Special Birthday Edition of Monday Links: January 5th, 2009

Published by Jarred on January 5, 2009 in Monday Links and Tropophilia. View Comments

Though our first posts were published in December 2007, Tropophilia was officially launched one year ago on January 5th, 2008.  In that introductory post, we announced our mission:

While we hope that you come to understand some of the changes that are happening around our world, we also hope that we cause some small amount of change in YOU. Whether we expose you to a new idea, or change your mind about an old one, we hope your perspective on life is changed – however so minutely – after having visited Tropophilia. If you’re not a tropophiliac before you arrive, we hope you’ll be one when you leave.

This blog has certainly changed us for the better, and we hope in some small way it’s done the same for you.  Tropophilia has inspired us to read, write, think, re-think, debate, learn, and grow.  We hope you’ve enjoyed the ride so far as much as we have.

We thought that we’d take advantage of this special edition of Monday Links for a little introspection and retrospection, as we reflect on some of the happenings on Tropophilia over the past year.

Content

According to the Internet Archive, we had published 32 posts to eleven different categories by January 19, 2008.  Today, we have just under 300 posts published in 59 categories (check out our new full-page archive to explore all our posts by date and category).  In addition to Taylor and Jarred’s content, we’ve had 17 guest posts from friends such as Dan, Joel, Eric, Bruce, Marriott, Jarry, and James.  We also have over 850 comments on our posts, signifying the robust conversations that have emerged among our growing community of readers.

Here are some of our favorite entries from this year:

Statistics (as of 12/30/08)

  • Google Analytics also tells us:
    • 28.67% of our traffic is direct (i.e. people coming to Tropophilia on their own, without clicking from another site), while 27.59% of our traffic is referred by another link on the web
    • 43.75% of our traffic comes from search engine results (over 90% of those from Google), with our top five keywords being:
      1. tropophilia (423 visits)
      2. bomomo (116)
      3. cons of social networking (111)
      4. 6 word essay (96)
      5. facebook political views (60)
    • 45.2% of our visitors use Firefox, followed closely by Internet Explorer (43.88%), and then Safari (8.61%), Chrome (1.11%), and Opera (0.68%)
    • 68.03% of our visitors are — as far as can be tracked — new visitors to the blog
    • Most of our visitors are from the United States (73.72%), with the top states being North Carolina (12.41%), California (10.94%), Florida (8.34%), New York (7.06%), and Washington, D.C (6.73%).  Internationally, we get most of our visits from the UK (5.44%), Canada (3.55%), and India (1.86%).

Design

In a way, Tropophilia has almost come full circle in terms of visual design.  Check out how we appear in the Internet Archive’s index from January 19, 2008.   We launched with a double-column variant of the excellent K2 theme — much as we have right now, though the width was narrower.  Not long into the life of the blog, we added a second sidebar to the left side of the main content.  We kept this format for most of the year.  After an ill-fated tinkering with a completely new theme in early December, we’ve come back to our roots with the dual-column look.  We love it for its simplicity and the priority it gives to the main content.  We’ve also introduced a new logo up top, which we also hope you like as much as we do.

At launch, we had a “What We’re Reading” widget in place that tracked our online bookmarks of cool articles.  This eventually was replaced with our “By The Way” section, where we would post small updates and links.  Several months ago, we removed “By The Way” and replaced it with feeds from our Twitter accounts.  Finally, in the past few weeks, we have reintroduced the “What We’re Reading” widget with a fresh commitment to keeping it populated with interesting links and notes.

We continue to tweak things here and there to see if they stick.  As always, we welcome your feedback on any design changes and suggestions.

Other Awesomeness

This has been an exciting year for Tropophilia: not only for the interesting conversations that have come out of our posts, but also for some special opportunities it has given us.

In June, we were invited by Brazen Careerist to join their new start-up community of blogging 20-somethings.  Since then, Taylor and Jarred have been featured a number of times on their front page and it’s been a major source of traffic.  Just a few weeks ago, one of Brazen Careerist’s founders (and noted columnist and career coach) Penelope Trunk cited posts by each of us as reasons she’s inspired to keep pursuing her startup business.

Taylor and Jarred have also been doing a little guest blogging.  In May, Taylor attended the Council on Foundations conference in Washington, D.C. and was invited by Sean Stannard-Stockton (who runs the Tactical Philanthropy blog) to write up some of his thoughts from the panels he attended.  Later that month, Jarred wrote a post for Sarah Perez’s blog speculating about how the battle over the social web would be fought, and who would probably win (hint: Google).

Speaking of which, as we’ve noted in several places, this blog played a big part in making Jarred feel confident enough to pursue and eventually get a job offer from Google.  So even though he knows you often found the posts boring or too detailed, he wants to thank you for humoring him as he cultivated and explored his (super geeky) passions and turned them into a dream job.  Here’s hoping that 2009 will help Taylor to do the same.

New Year Resolutions

While 2008 was a great start for the blog, we want to make a conscious and concerted effort to ensure that 2009 is even better.  So, here are our resolutions for Tropophilia in the new year.

  • Keep a steady pace of posting, at least twice per week but aiming for more.  Utilize the post scheduling tool more effectively to spread posts out, and communicate better with each other about up and down times for writing.
  • Continue to evangelize Tropophilia through guest posts and comments on other blogs, Twitter, etc. so that we reach and exceed 100 subscribers (right now we’re hovering around 75).
  • From Taylor: produce more original content, fewer link posts, and longer features every once and a while.  Follow up on guest-posting commitments and respond to comments (sorry for the slack, folks!).
  • Introduce one or two additional regular, sustainable weekly features beyond Monday Links, and commit to keeping them up.  If you have suggestions for what you’d like to see (return of the Tropophy [Taylor's note: please God no] or Satellite Challenge, perhaps, or something completely new), let us know.
  • Publish at least five guest posts, and potentially add a third full-time blogger (we want Eric *clap* *clap* *clapclapclap*)

Thank You!

Thanks for reading Tropophilia.  We’ve enjoyed writing for and sharing with you over the past year, and look forward to 2009 being even better.

We’d love to hear what your favorite posts and conversations from 2008 were, what you’d like to see from us in the new year, and any other comments or questions!  And remember, if you ever want to write a guest post, we’d be thrilled!

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user The Facey Family.

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