How I Made My Website More Sticky

An article by Jason    No Comments

Being a web developer, I had previously run A Miracle A Day on custom software that I wrote.  It had most of the commonly used features, and provided for my needs, as well as giving me a chance to learn how to write blog software.  It was written in Ruby, running on a Postgresql database.  It had come to my attention when viewing my website stats, however, that my site was not "sticky" enough… that is, much too large a number of people viewed the site and then moved on to the next.

I asked some others with more experience (and traffic!) than I what I needed to do.  They suggested several changes to make, most of which had to do with the design (layout).  Upon reviewing how much time it would take me to make those changes, versus how long it would take me to implement standardized blogging software, and the benefits of each, I decided it was time to switch over to the more standard software.  I am now running Typo, an open source, Ruby based application.  This actually has the best of both worlds… it's standardized software, but open source and written in a language with which I am already familiar, thus allowing me to modify it (which I have done) to fit my tastes better.

Now, on to why this affects you, the reader.  Any comments written previous to the switchover date (July 24th, 2007) did not transfer over.  This is unfortunate, as I consider getting feedback one of the best parts of blogging, if not actually THE best part.  I like to write things that help others, but I appreciate doing so even more when I actually know that it DID help someone.  I even appreciate it when someone disagrees with me, because it stimulates my mind to think more about it, and at greater depth.  So comments are extremely important to me, and it bothers me that I'm losing them, but I don't know of any reasonable way to transfer them… the system I used for the comments is too incompatible with the new system.

On the positive side, however, all of the articles transferred, although the dates are the date of the transfer, not the original date of posting.  The only exceptions were a few very short (as in a couple sentences) announcement posts I wrote, and didn't deem worthy of transfer.  So those few articles were deliberately discarded, not lost.

So, now a request for anyone reading this who has previously viewed this site.  Please leave comments in response to this post about what you think of the new design as compared to the old one, or if there's any further changes I could make that would enhance the usefulness of the site as it now exists.

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