Finally Jay-Z Weasel has provided a new construction set for the masses. Eat your heart out, dangermouse!

Give up?

Our website lacked a certain fundamental attribute until this point: Minimum and maximum widths. Yep, if your browser window was resized to be really really small, the whole thing would scale down and images would overlap and things would compress. To a point it was allright, but if it got too small things just fell apart.

Conversely, if you had a huge-ass resolution monitor, each of our articles could potentially be a single line long, and again images would begin to overlap.

I have now constrained the site to a minimum of 982 pixels wide (cower in fear, 800×600 users) and a maximum of 1200 pixels wide (a bit smaller than the standard LCD monitor these days). If this severely hampers anyone’s reading ability or pisses anyone off, let me know and I’ll consider revising the figures, but I’m going to guess that nobody will notice. :)

I also made a few minor graphical changes in anticipation of a BIG UPDATE COMING SOON! What is it?!

It’s that time again! Well, it’s 11 days after that time again but screw you, I was feeling lazy. This time around I’ve included 80% more charts and graphs as I love charts and graphs.

Around a month ago I posted our December Stats and I was quite suprised - best month ever? Amazing! A lot of folks chalked it up to Craigslist ads (even though I specifically mentioned how it couldn’t be in the last stats post). Will this month do better? Worse? Let’s find out.

Yep, looks like we’re still growing! All the Craigslist ads I have out expired in December, so there is 0 input from there. My maths aren’t so good but that appears to be a 1.1% increase over last month. Interestingly enough, our site requests have gone down but our page requests have gone up. That means we’ve had a significant reduction in bots/spam/otherwise-non-humans yet still retained our traffic levels. Nice!

Here are some details I get each month:

Well, it looks like we’ve gone down in Unique IPs per day… only around 750 this month, from 950 last month. I was really hoping to break 1000, but losing all those bot connections probably was a good thing. :) 9000 visits per day is pretty good though - the average surfer looks at 10 different pages before leaving again.

So what time of the day do we get all this traffic?

10AM still seems to be the favorite! I have no idea why. How about we follow up with some search statistics. Shakira, our monthly top-ranker for everything Blitz, is no longer #1! She doesn’t even appear on the pie chart:

Unfortunately she’s been replaced by something even more bizzarre; Dragonball-Z and Marines. In fact, if you take a look at this list here, you’ll see that Shakira only got 8 search results through us!

You can also see that quite a few of our links are referrals or bookmarks; few people search for our content to find it. :)

ON TO SOME COMPETITION!

Here’s the day-of-the-week popularity charts. There’s no way to for sure tell which author is the most popular, so using this measuring stick we simply look at how many people logged into the site on each day of the week:

#1: Maristar Mondays! Congrats Maristar for being in the top 5 every single goddamn month.
#2: Pagz Wednesdays! I know we all totally love his Star Wars frame-by-frame review, but since he stopped doing those his stats seemed to have gone up. HMMM
#3: Beaton Fridays! Beaton Fridays are starting to get popular because she’s edging in on NSP’s comics.

But then there’s a second way of measuring! The following is a list of how popular each specific day was, getting us a handle on the most popular articles:

#1: Beaton’s Magna Cum Laude! Her first Blitzed foray into the world of comics was, by far, our busiest day of the month. Congrats! (We also had a Blitz technical update that day but I don’t count it as it never showed on the front page)
#2: Maristar’s Dreaming of Better Movies! This was also the launch of BlitzTehc, our nerdalicious subsite… However I’m not contributing those posts to the scoring total because BlitzTehc doesn’t appear on the main page. Three way ties are messy anyway.
#3: Ashblaster’s Robots and Bottle Tokes! The trippy youtube-clippings seem to be popular (and this article was the one with the Robocop music video/montage which was awesome).

Finally, there is a third metric for measuring the most popular articles: direct references. I don’t have a chart or a graph for this one, I have to inspect some complicated log files to get this data out properly. A direct reference is an article that is loaded on it’s lonesome - this doesn’t count main page views or glancing back through the archives, or even search requests. This only counts how many times each page has been specifically looked at. (For example, after you submit a comment you are taken to a page that lists only the article you have commented on; this would count).

Many search engine results will link to specific articles like this, and other websites commenting on a particular post of ours might have linked to a specific article. For these reasons this is my favorite metric for measuring article popularity:

#1: The Original four Shakira articles. Yep, we thought we shook off Shakira but she’s still here, clinging on to life. Damnit! I thought we lost her! Way back in the day (these articles are over a year old now) we used to post 4 articles per day, all on the same subject. Each of these individual 4 articles ranked higher than any other directly-viewed article in January.

Interstingly enough, “Side-Boob” has made an appearance in our logs (both as site referals and search results), and my animated side-boob picture happened to be on this page as well. It looks like our “Shakira” fanatacism my actually just be side-boob fanatacism this month!

#2: Non-Stop-Pop’s Super Blooper comic! This is the hilarious Superman spoof.

#3: Maristar’s Dashing through the Snow bus blog! Bus blogs always make the top-charts every month in some form or another.

Strangely enough, this month each of those top links were NOT from January! They were all older articles. Very strange indeed! I guess The Blitz’s classic stuff is better than the new?

A new stat I’ve just come up with isn’t really an accurate measure of anything; it’s how many times people have clicked on an Author’s name, to pull up their bio/list of their articles:

#1: Beaton! Congrats Beaton, I’m sure your #1 article of the month helped contribute to this.
#2: Weasel! Hooray for me!
#3: Foley. :(

Well, that’s it for this month - be sure to come back in a week or two and I’ll have February’s stats over-analyzed for you. ;)

I’m re-doing the Avatar system today so that it isn’t confusing, stupid, and broken. That’s why I’m not doing my regular post. =)

Once again, some of our writers have slowly faded away and it has come time to get some fresh meat. Some of our policies have changed and we’re hoping to attract writers who may not have signed up before - Gone is the requirement to write 5 articles per week!

[WHO WE ARE]

There are many blogs on the planet. A lot of them cater to a specific niche - there are video-game blogs, there are kitten-blogs, and there are political-blogs. The Daily Blitz doesn’t try to specialize in a single purpose - we aren’t brainless gaming robots and we don’t obsess over cats.

However, we are real people. We have wide and varied interests, and during the course of our lives we come across interesting tidbits or dream up obscure rants that we would like to share with the world.

Most individual blogs take this same credo; people posting about the day-to-day things that interest them. Yes, they will post about kittens and the latest web trends, but you also have to drag yourself through 6 days of “I’m bored” and “Sorry I haven’t posted in a while” articles.

TDB tries to differ by collecting several authors - then we filter out the stuff that would be considered boring or “non-articles,” and we keep the remainder. A highly condensed interesting soup of topics that any average person could take an interest in.

The authors of TDB like to meet up in person once in a while and share a pizza or beer (or both); we also hang out daily in an IRC chatroom to alleviate workplace boredom. We’re a good crew and you’ll be happy to make us your friends!

[WHAT WE NEED]

We are looking for feature article writers who can make one solid post per week. There are no length requirements or content restrictions; the article must merely be entertaining or interesting. Posting more than once a week is perfectly acceptable. We are perpetually hiring for this position and will not turn away any applications.

[WHAT YOU GET]

The Daily Blitz is owned by the writers. Sure, I’m the only one with full admin access, but that’s primarily because nobody else wants the job. Essentially, every article you write earns you one share of TDB (for the purposes of profit sharing only; you won’t assume the site’s debt).

We don’t have any sacks of cash here though. When the site makes a profit, we do pay out the shareholders much like a co-op company would. The limited funds we get from hosting referrals and advertising usually goes to paying our bandwidth bills, but that’s not to say it won’t change in the future.

Even authors who no longer post here still own their fair share. Even if you contribute just one article, that article will go on to make you a bucket of potential dollars into the future.

That said, the biggest asset I can offer at this time is work experience and a reference. Yes, this can be considered a real job, and yes, I will provide a reference or letter of recommendation if you so desire one.

[HOW TO APPLY]

If you’re still reading and are interested, feel free to contact me (info below). I’m also available to speak over the phone or meet in person if you’re local! :D

e-mail: weasel@thedailyblitz.org
msn: lordeight@hotmail.com
aim: weasello
yahoo: weasello
icq: 6110490
irc: irc.spekklesoft.net #blitz

A lot of people seem to think nobody reads the Blitz anymore, and I can definitely see why. Our commenting level has gone down (no more posts from Fozzie or Gwydion, which used to spark debates), which is what most people use as a measuring stick for their post popularity. Unfortunately, comments can’t be the measuring stick used! It turns out we have a multitude of people lurking in the background…

So I’m going to make publicly available our site stats!

One thing to note during these stats - I have removed all statistical tracking software and Google site submission plug-ins from the site, so there is literally no advertising or search engine submission going on. I have no meta tags or keywords. In other words, I am doing absolutely nothing to promote site growth.

November was our best month ever, following our relatively slow yet still decent September/October (due to site upgrades, design changes, and lazy writing).

For those that are curious, our busiest visiting hour is 7:00 to 8:00 AM, Pacific Time, closely followed by the midnight to 1:00 AM hour (when we publish our new articles). Our slowest hour is 3:00 to 4:00 AM, but the afternoon hours are also pretty slow (2:30-7:00 PM).

I used to publish a “What’s the most popular article?” section, which was quite popular. But due to the new site format, with all the articles on one page, it’s fairly difficult to track this accurately. Using the old method (direct article hits):

Most popular articles for November:
#1: Pag’z Star Wars Dissection. I have no idea why this is number one - it has no fancy pictures, it has no comments - but it was directly viewed twice as much as the below. I have to admit, I don’t really like the Star Wars Dissection personally, but congrats to Pagz I guess!
#2: The chocolate pizza comes in second place, narrowly squeaking ahead of the below article. I gotta say this article was delicious looking.
#3: The Wickerman movie review almost made it to second place! Congratz Maristar!

Like I mentioned, however; the above stats can’t really be trusted because it doesn’t count articles read from the main page, which is where most people will be reading them (especially if they aren’t commenting). So, I’m going to try out a simple… Busiest day = #1, second busiest day = #2, etc.!

Busiest Days of November:
#1: Nov. 20th’s Kittens and Kubes takes the #1 spot! Clearly a crowd favorite what with all those cute pictures of cats. Congratulations Maristar!
#2: Nov. 18th’s Some like it Hot, an excellent Non-Stop-Pop comic draws in the second largest crowd for the month.
#3: Nov. 4th’s The Emperor’s New Clothes is another Non-Stop-Pop comic!

Now the busiest-days method is also a bit inaccurate because people may naturally visit more often Saturdays anyway, but the fact that Monday’s Kitten and Kubes came out on top proves that our readers… Like barfingly cute articles.

Speaking of days of the week, Wednesday is officially the busiest day! Again, no idea why. We have no scheduled authors for Wednesday at this time so it’s just a fill-in spot. =) Saturday is second busiest, followed by a very close 5-way tie with Friday eeking just 8 hits ahead of Monday.

Top 5 search referrals:
#1: “Shakira”, of all things, is our #1 search request.
#2: “Dear Maggie”, though she hasn’t had an article for ages, is #2!
#3: “DragonBall Z” is our third search request for some reason.
#4: “I am bender please insert girder” has been a common sight - every single month this shows up in the top 5 list somewhere.
#5: “Postsecret” (which maristar did an article on) and “Hell pizza condom” are both tied for 5th place. I don’t know what kind of pizza that person got but maybe they could take a picture and mail it to postsecret?

I’ve always been trying to push the “50% Firefox” audience and we’ve always hovered around 60-70%. I haven’t checked in several months but I’m disappointed for November:

Well, it’s been a few weeks overdue (I destroyed my back and haven’t been able to move for days), but the new site layout is now online. After a few minor tweaks it will be officially completed! I’m excited to get everyone back posting shortly.

In other news, the web address “tehblitz.org” is going to expire soon and I’m not going to renew it - so anyone that has to refresh their bookmarks should do so now. “Thedailyblitz.org” is where everyone should be travelling.

Feel free to post your feedback on the new, friendlier-looking site! (The colors will still be custom-editable by the authors, which will come over the next month I’ll assume)