Xatal

Highlights of May 2009:

• Overall, May was pretty consistent with traffic. Except for that initial spike, traffic held steady. Unfortunately, overall traffic has declined slightly since April, and April was a decline since March. Traffic isn’t bad at all, but I have been busy and haven’t been posting as much.
• The spike you see at the beginning of the chart was StumbleUpon traffic to how to search from the location bar in FireFox.
• 56% of traffic came from search engines, whereas only about 35% came from referring sites.
• The same posts as usual have been popular.
• Interestingly enough, four of my top five keywords relate to dorm necessities.

I’m sorry for the lack of posts this month — I’m hoping next month will bring much more time. I’m out of school in early June, so I’ll have way more free time!

In honor of summer vacation, this month’s poll will revolve aronud summer:

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As a quick way to better organize the major posts on this site, I’ve created the Resources page. There, I’ve sorted posts by category and by importance, so the posts that are most viewed should be easy to find at a quick glance.

For now, the posts you see are all from Xatal, but I plan to add relevant external links. If you have any suggestions, I’m open!

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Nate, from Debt-Free Scholar, posts monthly the best blog posts for the month, and he’s posted the results for March. My post about choosing a good cell phone company for college was one of the winners! Thank you!

His blog is definitely worth reading — he has tons of great posts for helping you to save money at college, as well as additional tips for being a college student.

Seeing as March is the month of college admission notices mainly, I figured the new poll should reflect that somewhat. Though most people probably haven’t applied, I think it might be interesting to see how many people have applied this year and are (maybe) waiting on a decision.

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Since seeing Nihar over at Nihar’s World do this, I’ve thought it might be fun to make monthly posts showing my stats as well. Although my stats aren’t nearly as impressive as his, perhaps you might be interested:

Page views by day for this last month, courtesy of Google Analytics

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So I decided to add both the CommentLuv and KeywordLuv plugin to Xatal. Here’s a brief explanation of what each does and how to use it:

KeywordLuv

When you enter in your name in the box as you type a comment, write your name in the following form:

<your name>@<keywords for your blog>. This will output links as “<your name> from <keywords for your blog>”, where the keywords become a hyperlink.

So, if I were to input “Paul@Xatal”, the output would be “Paul from Xatal wrote:”

The advantage here is the keywords will be directly tied to your URL, helping you out in the search engines. But at the same time, you can still use your name and have an identity besides just your website’s name.

CommentLuv

For CommentLuv, it helps if you’ve made an account at the CommentLuv website. That way, when it detects your most recent post, it will be most up-to-date. Otherwise, the post it lists may not be your most recent one.

You can alternatively choose other recent posts. Choose whichever post you want to highlight.

And that’s it! I hope you like both plugins and I hope that they can give back to your site. I’ll post a sample comment showing how both work.