Am I the Only One Who Cares? Probably
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| Local Color: The Colors of Yingge: May 2, 2011 |
Well, it’s time for the Pathetical Analyticals for 2011. I call it “Pathetical Analyticals” because I
think it’s kind of pathetic that I have to take this blog apart and analyze
every aspect of what happened in it for the year. It’s not so much that I feel a need to understand why I posted
one thing or another. I posted what I
posted because it was interesting to me and I figured, if it was interesting to
me, it might also be interesting to some other people who don’t know that much
about Taiwan. But what is pathetic is
my need to break everything down into some kind of statistic: To try to gain some meaning for the blog by
examining the minutiae. I wish that I
was above that, but, once again I have fallen victim to my baser nature and did
it anyway, so what follows is Pathetical Analyticals 2011 or by the alternate
title: Am I the Only One Who Cares? Probably
What’s it all about?
First a bit about the Taiwan Adventure Blog: In the beginning it was written purely as an informational tool
for my family and friends. I was
leaving my home country and didn’t want to be writing separate emails all the
time to dozens of people who might possibly be interested. It was intended to chronicle our life in
Taiwan as well as the church we came here to build. But after a while, I separated the church website from the Taiwan
Adventure. I needed a website for the
church and I felt after a while I was duplicating my efforts, so I split
them. The church website is at www.pottershousetaoyuan.blogspot.com. The Taiwan Adventure, became a stand alone
culture, history, travel, and food blog.
It has evolved into what it is, and probably there is more of the
evolutionary process that will still take place.
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| Taiwanese Traditions: The Planting and Growing of Rice: April 4, 2011 |
I think the blog has improved this year. It has a better look for one thing and readership has increased
dramatically. I have also included a
weekly feature, Photo Glimpses of Taiwan, which features photos that have been
used or supplement the photos in the blog.
The really great part is that my posts have been picked up by We Blog
the World and Go! Overseas. These two
websites have enormous readership and I believe they have really helped to
increase traffic to the Taiwan Adventure.
In addition to these we have been featured a number of times in the feed
aggregation, The Best of Taiwanderful and iTainan and a number of others.
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| Eating My Way Through Taiwan: The Stink of Adventure: July 11, 2011 |
The Taiwan Adventure is based in Taoyuan City, Taiwan. Taoyuan is a city of about 380,000 people in
Northeastern Taiwan. During the winter
it’s cold and during the summer it’s hot.
The other two seasons are superfluous because it’s either hot or its
cold, there are only a few days in between.
Taoyuan is not a beautiful place.
But the people are warm and friendly and if I have to live somewhere I’m
glad I live here. I can drive to a
pretty place, but as I’ve always said, people are where it’s at. The Taiwan Adventure is really my look at
Taiwan. Everything is examined through
the filter of an expat American. I
really try to understand the culture, and the things that cross my eyes, but
sometimes I’m wrong because I look at through the filter of my life. I can’t escape that. So it is what it is. So far no hate mail, so I guess I’m on the
right path most of the time, but who knows, there’s not a lot of love mail or
comments, either.
Statistically Speaking
The rest of the post will be made up of numbers and stats; some of them
may even be meaningful.
Readership
Total views of the blog this year:
26,167
Average Views per month: 2365.4
The Taiwan Adventure has readers in 129 countries.
The Taiwan Adventure has readers in 129 countries.
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| Taiwanese History: Sun Yat Sen: Sept. 13, 2011 |
Over the course of the year the readership increased from 1,150 readers
in January to 2,897 readers in December resulting in an average monthly
increase in readers of 158. This is a
net gain of 151% for the year. Of
course there were peaks ad valleys, some months readership went down only to
rebound the next month. One of the
biggest affects on readership was the number of posts. An increase in the number of posts resulted
in an increase in the number of readers; correspondingly a decrease in posts
meant a decrease in readership. Lesson
for bloggers: Consistency results in
higher readership. If you post regularly
readership will always increase.
Inconsistent posting results in lower readership.
The RSS feed did well as well.
We added the site to Feedburner in February and in 10 months there were
2,433 views on the feed with 917 clicks back to blog. That means that about 38% of the views resulted in readers being
driven to the blogsite. This is the
main purpose of a feed so that people will see your posts and want to go back
to the original to see others.
Posts
This year I posted 42 different posts under 8 category headings. I don’t usually break them into categories
in the way a wordpress blog does.
Actually I categorize them through the use of a “header” in the
title. I use eight headers
Uncategorized
Taiwanese History
Taiwanese Traditions
Cultural Unawareness
Traveling with M13
Taiwan Travelogue
Random Asianess
Eating My Way Through Taiwan
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| Local Color: Taoyuan City Ghost Festival Parade: August 23, 2011 |
Something new this year is the use of a header titled Local Color. The Local Color posts are photo essays of
some place or topic I find visually interesting. Rather than describe them, I just take a series of photos and
include them.
Most are self-explanatory.
Cultural Unawareness are my mistakes at the culture that resulted in
funny or embarrassing moments. I’m
hoping to phase this out this year; that it will become obsolete. Traveling with M13. Mordeth13 is a friend of
mine, and I have done a few things with him and his family. These posts are the result of some
interaction with him. I hope to do more
of these in the nest year.
Top Five Posts
1. Taiwanese
History: Sun Yat Sen
Total views since September
1,059 or 353 per month.
2. Taiwanese
Traditions: The Dragon Boat Festival
Total Views since June
2010 3,112 or 172 per month.
3. Traveling
with M13: Custom Scooters of
Taiwan
Total views since
February 501 or 50 per month
4. Taiwan
Travelogue: The National Palace Museum
Total
views since March 437 or 49 per month
5. Taiwanese History: Double Tenth day
Total views since October 2010 468 or 33 per month.
Sun Yat Sen is considered to be the Father of Modern China. This post has been the single most popular
post I have written on this blog. It
will be interesting to see if it has the kind of staying power that the Dragon
Boat Festival has had. The Dragon Boat Festival is still popular after 18
months.
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| Taiwan Travelogue: The North Coast: September 20, 2011 |
My Personal Favorite Posts
For various reasons I like the following posts the best. I think they are the best written and I’ve
had the most fun talking about them with other people. They’re listed in order according to how
well I liked them.
1. Eating My
Way Through Taiwan: The Stink of
Adventure
A very funny post on Stinky Tofu, that also
appeared in Zite magazine for iPads.
2. Taiwanese
Traditions: The Planting and
Growing of Rice
A post on Rice Planting in Taiwan, contains my
favorite picture of Taiwan ever.
3. Local
Color: The Colors of Yingge
Photo essay:
I think Yingge is a cool place…It’s also very colorful
4. Random
Asianess: Oh Sure, Now We Decorate
Talks about decorating for Chinese new
Year. It is the next post after my complaining about not decorating for Christmas.
5. Taiwanese
Traditions: The Dragon Boat
Festival
I’m only including this because everyone else
reads it.
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| Taiwanese Innovation: Magic Click Shoes: December 13, 2011 |
Top Traffic Sources
Of course some people, just go straight to the blog. I know it sounds hard to believe but there
are a few faithful readers. In fact,
11% of the readers on the blog have visited more than 101 times. So, I guess some people are regulars.
Google 7,764 referrals
Expat Blogs 299 referrals
Taiwan Bloggers 188 referrals
The Google referrals breakdown like this:
Google.com 5,225
Google.com.ca 603 Canada
Google.co.uk
579 United Kingdom
Google.com.ph 578 Philippines
Google.com.au 292 Australia
Google.com.tw 250 Taiwan
Google.com.sg 237 Singapore
Top Keywords
Taiwan Flag 416
Dragon Boats 182
Taiwanese Traditions 121
Mordeth 13 99
Sun Yat Sen
54
Other Places where the Taiwan Adventure can be found (or at least a
link):
There are some other places but some of them are really temporary.
Announcements
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| www.taiwangongfutea.com |
Finally, The Taiwan Adventure won first place in the category of General
blog in the popular vote at taiwanderful.net’s 2011 Top Taiwan Blog
Awards. We appreciate the support of
our readers and would like to welcome new readers as a result of the
competition. Thank you for your
votes. We also want to congratulate the
other winners. It always amazes me how
many excellent English language blogs there are in Taiwan.
Here is a link so you can see the results first hand. Taiwanderful
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