Attention RSS Subscribers: RSS Feed Change

I was trapped. The room was suffocatingly small and a big burly man was sitting between me and the door. Escape was not an option, so I sat in the corner and occupied my mind. That is about as glamorous as I can make it sound for I am actually talking about a very boring meeting I had to attend in a past life. I hate useless meetings and my old job as full of them. Meetings to discuss if we should have a morning tea. Meetings because people wanted to feel important. Meetings to discuss the prospect of future meetings. Argh! But I digress.

The point is that it was in that meeting that I realised just how much I love numbers. As I sat there, bored out of my brain, I developed a series of tests that I could perform in my head to determine if large numbers (i.e. more than 6 digits) were prime numbers or not. My method took less than 15 minutes to define and it was in that moment that I realised just how much I love anything to do with math - numbers, stats, averages, trends, patterns etc.

Which brings me to the whole point of this message - I have updated my RSS feed and I would appreciate if my current RSS subscribers could re-subscribe using the new feed.

RSS Changes?

The reason I am changing is simply to satisfy my data needs. My original feed was the out-of-the-box RSS feed that comes with Wordpress. It is handy but comes with a flaw. I cannot see the numbers subscribers! What good is it having a subscription mechanism where I cannot even keep track of the number of people subscribing?

So I have changed the RSS subscription links to use Feedburner which is what I was already using to manage my email subscriptions. It allows me to track numbers of subscribers easily and with minimal changes to my site.

What Changes Will You Notice

None. You can still subscribe and receive updates in exactly the same way, but if you do so through this link I will now be able to keep track of the number of my subscribers. You will still get my content delivered to you as you always have.

And if you don't switch? Nothing will change either. The original feed will still work. There is no encouragement for you to actually re-subscribe using my new feed other than the warm fuzzy feeling you will get from doing something nice for me. :)

So, for those original RSS subscribers I ask you to please consider re-subscribing. For those who have not subscribed yet, it is never too late! You can subscribe to receive my content updates either through email or RSS. All you have to do is subscribe once and everything will be sent to you fresh of the press.

Please note: for email subscribers no action is required. This is for RSS subscribers only.

My First 3 Months

Time certainly has flown by - it has been 3 months since I started this website and I feel like I have developed significantly over that period. 3 months of dedicated personal development and physical experiments will do that I guess. The 3 month milestone is quite an occasion for me. I have dabbled in personal websites and blogs before but none of them managed to keep my interest like this. I feel like I have only just begun, that I have so much more to offer, and that I could keep writing for years. With that in mind I thought I would assess how much progress I have made in 3 months.

The Site Stats

These are the cold hard stats. Keep in mind I am missing about 6-7 days worth of data when I mistakenly removed the analytics code when I was upgrading my site.

  • Visits: 651
  • Unique Visitors: 463
  • Page Views: 1661
  • Email Subscribers: 1
  • Traffic Split: Search Engines = 46% , Referring Sites, =33% , Direct = 21%
  • Most Viewed Article: Sometimes We all need some Alone Time

Overall most things are trending upwards. Over the past two weeks I have averaged over 20 visits per day and I have set two personal bests for single-day stats: most visits (30) and most page views (98).

My (lack of) Marketing

I have pretty much broken every rule for how to create a high-traffic website. I do not write small articles (most are over 500 words and some are up around the 1500 word mark) and I do not get myself out there with hardcore "marketing" that seems to be the norm. My current self promotion tally is:

  • Commented on 4 blogs.
  • Posted 10 links to this site on Twitter
  • Submitted 6 articles to blog carnivals.

I think this is one area I should put more effort in to but right now I prefer to spend my time writing high quality content so that this site can be as useful as possible when I start attracting higher visitor numbers.

My Writing Style

Looking back I can see some of my earlier articles were very rough and unpolished. I have always enjoyed writing, both fiction and non-fiction, but my skill has definitely improved since beginning this site 3 months ago.

Now my articles flow better, my conclusions are stronger, and I invoke more thought and feeling with my writing. At least that's how I see it.

My Biggest Mistake

I have made plenty of mistakes over the past 3 months but the biggest would be blurring the lines between this website and my personal life. I got so involved with the mindset of personal development that I started acting like a "life coach" all the time.

The realisation for this came from my beautiful wife-to-be, Sophie, when she said said "I feel like I only get to talk to the writer version of Zac Sky now. Where is my fiance Zac Sky?" That was a wake-up call for me.

I am the kind of person who gets passionately involved in projects, so much so that I can loose perspective on others things that are important but I did not want to do that to my relationship. My relationship with Sophie is the most important thing in my life and I am lucky that she was understanding of my over-zealous dedication to this project. I just hope my passion is one of the reasons she is marrying me...

The Next 3 Months

So what is in store for the next 3 months? More of the same but better! More articles, more personal and physical development, more stories, more experiments. More of everything. More, more more!

Don't forget you can subscribe to my email newsletter. That way you won't miss a thing.

Stay tuned.