Happy Birthday. I want to share some stats about what’s happened over the year since launch.

First, part of the reason I started this blog was to experiment with search engine optimization (SEO). I started from zero and watched each post rise and dip according to the rules around search, particularly around Google’s algorithm and each page’s Page Rank.

Okay, the numbers (according to Google Analytics)…

I’ve seen just over 10,000 unique visits, just over 13,000 page views for an 86% bounce rate. My most popular story was the Comcast blocking email, followed by the Blackberry on Mac tutorials.

Google Ads numbers…

I’ve made about 28 dollars in 12 months (at this rate I’ll get a check from Google in about 4 or five years).

Wordpress…

The other reason I started the blog, was to play with Wordpress. I have to say I am very impressed with it. It’s features, number and quality of plugins, themes and flexibility is unmatched. They’ve since added easy updates.

I’ll keep writing and continue my experimentation. With everything I’ve done on the blog, I’ve encountered questions, searched for answers and learned something new.

So far, my experience with Wordpress has been great. I installed it myself on an Apple PowerMac G4, running Apache, PHP and MySQL. Installing required unzipping it into my webserver’s root directory. I had to modify some of the directory permissions (chmod, etc…).

There are numerous Wordpress themes and Wordpress plugins available. I have installed a few of them so far, including:

• All in one SEO Pack
• Google Sitemaps
• wp-cache

Here’s a link to the WordPress plugin directory

For my theme, I chose fourWPTP, by Moses Francis (he has some great resources too). UPDATE: I had to switch themes. After a playing with it for a week, or so, I found that it was laying out differently across, IE7, Safari and Firefox, browsers. Also, I thought I would need a 4-column layout, but a 3-column layout works fine for me. So now I’m using ‘xtn57′. Which like fourWPTP, installed easily. There is a great deal of info out on the web already on how to do this step at a time and I’m sure most people aren’t using MacOS X, like I am.