Sandstorming.com: The Year at a Glance
2005 was a huge year for Sandstorming. What started out as a one-man blog has grown into a three-man website, with Julz and myself joining Johnsee on the writing force at various stages during the year.
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Not being one to brag or anything, but here is a list of things we achieved in the past year:
- We actually started getting comments on our articles (averaging at just over 5 per article now).
- We changed blogging programs (from Blogger to WordPress). This allowed us to do a lot of cool stuff we couldn’t do before, such as: category tags on articles, user accounts, cleaner and faster site design, more creative themes, and release our dependence on any 3rd party website (eg. Blogger.com).
- We received our first Google AdSense cheque (with a second one winging its way shortly).
- 4 of our articles made it to the front page of Digg, and 1 of them made it into the Diggnation podcast.
- Our Google PageRank (a ranking out of 10 that helps determine where your site will show up in search results) went from practically nothing to a 4 (for comparison, digg.com is a 6, and news.com.au is an 8).
- We changed servers (from Windows to Linux), and we changed our site statistics analyser (from AWStats to Google Analytics).
- Sandstorming.com now averages just over 450 visits per day.
We also branched out a bit and tried some other projects. Our Jack Thompson Random Fact Generator has been very successful, with over 100 submissions and 31,700 votes cast. Unfortunately, some other projects didn’t take off, such as Globecast. (Although if you would still like to submit an application, the offer is still there. We need more applications.)
Overall, this year has been great, and things can only get better for us as we put more projects into the pipeline with the money we earn. Thanks for everyone’s support, and we’ll see you all through 2006 and beyond!
Also, stay tuned for the Top 10 Sandstorming Articles of 2005.
Dallas said,
February 1, 2006 at 11:54 pm
the storm is brewing