Server error: This item cannot be deleted because it is still referenced by other pages.” 79 views
8. Rollup Data View Web Parts Revisited 67 views

The first two posts in the above rankings aren’t very pithy at all, but talk about the fact that the IEDT is built into IE8 and an error that I’ve been getting in SharePoint Designer, respectively.  Number 3 is one that I actually am sort of proud of that gives you a nifty little XSL template I wrote.  5, 6, and 8 are posts about the trusty DVWP, which is at the core of my development interests.  4 and 7 are just little workarounds for a couple of SharePoint and Designer issues I had run into.

There are days when I see a really strange bunch of hits on some old, seemingly useless post.  For a few days last week, my post about How to Fix Recurring Meeting Workspace Error: ‘g_InstanceID’ is undefined got a bunch of hits.  I wondered if maybe there was a new hotfix or something that might have caused this error to be triggered in a lot of places, but I didn’t see any indicator for what might have spiked the interest anywhere.

If nothing else, watching my statistics points me to places where I can do some housekeeping.  A lot of my old posts don’t have tags in WordPress because I got lazy after I moved over from Live Spaces.  I also recently learned the cool WordPress trick for displaying source code painlessly from my buddy Pete Sterpe, so if a post is getting a decent number of hits, I’ll go and implement this so that the code can be more easily copied.

Even better is to watch traffic to see what all of you out there in ‘Netland might want to hear more about.  My DVWP stuff consistently gets a good number of hits, and I hope that it is helping folks out there.  I don’t post for vanity or to become famous; I really do want to provide good tips and tricks, if not downright solutions, for those of you who manage to make your way to my blog.  I love developing with SharePoint and I just want to spread the word!

If there’s something that you’re struggling with or something that you’d like me to blog about more, drop a comment on this post and let me know.