ED » Blog Admin

Site Updates

Dave Guerin — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 22:44:02 +0000

We’ve made a few site updates. At the upper right you can now subscribe to RSS feeds, Facebook, Twitter and posts by email. The comments feed wasn’t working properly but now it is, so feel free to sign up – the comments on this blog are constructive and useful, so subscribe to them if you use RSS. Otherwise you can always track recent comments in the fourth box of the sidebar.

We’ve ditched the Twitter feed and the Facebook badge to simplify the sidebar.

I’d like to know if people find the newsfeed on the righthand sidebar useful. I’m tempted to ditch it unless I get a strong response as it takes a few minutes to update every day and that all adds up over time. The news posts each morning tend to cover most of the items anyway, so the original purpose of the feed is diminished.

Over the next few days we are also likely to update the categories and tags to reflect the same system used for ED Insider. A few generic tags will become categories, making it easier to track some items.

Month 2 Review for ED Blog

Dave Guerin — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 01:23:33 +0000

Thanks to all of you readers for making ED Blog so successful. At the end of our second month, here’s a quick review of progress.

We have averaged about 100 (122) unique weekday visitors (most people view at work only) plus another 66 (42) RSS feeds and 10 people getting posts emailed to them (see option below search bar at top right).
44 (42) Facebook fans and 31 (20) Twitter followers.
52 (43) posts and 61 (75) comments.
Added one op-ed from Wayne Smith, Tranzqual CEO.
Increased the page load speed.

The overall popularity of the site surged in late February and early March as some posts gained wider coverage and non-education visitors. We haven’t had any really popular posts in March and I’ll put that down to my main focus on ED Insider, which I’ve been trialling during that period. That service will launch in early April and once that’s under control I’ll write a few larger posts here. I’m happy, though, that our core audience has increased, with numbers on the various subscriptions available rising from 104 to 151. If you know of someone who’d appreciate ED Blog, please send them a quick email.

Want to Keep Up to Date with ED Blog?

Dave Guerin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 04:36:26 +0000

We want to make it as easy as possible for you to keep up to date with ED Blog, so we have added a new email option to our existing RSS, Facebook and Twitter feeds.

NEW You can be emailed full text of any new post to ED Blog by clicking here and signing up. This is a great option for people who think RSS is a weird geek thing and that social media are corrupting society.
About 50 people have signed up to the ED RSS feed. I started using RSS feeds in the middle of last year and they are a great way to keep your news organised. If you want to learn more, here’s a one page guide to RSS and here’s a link to Google Reader, which is a good application to use (there are many others).
About 40 people are ED Facebook fans and get an update in their newsfeed whenever a new post goes up (and occasional extra links and comments). If you Facebook through your day at work, this gives you good cover – “oh, yes I use Facebook to follow ED Blog, not to play Scrabble”.
About 30 people follow ED on Twitter and get a tweet whenever a new post goes up (and occasional extra links and comments). Twitter is a great way to keep up to date with new info, as well as to follow revolutions or earthquakes.

How Should ED Blog Develop? What’s Your View?

Dave Guerin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:16:13 +0000

ED Blog was launched on February 1, so after four weeks of blogging I’d love your feedback on how to make it better. (News post will be late today, as a result)

Month 1 Results

This week averaging 122 unique weekday visitors (most people view at work only) plus another 42 RSS feeds.
42 Facebook fans and 20 Twitter followers.
43 posts and 75 comments.
Added two guest bloggers – Darel Hall and David Choat.
Top post was Darel’s one on national standards (by a country mile) and second was mine on ACE - see featured post sidebar for links.
Added more features, like the ability to be notified of comments that follow yours on a post, a new featured posts sidebar, the newsfeed, Twitter feed, Facebook badge, Sitemeter (publicly available site stats) and a simpler theme for smartphone users. A side result of having an amateur like me add things is that page load speed has declined - the experts are working on that now.
The site is in the top 100-150 blogs in NZ, with about 1/70th of No 1 Kiwiblog’s traffic, and has good potential to get in the top 40-50 NZ blogs. In perspective, ranking service Alexa has ED Blog as 3,369,972 amongst all websites in the world

Where Should ED Blog Go Next?

There’s been a good start, but the site is only starting to reach its potential. If ED Blog is to serve as a place for the tertiary education community to read about and discuss the issues of the day, then it probably needs to attract 300-500 visitors/day, have more voices on the site and provide a better place for people to discuss issues. But how? What content is needed? How do we get the word out?

I’d really welcome your views on how ED Blog can be improved. I know that many readers feel constrained by work obligations from commenting, so feel free to use a pseudonym or drop me a line via the contact us link at the top of the page.