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Lately I've been looking around the blogosphere for a few new knitting blogs to add to my reader feed. I ended up finding another local knitter who I don't think I've ever met.
While poking around Orange Swan's blog I looked at her popular post list and I read this one. It's from Dec 29 2012. I then repeated her search to see what had changed and the answer is a year later they are the same. While I'm a little surprised, it confirms something I've suspected for some time. Numbered "Top" lists take on a life of their own that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. My top ten popular posts list is also relatively static. I see movement on the bottom two or three posts occasionally but the rest of the list has been static since I added that feature to the page. I'm starting to question if keeping the list there has any real value for my readers. Since I added the topic index I've seen a lot of traffic going directly to the index. Some times I get more direct entries on the index page than on my home page. A few of my friends have told me they really like the index page and are using it frequently.
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I'm planning to follow up next year to see if the top 5 patterns change. You can check yourself with this search. It's by projects. If you change the search parameter to queues, favourites or popular you will get different results.
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Please let me know what you think about the popular post list in the comments, should I keep or remove it?
What's most interesting is that 4 of the 5 are free patterns - from Knitty. This isn't surprising, just confirms my suspicions. I'll have to go see how many of the 40 or 50 are free patterns.
ReplyDeleteI had that thought too! It's pretty scary when I consider the amount of time I spend on writing patterns.
DeleteExactly! Glad it's not just me that had that thought.
ReplyDeleteI thought immediately that they were free Knitty patterns. (Not the Baby Surprise.) The pattern I had published in knitty is the most popular one in my Ravelry account. Two things - it's free, and Knitty has a huge audience.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing is that these patterns are *years* old, so they have a big lead time. It'll be hard for there to be a shift anytime soon.
ReplyDelete