freshly pressed – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

Today was an insanely irritating day, and I’ve got a blog post nibbling at the back of my brain that I really don’t want to write on account of there will be a high chance of insanely irritating fallout, and I don’t want to babysit the internet today. I’m listening to the new Sleater-Kinney album and so far I don’t like it. So given all that and my general mood of ARRGH LUTHER SMASH, have a blogwanking post.

You may recall that my post “In which the kids are fine, shut up” went Freshly Pressed a week ago Thursday. I’d been notified by email on… the previous Sunday? Saturday? that it was going to happen, but they hadn’t told me which day. So lots of reloading on the FP page ensued.

Notable fact: 164 page views during the first hour it was on FP, which was the biggest single spike of the time period.

GRAPH!:

That big spike in the middle there is actually the second day the post was on FP. Conveniently for me, the week prior to going FP was pretty damn consistent, with an average of 392 page views and 233 unique visitors per day. The FP went live at about 4:00 PM on Thursday.

Over the next four days I had 2873 page views and 1662 unique visitors. The peak day was Friday, with 1085 page views and 610 unique visitors. Subtracting out the average of the previous seven days, I find that Freshly Pressed brought me a total of 1305 page views and 964 unique visitors over those four days. Is this perfect? Not at all, since I have generally been posting less over the last couple of weeks because I’ve been busy with the book– so my natural views would likely have dropped, meaning that FP brought me more than those numbers indicate. In fact, I’m comfortable calling 1305 and 964 the minimum in terms of how much traffic I got. Also important: the page is still getting hits; it’s dueling with the Snowpiercer post from day to day on what the highest-traffic post of the day is. It hasn’t been beaten by anything but the Snowpiercer post yet. Maybe once. Not more than that.

(Why four days? I view FP in grid view, which shows nine posts. After four days, my post got pushed off the page in that view. I figure that’s as good as any other demarcation point. Notice also the drop on day five below.)

GRAPH!:

As you can see, it’s still getting noticeable attention from day to day, so clearly there are people who like to scroll way back on that FP page to see what’s on there.

Other notable facts:

The post had 40 WP likes when the FP hit. It now has 810. It has been Liked on Facebook 42 times, been retweeted 41 times, and reblogged 42 times. There are currently 155 comments.

Since it went Freshly Pressed, I’ve gone from 4550 followers to 5276. It remains to be seen if I see a sustained traffic bump from all those new people once my posting gets back to normal and I stop blathering about the book all.the.damn.time. (I promise! I’ll be interesting again someday!)

I know you all needed that information quite badly. You may resume your normal lives now, if you can.

Just so I’m sure we all agree, paper.li is basically just a spamming service at this point, right? Does anyone use this site for anything actually useful? I’m not actually going to link to them; feel free to look them up yourself if you like, but the site has attracted my attention twice now, and I haven’t liked it either time. The first time was when they published a photo of my kid that I’d put on my blog and shared it under the “Adult” category for no clear reason. I locked the picture down, putting it behind a password, and removed links to it from Twitter.

This morning when I got up I had a notification that someone had retweeted a tweet that mentioned me– although oddly I hadn’t gotten a notification of the original tweet. That message led me to discover this:

I hope it’s obvious to anyone who reads me that I did not write that nonsense, nor have I heard of the book I’m supposedly “sharing.” The site has a “prevent mentions” function, although to use it you have to tweet at them, so I’m a little skeptical that asking to keep my name off of their site is going to do anything. But this is annoying as hell. I tweeted at the person who RTed the original tweet and haven’t heard anything back yet from them.

The other thing I’ve done is that I’ve started using the JustUnfollow app. I don’t like that it occasionally tweets for me but I delete them when it happens (hint, guys, I’m happy to just send you money if I like your service) and I think the functionality is worth the minor occasional annoyance. I had a conversation with a few folks yesterday about whether an auto-reply to people who follow you is worth the time it takes to set it up and ended up deciding it wasn’t, but the base Twitter app doesn’t seem to be telling me about all of my new follows anymore and I’d like to keep up a more or less 100% follow-back ratio for a while.

(For those wondering: this means that at the moment I’m following close to 1900 people. It means that the main Twitter feed is a firehose that no one could pay attention to. Basically the rule is that if someone interacts with me or if I notice them consistently they get added to a much smaller list that I pay attention to consistently. TweetDeck is wonderful for this purpose, even if there’s not a mobile app for it.)

The other good thing about using JustUnfollow is it makes it a lot easier to aggressively grow my follower list again, which I’ve been looking to do lately. I can pick people who have already followed and/or interacted with people I already know and scoop up a whole bunch of ’em at once. It’s not the most targeted way of acquiring followers, I know, but at least I’m grabbing people who I can reasonably suspect might be interested in what I’m doing over there. So if you’re seeing this because I followed you recently, I did that because you’re already following someone who I think I have stuff in common with. Hi!

Ultimately, I want to get to a point where if I send out a Tweet it’s got a good chance of being seen by a few hundred people, and then I’ll stop worrying about growing my follower list as much. Right now my average over my last 20 Tweets is 111.5 impressions, so I’ve got a way to go yet. I figure I’ll get there right about exactly when the service either shuts down or finds a way to make itself radically less useful (coughfacebookcough) so we’ve got that to look forward to.

(Follow me here, if you aren’t yet.)