Trivial Matters

I’m taking today to update Trivial Matters itself. I created a page for TNT, which I will be adding to once I get the fundraising page setup tomorrow (this weekend at the latest). I also updated the FAQ page with the last post, and updated the About the Author page to reflect some recent changes.

I’m still waiting for the new site layout to take effect here. I don’t know what Today.com’s schedule is for the final switch, but they have a beta theme up that people can switch to while they test things out. I decided to just wait for them to finish the beta and switch at the end. That way I only have to fix things once (hopefully) instead of every day.

I also added the RSS feed for Trivial Matters to my Facebook page. Right now, it shows the full post on Facebook, which doesn’t help my stats very much. The admins here are going to change that soon, and only the first few lines of text will show up on FB. In the meantime, it would be appreciated that if you are reading this on FB, please click over to the site so that I can keep track of how many views I’m getting.

It’s not just a money thing either. I’m constantly checking my stats after each post to see how many hits a post gets over time. Some of my posts get a mention on my Twitter feed, and I can see a spike in traffic from TinyURL or something related. If people start clicking over from FB, I can monitor similar effects when the RSS feed updates over there (it’s not a quick as I’d like).

The Meetup Email Lists post was a huge hit. It has had 79 hits so far (73 in the first 24 hours), not including hits from the main page (as many as 14 additional hits). The avergae daily visit count doubled overnight, bringing Trivial Matters into the top 350 on Today.com. My hope is that the traffic generated by my fundraising will help bring those numbers up even more. I’ve already pledged all of the money earned by this blog to TNT/LLS, and a sudden spike in visits could result in a payment bonus to that end.

So, the TNT stuff should be up this weekend. I’m still hammering out the details for the raffles. My plan as of now is to offer a different item each month (February - June) and add a bonus item if we surpass a set goal amount. For example, the first item could be an iPod with a iTunes gift card thrown in for going above a certain amount.