On Sundays I’m looking back on the past week. How did I perform towards my goals? How did my blog do? And how am I keeping up with my Getting Things Done system and Zen to Done habits?
Blog performance
This has been a strange week with a spammer abusing my domain for his cyber-criminal activities. That was quite a shock I can tell you. The first thing that comes to mind is that your server or pc is compromised (well that’s what I thought). Thankfully that was not the case, as the spammer only used my domain as a fictitious domain. All returned mail was delivered in my inbox though (all 8000 of them). But they could just as easily have used any other random domain, even yours!
I also found out why there was no traffic coming from StumbleUpon to my article on comparing the different paper planner systems. The post was submitted originally by “someone” to the category “ecommerce”. Ecommerce is meant for (taken from page with misclassification instructions):
Ecommerce is a topic for pages specifically about Ecommerce, such as a company that sells online credit card processing software. It is not for sites that makes money over the web. For example, a rare book seller belongs in Books, not Ecommerce.
So it was submitted in entirely the wrong category. I sent in a misclassification report, but to no avail yet. Too bad, it’s an article that probably would’ve done pretty well on StumbleUpon.
I did some behind the scenes work on the blog. I changed the About page last week, and added Twitter to the contact options (that’s not really behind the scenes though). And I changed some plugins. You’ll notice that the number of visits per post is no longer showing. That plugin did not work anymore with the current version of WordPress, and the creator seems to have vanished from cyberspace. Anyway, I put up a hand-picked Popular post menu to the right to replace it.
Subscriber numbers have risen quite fast this week. Last week I broke the 600 barrier, and this week the average is 629! Rest of the stats are up slightly, making it a good week.
| Statistics week 03-2008 | ||
|---|---|---|
| Average RSS subscribers: | 629 | +51 |
| Average daily visitors: | 184 | +14 |
| Technorati Authority: | 266 | +3 |
Progress towards goals
And yet another week of progress on the renovation project. Not a lot of heavy work this week, but painting and cementing takes a lot of time. The walls still need to be plastered and the floor leveled (and a gazillion other little projects), and a lot of painting after that too. But I’m loving the progress and my wife is very satisfied with it as well 
Not so much news about the other goals. Just a solid week of progress.
| Material State | ||
|---|---|---|
| 2nd floor renovated by 02-2007 |
Third week in a row, strong performance on this goal. Still a lot of work to be done, but it’s progressing quite nicely. |
|
| Active State | ||
| 2500 subscribers by 12-2007 | Overdue! 25% done. | |
| Social State | ||
| Be in contact with friends and family 4 days a week | Yes. 4 out of 10 weeks | |
| Emotional State | ||
| No goal at this time | ||
| Physical State | ||
| Run half a marathon in 10-2008 | No progress (again). | |
Zen to Done / Getting Things Done – weekly review
Nothing new for this section. So I won’t waste your time with random thoughts 
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
the numbers aren’t that bad.
Hi Lodewijk,
The subscribers numbers are growing fast, aren’t they? Is there any single reason you think may have caused that? Be very interested to hear you thoughts, as 666 is starting to get VERY respectable!
regards
Mark
I totally agree with Mark, I am sure the coming days will bring more with them.
I don’t think there’s a single reason for it. I did notice however that my email subscribers increased significantly when I applied the changes to my theme, making it easier to sign-up by email. But for the remainder I haven’t got a real explanation.
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