Debian Admininistration Site Update

Posted by Steve on Sat 30 Apr 2005 at 14:15

This is the first real site update in quite some time, telling readers what I expect to be happening in the short term and what I'm doing with the site along with some statistics.

First of all the good news, the site seems to be attracting increasing attention, and readership.

On an average day we seem to get around 4500 hits on the syndication feeds along with approximately 2500 article views.

In addition to this site itself several of the articles have been translated into other languages and now appear on the following sites;

Perhaps predictably it seems like most people will hit the feeds and then view only one article. I assume this is because the synopsis or title that I've chosen doesn't do enough to attract them to read other pieces there and then.

Now the bad news. In some places the code that runs this site is pretty inefficient. To be fair some of this efficiency loss is due to changes I've made to it.

(Incidently you can view the site's code here)

There are also a few missing features which I'm very keen on adding, such as:

Comments on polls - this is probably the single thing I miss the most.
A scratchpad showing what articles were being worked on.
- For example right now I have a bunch of topics that I'd like to write about, each of which is "half-finished". It'd be nice to allow people who were keen on assisting, or just curious to see these "incomplete" pieces.
Some users have complained about the adverts, others praise them:
- I personally believe that the relevence of the adverts I've seen and their low annoyance factor is a good thing, the monetary gain is useful in offsetting bandwidth and time costs, although the income isn't amazing.
- Some people have asked to be able to remain logged in and still choose to view them.
- Two companies have asked to show their banner adverts, I declined when they insisted that these be large animated gifs.

I can think of other things that I'd like to investigate changing if I had the time to work on them. For example the code could be simplified if it made use of some useful Perl modules, such as CGI::Application instead of replicating similar functionality itself - but not in such a flexible manner.

That aside I've not had any major complaints about the way the site looks, or feels, for some time. Personally I sometimes think the leftbar is a little crowded. I think splitting things so that some items are on the left and some on the right might work - but that would mean I'd need to find a new location for the adverts. (Is that an argument against having them?)

As always user/reader feedback is encouraged either as comments, or if you wish you may mail me direct.

This article can be found online at the Debian Administration website at the following bookmarkable URL (along with associated comments):

http://www.debian-administration.org/article/Debian_Admininistration_Site_Update