So the good new is that The Inquisitr got accepted into Google News, least the tech stream did anyway. This is going to be a healthy boost in site traffic, although until we start appearing I don’t know by how much yet. I could be hundreds of page views a day, it could be thousands or even more. Its been years since I had a site in Google News, but I do recall The Blog Herald getting reasonable sort of traffic from it.

Now the bad news: I had to change the URL structure to be accepted. Google News will only index pages where those pages have a min 3 number unique identifier. The Inquisitr didn’t, with me having taken the SEO and simple URL route of inquisitr.com/postname. So I had to change the permalink structure of every post (it’s now inquisitr.com/postnumber/postname), easy, but that means a redirect of the old posts…easy, but because the posts didn’t have anything between the URL and name originally the site is now trying to redirect everything with that structure, including archive pages and static pages. The plugin I used for the redirect has an exception box, but how do you define the exception when there is no unique identifier in the first place other than the name of the page itself (and I tried that…didn’t work, it looks for a broader field). So for now the pages for QMeme, About and Content are now redirecting to posts with the same content until I can find a way of excepting these pages from the catchall 302 redirect. Did I mention that it caused me one hour of sheer panic as well?

Update: before I even hit publish my Google News vanity search email pops up with a hit

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Today marks 1 month since The Inquisitr launched. I was going to write something over on the site about the 1 month mark but the last time I wrote a post about the site people used OutBrain to rate it poorly, besides, I don’t do self indulgent well anyway…well my personal blog aside

Having said that being transparent to a point is an important part of blogging/ publishing 2.0 so here’s some numbers from 6pm AEST June 6. Some constantly fluctuate so hence the proviso in terms of when the figures apply to

Page views

Awstats 5 May- 4:15 5 June: 415080
Google Analytics 9 May - 5 June: 136,768 (note missing the opening big 4 days)

Subscribers
Feedburner: 2155 across 4 feeds.

Technorati
Authority: 339
Rank: 12505

Techmeme
Leaderboard 51st
Bloggerboard (30 day rolling) 51st, (7 day rolling) 32nd
Writers: me (30 day rolling) 29th (includes two TC posts), (7 day rolling) 10th

Webstats
Alexa one week: 36,041 3months: 349,347
Compete: 129,714 “people” for May
Quantcast: predicts a monthly unique of 82,426

Services running on the site
Disqus
ValueClickMedia
BuySellAds.com
Adsense (one unit only…and not for long)
Lijit
FriendFeed (via WordPress plugin)

Services tried but down
Pubmatic
Outbrain (subject to review)

Sponsor(s)
The Metaverse Journal

Widgets Running
Display: Techmeme, BlogCatalog
Available for users: iGoogle | Netvibes | Opera | webpage/ blog

There’s probably other things as well I’ll think of later. My thanks to those who have supported myself and the team along the way. After a low second week the site is starting to trend upwards, not huge overnight growth but sustainable, solid growth. More next time.

I’ll save all the formal stuff for a post at The Inquisitr later this week, but I’m sitting here on a Monday, nearly a week into the process, and thought I’d share some thoughts and numbers.

- I’d forgotten the joy (or pain) of running my own large WP blog. I’ve managed to break the template a number of times, including Sunday night where I thought it would be smart to auto-update the plugins. Big mistake

- Feedburner is still like a Rollercoaster years after launching. I can’t give an accurate subscriber number because it’s up and down, but it’s roughly 1200 subscribers on average one week in (highest count has been 1500+). Not huge, but more than the 300 or 400 I thought the site would get. BTW: why isn’t Feedburner using Google logins yet? have they forgotten about the service?

- All the missing bits are now fixed: about page with full bios, contact page complete with form (3 form plugins later), Twitter account here which auto updates via plugin, but painfully posts on pre-posts.

- The site is averaging around 18,000 page views a day as of yesterday (but including the entire month including pre-launch). The biggest day was Thursday (US time) where a post hit the front page of Digg. If the average holds (it wont) about 750k page views month. I’m betting on 500k, but hope it’s higher. When planning this I thought 100-200k, so I’m more than happy (its nearly hit 200k now)

- Started running some basic affiliate ads to demo the 125×125 spots. I’m not going to actively try to sell them until there’s a month worth of traffic to use, but if anyone is interested and would like to buy one now, I’m certainly open to offers.

- The writing team is working really well, I woke up Saturday to find I didn’t have a post on the front page. It was magical knowing that there was a pile of content up and I wasn’t pressured to add to it. Spent 2 hours playing with my son: it’s been a long time since I’ve felt able to do that without stressing about getting content up. I still worked both days of the weekend, but it was more leasurly and fun…well the Sunday night breaking the template and coding part aside

- slowly working my way through some value adds and partnerships. Couple of small announcements hopefully in the next few week.

- Haven’t had one headline on Techmeme yet, only the odd link in. Reddit and Digg headlines therefore have become easier to obtain. Bizarre.