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Secret figures of a Debian/Ubuntu blogger: what you liked most on raphaelhertzog.com

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Chart goes up on screenI launched raphaelhertzog.com this summer (taking over the English content of my former multi-lingual blog), when I decided that I would be more serious about blogging on Debian/Ubuntu related topics. On September, I decided to write 2 articles per week and up to now I managed to keep the schedule.

Two of my articles were published by Linux Weekly News, those are much more researched than the average blog article (they are tagged with [LWN] in the list below).

The most popular articles

Most people read my blog through the RSS feed which happens to be syndicated on Planet Debian and Planet Ubuntu. According to the feedburner’s statistics, the top-5 articles are:

  1. 5 reasons why I still contribute to Debian after 12 years (32700 views)
  2. [LWN] Understanding Membership Structures in Debian and Ubuntu (31700 views)
  3. Social Micropayment Can Foster Free Software, Discover Flattr (30100 views)
  4. Everything you need to know about conffiles: configuration files managed by dpkg (29900 views)
  5. How to make 110.28 EUR in one month with free software and Flattr (29400 views)

But I also have occasional readers visiting my blog because my articles are announced on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook (and they circulate on social networks, thanks to those who are sharing them!). The top-5 articles according to the statistics of my website are:

  1. 5 reasons why I still contribute to Debian after 12 years (6000 views)
  2. [LWN] Can Debian offer a Constantly Usable Testing distribution? (5000 views)
  3. Understanding Debian’s release process (1500 views)
  4. Flattr FOSS (1400 views, not an article but I regularly blog about this project)
  5. Can Debian achieve world domination without being on Facebook? (1100 views)

The most flattered

Since I am using Flattr on my blog, it can be interesting to see the articles which generated lots of flattr micro-donations. The top-3 articles are my articles about Flattr (1, 2, 3). Excluding articles related to Flattr, the top-5 is:

  1. 5 reasons why I still contribute to Debian after 12 years (12 flattr)
  2. The secret plan behind the “3.0 (quilt)” Debian source package format (10 flattr)
  3. How to use multiple upstream tarballs in Debian source packages? (5 flattr)
  4. [LWN] Understanding Membership Structures in Debian and Ubuntu (4 flattr)
  5. Do You Want a Free Debian Book? Read on. (4 flattr)

Most articles get 2 to 3 flattr clicks.

The most commented

I usually get 4-5 comments on most articles but some generate much more feedback:

  1. [LWN] Can Debian offer a Constantly Usable Testing distribution? (40 comments)
  2. 5 reasons why I still contribute to Debian after 12 years (22 comments)
  3. Can Debian achieve world domination without being on Facebook? (15 comments)
  4. How to generate different dependencies on Debian and Ubuntu with a common source package (14 comments)
  5. [LWN] Understanding Membership Structures in Debian and Ubuntu (12 comments)

Factoids

Here are my conclusions based on the above figures:

  • Writing about your Debian/Ubuntu work and your long term involvement makes for highly popular content that spreads well.
  • In-depth and well researched articles (like those written for LWN) do not generate more flattr revenues than the average article even if they take 4 to 8 times as long to write.
  • People are more likely to flattr you for your free software contribution than for the value they get out of your article.
  • People care a lot about the Debian release process, and like to discuss the topic.

If you also appreciate the above-linked articles, you should click here to subscribe to my email newsletter.

Reorganization of my blog, please update your feeds

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Up to now I had a single blog hosted on ouaza.com, I used to blog in French and in English on many topics, even though free software and Debian was the main topic. Sometimes I avoided blogging on something because it would not really match the expectations of my readers (and of the various planets syndicating my blog). And I have always been annoyed by the fact that English readers were second-class on my blog because everything was configured in French.

So I decided to fix this once for all, I have created two new blogs in addition to ouaza.com. The latter is now my private blog (in French) with everything that is not free software related. And free software will be the topic of my 2 new blogs :

I have setup some HTTP redirections on various feed URLs but if you were subscribed to my main feed, you’re now redirected to the new English feed and you might want to subscribe to the French one to continue reading my articles in French. In any case, you might want to update the feed URL that you used.

I also profited from this reorganization to switch to WordPress 3.0 and the 3 blogs are hosted on the same installation thanks to the new multisite feature and to the domain mapping plugin. The main regression in those changes is that I’m back to the (new) default theme of WordPress with the standard header image. I would like to personalize them but I have no graphics skills… but if you do and would like to work on this for me, please get in touch. I’ll make sure you get your pony in return. 🙂

More changes concerning those blogs are in the pipe but that will be the topic of other posts. Thanks for following !

Blogging considerations and updates concerning the French planet

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Since the policy of the Debian planet is to not restrict content to Debian-related stuff, I switched the URL of my feed in PlanetDebian to include any English content that I might blog about. Don’t be afraid, I’m not going to overwhelm you with random crap. I’m currently trying to blog more in French instead.

Since I maintain the French Debian planet, I decided to apply the same policy for the French version (and announced it here). At the same time I also created a planet for the French-speaking Debian users who happen to blog… it’s hosted on the same server at http://planet-fr.debian.net/users/ and its policy is a bit more strict as it only allows free-software related content.

For all those reasons, I recategorized my articles so that I can now provide an english-only feed and a french-only feed. The first one is used on planet.debian.org and the second one on planet-fr.debian.net.

Continuing on this blogging frenzy, I upgraded WordPress to the latest version, I installed the subscribe-to-comments plugin and translated it to French. Thus it’s now possible to have a sane discussion in the comments of my blog articles!

Tags

3.0 (quilt) Activity summary APT aptitude Blog Book Cleanup conffile Contributing CUT d-i Debconf Debian Debian France Debian Handbook Debian Live Distro Tracker dpkg dpkg-source Flattr Flattr FOSS Freexian Funding Git GNOME GSOC HOWTO Interview LTS Me Multiarch nautilus-dropbox News Packaging pkg-security Programming PTS publican python-django Reference release rolling synaptic Ubuntu WordPress

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