Tom: I agree entirely! Sprucing up my site is high on the list of priorities.

Rob: Just ordered Tipping Point. Thanks! I enjoy some of Tim Ferris’ stuff, when I can bear the smugness.

Steve: no issue whether people read via RSS or not. Stats are only an indication of whether you are doing something right: They are not the be all and end all.
As an aside though, you’ve done well to “get” RSS – I am really surprised how little it has taken off. I only have a few hundred RSS subscribers as opposed to a few thousand for the monthly email update.
If you don’t understand Twitter my advice would be STAY AWAY! I use it a lot (and get 10% of my traffic from there), but it really sucks time!

Glad to see the web stats increasing. One thing I wondered about is how RSS affects the stats (if at all). I tend to catch up with the various blogs via RSS rather than visiting the pages directly. Obviously I come here if there’s something I wish to view /comment on, but other than that I guess my stats don’t count?

If you ‘need’ to get views up you could do what Ben Goldacre tends to do on his blog (Badscience) which is to have the first paragraph so you get a flavour but need to go to the page for the whole story. His articles do tend to be a little longer than yours though.

Also, I still don’t get Twitter.

Thanks!

Steve.

Love the growth on the blog views – congratulations. Not surprised because there is a) so much content on the site and b) it’s all so damn interesting.

My only complaint is that it is a black hole for my time as I can spend far too much of it on here. Big thank you back at you.

Rob

PS. You’ve probably read the Tipping Point – there’s some really interesting stuff in it about how small changes in context and the way an idea is communicated can have a big influence on its stickiness. What I take from it for blogging is that you should keep experimenting with little changes on the landing pages / how people are directed to different places and keep an eye on the stats to see the impact.

This is quite good too: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/06/29/how-to-build-a-high-traffic-blog-without-killing-yourself/

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I tried removing “float:left;” and the problems went away…