Build doctor: a standalone blog once more.
•
Its been a little over a week since this blog was removed from the Planet TW aggregator. It was absolutely the right thing to do. That didn't stop me being nervous about doing it. The problem was the lack of feedback from the users that read the blog via Planet TW's website or RSS feed. Darren Rowse of problogger.net had kindly confirmed my suspicion that I wasn't really connecting with people.
The other issue that I had was that none of the branding came through Planet TW. It was all posted under my name and not the Build Doctor brand.
After some correspondance with the ThoughtWorks IS department, Last Thursday evening Hongtao pulled this blog from the aggregator for me. And nothing really happened. Well, I went to the pub (my local has Broadside on tap!).
Hits still continued to be mainly from google searches, with a few referrals and RSS readers. Traffic was a little down at the beginning of last week but:
- I hadn't posted much content last week anyhow; and
- The drop wasn't all that significant, and things picked up a little.
What has been interesting is the growth in subscriber numbers. Build-doctor.com is a new-ish, niche blog that I haven't promoted very much. The subscriber numbers haven't been huge. Since the disconnection, the RSS subscriber numbers have been slowly but steadily growing.
Hurrah. A metric that I can actually use.