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I HATE How Commercial WordPress Is Becoming & Bye, Bye, Jetpack

By Technology, The Web, ThinkingNo Comments

I HATE how commercial WordPress is becoming! What went wrong? It started out as a community-based blogging platform. Now everything is about business and money and it stinks!

A good example of this is Jetpack. Jetpack is a plugin that recorded statical data about visitors and views. It used to be free and did these lovely annual reports.

Now the services provided by Jetpack, including their Stats has in the latest update become a paid model. Not just a paid model, but a subscription service – like money is no object. Sure it’s fine if you have a business and are making money.

But for a small author and blogger like me, let’s be clear: This website costs me more than it has ever earned me. But I keep it running, at a personal cost to me for my enjoyment. It’s a leisure activity.

So today, it was Bye, Bye Jetpack. I’ve removed and deleted the plugin. I encourage other bloggers to do the same. Let’s not give in to their financial demands and instead opt with our fingers and delete plugins and themes demanding money with their Dashboard banners.

It’s not just Jetpack. EVERY theme and plugin now expects you to pay, usually a subscription service, for regular updates.

Honestly if there were an alternative community-based platform, similar to WordPress’ past, that focused on development to improve user experience, rather than making developers rich, I’d switch. But there isn’t right now, meaning that at least for now I’m stuck with WordPress.

Blog – Yes blog, writing for pleasure, not to make money, soon,

Antony

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Thursday 11 April 2024

20,000+ Visitors in 2014 – Not Bad For A Little Personal Blog! :)

By Technology, The Web2 Comments
jetpack-2014-numbers

Jetpack Annual Report 2014 – Crunchy Numbers

 The numbers are in and according to my WordPress Jetpack Annual Report in 2014 I had 20,000 views of my blog. Not bad for a little personal blog! Click the image left to see the screenshot. Any image in this post can be clicked for full size.

My hosting provider Vidahost (who you can learn more about here) provide AWStats software. According to AWStats I’ve had (see image below):

  • 58, 101 unique visitors to my blog in 2014.
  • Who have visited 149,103 times in 2014.
  • And have resulted in over a million hits in 2014.
antonysimpson.com-awstats-2014

AWStats from Hosting Provider Vidahost.

The WordPress Jetpack Annual Report reports that my biggest referrers in 2014 were from social media sites Facebook and Twitter:


jetpack-2014-finding

Jetpack Annual Report 2014 – How did they find you?


jetpack-2014-attractions

Jetpack Annual Report 2014 – Attractions

 The WordPress Jetpack Annual Report indicate that my five most popular posts in 2014 were:
jetpack-2014-posting-patterns

Jetpack Annual Report 2014 – My Posting Patterns

 I’ve really grown my blog in the last few years, with Reviews of books, films and technology seeming to make the big difference to increasing the number of visitors. But what keeps my visitors returning seems to be blogging about my personal life. Below is the result of a readers survey undertaken in 2014. It that shows that readers enjoy the current content I create and would like more of everything. It shows that 80% of readers surveyed said that they would like more personal blog posts:


type-of-posts-readers-survey-2014

Readers were asked: What sort of blog posts would you like to see more of?


I think these statistics are great. In the next year and beyond I hope to continue to grow my loyal blog readership.

The blog costs money to host and takes up a considerable chunk of my time. So if you have a product or service that you’d like to advertise on the blog, please don’t hesitate to Contact me. Your advert could reach 20,000+ unique visitors a year.

Blog soon,

Antony



I aim for posts on this blog to be informative, educational and entertaining. If you have found this post useful or enjoyable, please consider making a contribution by Paypal:


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Friday 2 January 2015

Typos

By Books & Authors, ThinkingNo Comments

I got an email recently about my Book Review: The Book of Tomorrow by Cecelia Ahern post with the Subject: Typos. See the email below:

Name: Sally O
Email: removed

Subject: Typos

Message Body:
Hello; I found your review of The Book of Tomorrow via Google. It is an entertaining review but has a great many typos. If this doesn’t bother you then that’s fine. If it does, might I suggest a quick proofing and edit? Things to fix =

about to loose everything
LOSE

couldn’t bare facing
BEAR

Rose, in to the gatehouse.
ROSALINE, INTO

which burn’t
BURNED

angry and board.
BORED

having latte’s
LATTES

older man, who she fancies.
WHOM

begin’s to realise
BEGINS

Sally O

Reply Required: No

I’d like to thank Sally O for taking the time to email me. I know that Sally O didn’t require a reply; but I wanted to use her email as an opportunity to write about the grammatical and occasion spelling errors you may spot on my blog.

All of the “typos” or grammatical errors Sally O points out in her email about my Book Review: The Book of Tomorrow by Cecelia Ahern post are most probably right. When I wrote the post that’s where my writing was at. Once I’ve hit the Publish button I don’t go back and edit it, but I do consider the errors and try to learn from them so that my writing improves. This is how my blog helps me to learn to write better and it also shows me how my writings developed over the years.

Interestingly I now spend more time editing a blog post than I do writing one. I’ll write a first draft, then read it carefully looking for grammatical errors. Usually in sentences I’ll find words that I don’t need or words that are in the wrong order. Occasionally I’ll have written a sentence that doesn’t make sense. It’s the editing that takes the time, but it’s the editing that brings out the quality to my writing.

So although it’s tempting to edit posts removing the errors I spot after they’ve been published; especially on posts that bring a considerable number of visitors to my blog like Book Review: The Book of Tomorrow by Cecelia Ahern (according to the WordPress Jetpack Stats Plugin) because the process helps develop and improve the quality of my writing and editing I’ll continue to leave the grammatical and occasional spelling errors as they are.

Take Care,

Antony

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Sunday 16 December 2012
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