Archive for blogrush tag
Goodbye BlogRush
I’ve now given up on BlogRush and removed the widget.
My dashboard shows that in the last 30 days I have directly earned 66,691 credits (made that number of impressions) and have been awarded 11,502 bonus credits and 3,473 referrer credits.
In return BlogRush have imprinted my last 12 blog posts (actually 11, one repeated, see below) and have sent a whole 15 visitors my way… that’s 1 visitor per 4,400 impressions which is mediocre by any measure. I get more hits than that in a month from leaving a couple of off-the-cuff comments on blog posts I’ve read elsewhere.
Apart from the mediocre conversions, some of the other problems include:
Uncontrolled spending of credits
BlogRush highly favours publicising the most recent articles regardless of hotness.
In my case it keeps putting out the More Silk Icons post despite only having 3 visitors for the 12,832 impressions whilst the older article on object initializers hasn’t got any new impressions despite getting 1 visitor for just 301 impressions.
If you have a glut of credits from a successful peak and you would rather hold on to your credits for the next post…well, tough, you can’t.
This forces you to change your posting schedule to meet your BlogRush credit balance.
Random capitalisation of post titles
It seems that BlogRush randomly changes the case of titles. Some examples include:
- Calculating CRC-64 in C# and .NET > Calculating Crc-64 In C# And .net
- AnkhSVN (Visual Studio Subversion integration) on Vista > AnkhSVN (visual Studio Subversion Integration) On Vista
- Droid font family courtesy of Google & Ascender > Droid Font Family Courtesy Of Google & Ascender
- Show Package Contents in Mac OS X > Show Package Contents In Mac Os X
- SQL Server replication blocking on clean-up job > Sql Server Replication Blocking On Cleanup Job
- Dissecting a C# Application – Inside SharpDevelop > Dissecting A C# Application – Inside Sharpdevelop
There seems to be no pattern behind it at all.
Duplication and random ignorance of content
My incredibly popular Droid Sans Mono great coding font post (42,000 hits in a week) doesn’t turn up on my BlogRush list at all.
Conversely my SQL Server replication article is treated as two different articles as I revised the title/URL.
Poor matching of content
Whilst they have introduced more specific categories my blog continued to show very unrelated posts – the whole simple categorisation system just doesn’t work especially when half the people haven’t revised from the more generic categories not have had any reminder or deadline to do so.
Something that worked off a posts tags would have been much better.
Filling the space
For now Google’s AdSense is taking the place rendering text adverts although for the default landing page it has no content for me. This apparently occurs if you are:
- Not indexed (definitely am, check out Google’s searches)
- Serving certain unspecified bad-words (every individual article gets adverts so not that)
- Nothing in your geographical region (see above)
I can only imagine the combination of words across certain posts when presented on the same page is hitting some magical figure. I hope talking about AdSense doesn’t mess it up further!
I doubt this widget will last very long – last time it was on for 3 months and earned me a whopping $9.
Ideally the site would move somewhere that can take being hit by the front page of DaringFireball again – that’s twice the sudden influx of users has knocked the site off. The first time my home DSL couldn’t take the strain, this time UHHosting kindly switched my site offoff for a couple of hours because I was “using too much CPU” – I have only WordPress, MySQL and a bunch of plug-in’s installed of which I have temporarily sacrificed FireStats, StatsPress and Gravatar2 at the sysop alter in order to keep my home online.
I have been toying with either renting a dedicated 1U server or co-locating one I buy. The latter was more tempting until I discovered that you only get 0.5 amps which is 120W for a whole server which means mirrored disks and a Core 2 chip are out…
[)amien
Disappointing start to BlogRush
BlogRush has now launched phase 2 and it looks much better!
Like many bloggers I recently added the BlogRush widget to my site. The idea is simple:
- Register at BlogRush (it’s free)
- Add the JavaScript widget code (Get Code)
This will then:
- Present visitors to your site with 5 links to other blogs per impression
- For every widget impression yours will be shown somewhere too
The problems started with the dashboard which was basic, then slowed to a crawl then finally gave minimal information and an assurance that a great replacement was on the way. That replacement was scheduled for ‘this week’ last Monday and not a word except:
This is a MAJOR update. The service is not even 30 days old, yet we’re about to release more changes than most Internet start-ups do in their first 6 months.
Or put more succinctly the service is almost 30 days old and you still can’t see if we’re doing what we promised.Google Analytics can track referrers and all go via widget.blogrush.com (you can’t tell which Blog sent a browser your way) and I’ve had 2 referrals out of 3,50 in the last 30 days putting it 112th in my referrer league. Analytics also tells me my site has had 11,800 impressions in that time although curiously StatPress informs me it is about 3-5 times this.Either way it’s rather disappointing on both fronts. It goes to prove that a great idea needs a great implementation which reminds me of Rojo’s failed roll outs which led me to switch to the then-inferior Google Reader which is now much more successful.I wonder if many people are blocking analytics.google.com. Does anyone else have such a large disparity between log/hits and Analytics? I thought it might be feed readers or crawlers but StatPress lists those individually.[)amien