Those who read this blog regularly will have noticed the rize in activity during 2013. To begin with, there was the launch of the new wordpress version in January. The old blogger platform didn’t offer any longer the possibilities I was looking for. Multilingual blogging for instance was something I was thinking about for a while. The main topic here being rather universal, allthough the content may be some of the time dedicated to more local subjects. Therefor I wanted to share the knowledge assembled here with a more international public. And last but not least, as an organisation, I wanted the platform to be capable of sending newsletters on a regular basis. All of which wasn’t immediately possible with blogger at the time.
Professionaly I worked with wordpress allready and I knew that I would be disposing of a reliable platform to achieve my goals. Of course it wasn’t always rosy along the way. WordPress is much more a target for hackers. I had to endure them a couple of times. In the end they forced me to take some unpleasant measures but for the moment the blog is spam free and it even seems I annoyed the hackers away.
But did all the work delivered in the end? When you look at it from a purely statistical point of view it actually did (thanks to Google Analytics):
| 2012 | 2013 | |
| Unieke bezoekers: | 1804 | 2057 |
| Trouwe bezoekers | 14% | 20% |
| Tijd per bezoek | 00:01:04 | 00:01:10 |
| Aantal bezochte pagina’s | 1,72 | 2,13 |
Of course one can discuss whether this is a significant growth or not, but for me it is sufficient. My topic is rather a niche in it self. And ask yourself: how many people would ever read something interest worthy on dance history anyway? And for the rest, I rather think my blog is far more popular than my purely scientific papers.
The number of posts went up from 26 to a whopping 37, 20 of which I translated in English. Not every post is interesting for non-dutch speaking readers. When I discussed my e-book I never translated the posts. It being a Dutch book, I didn’t see the necessity. By the way: it’s a book about the Belgian Folk Revival or rather the first part of three, discussing the singing – traditions and their origins. Or rather their construct, because I consider them to be invented traditions anyway. The book was downloaded 147 times from Smashwords, which I find a decent success for such an essay.
Which brings me to the point of my future plans. To begin with, I would like to clean up my old blog and transfer all the posts in a ‘pure’ way to the new platform. Imports often cause old mark-up problems to interfere with the actual content. I want all my post just to look the same as my last. And of course I will continue to translate some older material into English. The international dimension of my work still keeps me going and I receive some nice praize for it too. So…
And to finish this post, I would like to announce I’ll be going to the Biennal Early Dance Circle Conference in Bath (U.K.) to present a part of my scientific work to my pears. This means I’ll need to visit some Paris achives soon. All of which you will be able to follow on this blog. Have a nice read and stay tuned!
Source picture: http://alizeelifestyle.com