Hang on, that should be Vim vs Emacs right? No.
I have been blogging for the Perl community I have been writing Perl blog posts for around 6 weeks now. Prior to that, I wrote mostly Emacs related blog posts for around 18 months. My vast experience puts me in a great position to compare them.
Emacs blogging
Back when I wrote about Emacs I averaged a couple of posts a week and around 200 visitors a day. Better still, I got several comments for each post, pointing out things I had got wrong, things I could improve or alternative techniques.
200 visitors isn’t many, but it was plenty for me. I was paid for my blogging effort in comment currency.
I suspect the reason I got the comments was that I never had much competition in the emacs hints and tips space. The main ones were:
Of these, only emacs-fu kept grinding out the handy tips, week in week out.
Interestingly, emacsblog reports 3379 readers by feedburner which indicates a decent level of interest in emacs hints and tips.
There was only one real place to pick up emacs news – Planet Emacsen. My posts would hang around for a week or more and I would pick up pretty much all the readers who were interested as well as probably quite a few who weren’t.
Perl blogging
With my Perl blog posts, I struggle to keep 100 visitors a day and I need to post every other day to get that many. Why the difference? I suspect it is a combination of things.
- If you want to read about perl, you can read the gurus in the community – the Miyagawas, the Tim Bunces, the Curtis Jewels. And there’s hundreds more perl gurus blogging. Okay, maybe 10 more.
- There are multiple perl news sources. I listed a few here.
- If you want to improve your perl-fu there is IRC or Perl Monger groups. Emacs in contrast had fewer options.
- There are more perl bloggers, so your post disappears off the Ironman aggregation pretty quickly.
- Six weeks may not be enough to build up a following.
- There are more areas of perl to be interested in. Maybe no-one else wants to know about writing AnyEvent TCP servers.
It could also be that the quality of my writing is poor. But one of you guys would tell me, right?
Why does this matter?
Blogging has to have some value to me, otherwise I might as well watch TV. I do get something out of it even if there are no readers – I’m able to find my fantastic code snippets as long as I have access to the internet. But the lack of input means this doesn’t really offset the effort to write a story around each post. And these days with github et al there are easier and better ways to get your code out there.
Okay, no worries, you’re thinking, if Jared stops blogging about perl (not that I’m thinking of doing so) no-one loses anything. But maybe my experiences is why the level of blogging activity is low compared to the relative size of the community.
And maybe it just doesn’t matter.
“I have been writing Perl blog posts for around 6 weeks now. Prior to that, I wrote mostly Emacs related blog posts for around 18 months.”
Man…
You started writing about Perl just 6 weeks ago, and expected the same number of readers/comments that you had after 18 months of blogging about emacs?
Come on!
Wait 6 months, then you’ll have some base for comparison.
Hey,
Try to stick with it if you can. I know sometimes the Perl community can be a bit remote. Perl programmers tend to be idiosyncratic experts, often wondering if they really have anything useful to learn from anyone else🙂
However I do think blogging can be very useful, particularly if you use it as a sort of offline, asynchronous continuation of IRC chatter. I find using it for that purpose tends to get me the most feedback
I think you observation is very important. One of the (or the main?) objectives of the Ironman Challenge was to raise the conversation in the Perl community and to make it more accessible for people who are not yet in the the echo chamber.
The fact that you get only 100 visitors means we – as in the Perl community – have not yet managed to break that barrier. (I think I get about 2-300 visitors but maybe because my blog is aggregated in more perl related places and that number is still very low.)
I think having lots of comments on each other blogs and linking to each others blogs helps a bit in this but IMHO we are still missing something in order to attract more readers.
This was an insightful post for me. I’ve been reading blogs.perl.org and ironman daily for the past month or so but only commented a few times.
Maybe I’ll try to comment a bit more, since this seems to motivate authors to write more great posts.
Hi folks,
These are all great comments. And now I’m feeling a bit hypocritical because I don’t comment much on other blogs either. I’ll have to do more of that.
Apologies for a couple of comments getting stuck in the WordPress spam filter. One of those was due to the links (I think it defaults to filtering comments with more than two links from a new commenter). I’ve no idea why it picked up the other one.
@foo – good point on the relative timespans. I was aiming for tongue in cheek with emphasis on “My vast experience…” Having said that, I was looking over the monthly visitor history. When I took over the basically moribund blog it was averaging fewer than 500 visitors per month. The month I took it over, I got 2136 visitors. The one after was 3375 and the third was 5675. So it didn’t take long to build up a following.
@john – thanks for the comment – I appreciate the sentiment🙂 It sounds like your are saying it is good to get involved in IRC (which is something I haven’t done yet) and then follow-up in blog posts. I’m not sure I’m quite sociable enough for that, but it is worth bearing in mind.
Oh, and I had meant to say that I wasn’t thinking of quitting blogging just yet. Maybe I deleted it from the final draft by mistake.
gabor and Nilson, now you guys took the time to come and comment on my blog, I’ve just thought maybe I was being a bit hypocritical. I complain about no-one commenting, but I haven’t left any comments on any perl blogs yet. It’s clearly time to sign up to Disqus.
Sometimes you can get “paid” in other ways besides comments. Have you picked up rss readership or Twitter followers or do you see an increase in the number of pages your visitors are viewing per visit?
Hi Chris,
I do have a few subscribers to my rss feed, but I think I picked most of them up when I was blogging about emacs. It doesn’t seem to have increased since I started blogging about perl so it could be that my subscribers are not interested in my new stuff.
It is nice to see a good number of visitors but I would prefer to see 20 visitors, half of whom commented than 200 visitors and have no comments. Comments give value to me as they correct me when I’m thinking incorrectly; give me new things to think about or are a much stronger “right on, we like what you’re writing” then reading a post. It could be that IRC would be a better medium [for me] than blogging to get that.
Jared
Some points to consider:
Your entire article is in your feed, people don’t need to visit your site to read your articles, I’ve only visited because I want to comment, I’ve *read* your articles before, but you’ve no way of tracking that fact.
Yes you can sort-of track RSS subscriptions, but I don’t subscribe to your feed, I subscribe to the ironman feed and read them from there.
So your readership may be larger than you think.
Secondly, ~200 is about the same for when I publish a perl article, I think there’s a fairly die-hard core of people following the ironman feed that, like myself, read pretty much everything posted.
There’s an equally die-hard core of search engine robots that visit every time I publish an article too, so I hope the real people are the majority.😛
Thirdly, lack of comments doesn’t mean lack of interest. Perl programmers, by and large, are a taciturn pragmatic self-reliant bunch: if someone says something sensible that they agree with, they tend to just nod their head and get on with whatever they were doing, they’re not the sort of people who feel they need to post “me too!!!!”
We’re also spoiled by having a remarkably high standard of literacy and eloquence in the documentation, modules and entire culture surrounding perl as a language: to earn a comment of “nice post, well written, you’ve made that point better than anyone has before in our community” you really do have a higher standard to aim for compared to a lot of other communities.
Or you need to cover a topic that hasn’t been covered before. Again though, perl’s strength is the weakness: 20,000 modules on CPAN, lots of the things that people try to do in other languages and communities has long since been covered by perl.
None of which is a reflection on your writing or your blog, it’s an observation of the perl community compared to others.
Finally, emacs is a narrower subject than perl, there’s going to be a greater overlap of interest in the community.
You probably posted about how to achieve stuff with emacs, but I doubt you posted much about the documents you were actually writing and their contents.
With perl, people tend to post about what they’re *doing* with perl, rather than perl itself.
Well, that’s not really true, but it’s more true than if you tried saying the same about emacs. (IMO)
Anyway, ignore the silence, often it just means people agree with you.
That’s what I tell myself anyway.
Hi,
just wanted to say that I found your blog few weeks ago via Miyagawa’s bookmark on delicious. I like your articles, you hit the area I started exploring just recently — Plack on Windows.
One reason also might be that you write about quite advanced topics, so maybe narrower audience is not such surprise.
— regards, Roman
Hi Sam,
I must have tried to subscribe to the wrong ironman feed then. I only get truncated articles.
But wordpress does estimate the number of aggregated visitors you get. For example, for this post, I have 189 aggregated visitors onsite vs. 101 who read it onsite and today the numbers are 60 and 59 respectively for a total of 409. I was trying to think how they measure the aggregated visitors, originally attributing it to an image load or something similar, but as there aren’t any, I guess it must be loading something else. Google reader, for example, seems to know how many comments there are. Does each rss view trigger an HTTP get from my site? If I had the logs, I’d check them.
I also hope the real visitors outnumber the bots. I’ve outsourced my visitor tracking to wordpress.com but I guess it should be fairly easy to distinguish between them, based on IP address for example.
I’m glad to hear it isn’t my writing. When I read it back to myself it sounds a bit dry and awkward but maybe that is similar to the effect of hearing your own recorded voice.
Interesting point about writing about emacs vs doing stuff within emacs. Do you think there would be more interest in writing about developing perl itself? Not that I would be capable of doing that of course, but I am curious.
Hi Roman,
I have a few ideas for posts on more beginner areas. I’ll try to remember to check the stats to see if they are more or less popular than the more advanced ones.
Thanks
The ironman front page truncates articles, but the ironman feed itself doesn’t truncate them unless the original author’s feed truncates it.
As for tracking feed visitors, the only way they could be sure is by placing a “webbug” or other trick into the feed. Looking at what makes it through to the ironman feed, it doesn’t appear that that is the case.
So they must be using goat entrails on the keyboard to give you those numbers.
(Probably it’s an extrapolation from some other figure they do have, I’d have my doubts about the accuracy of that sort of estimate on a high-volume mainstream topic, let alone a low-volume atypical topic.)
In answer to your question about a HTTP fetch, no, reading the article doesn’t cause a fetch from your site, unless they click through to actually view the article on your site.
I’ve no idea whether wordpress’ stats strip out bot visits, my webhosting ones don’t. (There’s too many and they change too often, not really worth the bother.)
As for writing about development of perl the language, rather than developing IN perl, I’ve no idea whether it’d be more popular. I’d probably read it, but then I fairly obviously already do read it.😉
Mostly I was just illustrating the slightly different focus, not saying you should do anything about it.
Write whatever you want to write and feel enthused about, one of the strengths of perl is that it’s useful in so many situations, and part of the point of the Ironman Challenge is people being able to see the broad range of ways that people are using it.
You, and others, could write 30 different articles about tasks that I’m never likely to do or be interested in doing… but, even so, I doubt I’m the only person who’d say that I’m interested in the fact that you *are* doing them, with perl, and how you’re doing them.
🙂
What number would they extrapolate from? And it doesn’t seem to be a consistent multiplier – even my own post has a different factor between different days.
I can’t imagine how they are doing it, but surely it must be slightly more scientific than that. I’m tempted to install a wordpress and an ironman on my box and see if anything gets reflected in the logs when I view through the feed. If I had plenty of spare time, I would do exactly that.
Anyway, great comment. Thanks Sam.
Hi Jared,
I’ve been following your emacs posts for, I don’t know, a year now, and I did not know you had a Perl blog. I’ve found your emacs tips useful, and though I’m a Perl expert, I’m always open to tips.
But… d’you think you could have provided a LINK to your Perl blog?? C’mon! 🙂
Thanks.
“What number would they extrapolate from?”
No idea, but maybe google lets you purchase access to anonymised traffic figures for people using their online reader.
That could be a figure to extrapolate from.
There’s a lot of different online news readers, and I’d be very surprised if none of them provided this information.
Traffic figures for websites are a black art at the best of times, with large amounts of behind-the-scenes fudgery, because there’s certain things you simply CANNOT know from logs, but you can sort of make a 90%-right guess.
RSS is one-step removed beyond that, the fetch of the feed shows up in your logs, but that’s it. And the fetch happens repeatedly every 15 minutes/60 minutes/24 hours, however they have their feedreader configured, for as long as their feedreader is open. If they’re using an online feedreader, then that’s 24/7.
If your feed is then aggregated by something like Ironman, then you won’t even see how many people are subscribed, because Ironman will show as a single subscription to your feed, and you’ll never see all the people subscribed to it in your logs – they’ll be showing on the Ironman webserver logs.
So that makes you yet another step removed from the data you need.
I’m no expert on google’s feed reader or the other online offerings, I’ve never used them myself, but I do have several feeds on a devel box that only I subscribe to, and I can say that there’s nothing in the logs but the fetch of the feed itself when using NetNewsWire. (A pretty popular and particularly well-written mac client.)
On my perl blog, I couldn’t say, I mostly hide the main article behind a “read more” so that people visit and show up in the traffic logs. It’s irritating, and I dislike it when other people do it to me, but it does mean that I have some confidence that the people who bothered to click through probably were interested in the article lead-in at the least.
Funny, I keep toying with the idea of starting an “emacs users group” in the San Francisco Area… maybe I should just go ahead with it and see what happens… our perl-mongers group has been attracting 20-30 people, it would be funny if there was even more interest in emacs talks, just because no one does them (emacs culture preceded the era of “users groups”).
On a different front, I’ve tried creating a discussion group for subjects related to both emacs and perl, but with only limited success:
http://groups.google.com/group/emacs-perl-intersection/
Probably I need to be more obnoxious about promoting it (like, by posting messages like this).
@Sue – Welcome back! I don’t really have a perl blog. I blog about emacs and perl, but I don’t have so much to say about emacs at the moment. So maybe I do have a perl blog.
Where would I have put a link to my blog from – I’m always open to suggestions🙂
@Sam – I was thinking overnight that they might be able to get traffic information from google reader. But I had a huge number of aggregated readers when I was on the emacs planet. Measuring that would be tricky eh? Unless they had another blog on the same planet that did have images that were HTTP got. Maybe your goat entrails suggestion is the right one.
A while ago, I read an article where someone was trying to determine the number of readers to his blog from the apache logs. It was an interesting read and he came up with a range with a level of certainty. I’ll have to try and dig it out.
A [read more] link is probably the more reliable technique, but I’m not so keen on it myself so I stick to the full feed.
@joseph – I’d hope that a local emacs group in a sufficiently large area would be fairly popular due to (currently) zero supply and a little demand. I’d attend one if it was started in my area.
I had a look at the emacs/perl group you mentioned. I don’t know when I’d visit it though. The only cross-over that I would be specifically searching for would be cperl-mode. I’m happy for you to put the link here though – it is relevant to the discussion.
Ah! Sorry, I thought you meant you had another blog where you wrote about Perl🙂
Maybe one day Sue, maybe one day🙂