Chp 140. The Big Break

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

A lovely poem by Robert Frost. Short and sweet, and yet extremely meaningful. “And miles to go before I sleep”. Hence this is the time when I must take a leave from the blogosphere for a month or two, because of those “miles” I must cover.

Of course this sabbatical would mean the usual stuff: a drastic decrease in the number of my daily visits (past 3 days visit was 470+). Even though I did used to get more than 200 visits/day a long time back during my IIM days, I took a break and then came back writing more Mizo-centric articles. I was then barely maintaining an average of 100 visits per day. And then I entered Camp and came out writing only Gospel articles, and the number of daily visits increased but the profile of my visitors completely changed! Now having learnt how to strike a balance between each type of posts, I feel proud to maintain a visit of around 130/day, all thanks to all you wonderful people out there. Here is a *Muaaah* (No it is not considered normal for a guy to give out muaaahs in my culture too, but what the heck, I just feel like it )

A great big thanks to all the Zo bloggers out there for reaching out and letting your voices get heard. Keep the faith and keep blogging. Love you all. Also another bounteous thanks to Bobby, Marzi, Jesse, Janice, Jean, Emila, Zublin, Christy, and all my new wonderful blog-friends from MBL community who introduced me to technorati. I am now in the top 100K website listing!!!!! Thank you, thank you, thank you

[Notice how I kept the mouse over the PC time for “date stamp”. Lolz]

Even though that rank is miniscule compared to some of the ranks of my friends mentioned above, I feel proud to have reached that rank as my blog is more article oriented than short-posts based, with just 4-5 updates/month. It would indeed be sad to see all that slip away yet again, because of the break I am going to take. But I promise I will be back with more improvements, enthusiasm, passion, energy and the usual Kim-Humor

Visit past one week:

Yeah I may have fallen into the “site-meter trap” (visiting one’s site-meter more often than one’s own blog! ), but sometimes it is important to know the profile of your visitors, so that you can tailor-stitch your blog more to their liking.

I have registered at Google Analytics thanx to my good friend Sundancer on October 2nd 2006. It’s not even been a year since then, but what I learnt from the Analytics report is gargantuan (yeah I really love that word ).

I’ve learnt that 59.24% of my visitors visit my blog 4-5 times a month. This corresponds exactly with the number of times I update my blog a month. This tells me that people who visit my blog know how frequently I update my blog, hence it would be a waste of time to visit everyday. Last month (July 2007), the number of people who visited my blog more than 10 times during the entire month was 534, which is just 22.25% of the total month’s visit (2400 approx).

I’ve learnt that 58.93% use Internet explorer, compared to 36.66% Firefox. Hence I could use HTML tags like “table bordercolor” which displays perfectly for Explorer but looks ugly in Firefox. I avoid “rowspan” as it sometimes gets messed up in Explorer. Similarly there are CSS scripts which works well for one but doesn’t for the other, which I will not post here for boring’s sake

Another important point I’ve learnt from the Analytic’s report: 71.55% of my visitors use a screen resolution of more than 1024x768. Hence I could freely increase the size of my page to (currently) 815 pixels, with 468px on the content and 336px on the side bar. This way I could push in more graphics and contents on either side without bringing in the (oh so evil!) Horizontal scrolling.

67.21% of my visitors come from Cable, DSL and other high speedsters, while 4.57% come from Dial-up (Why do I picture my friend calliope’s canticles in my mind every time I see a visit from a Dial-up? ). Hence I could safely use a number of heavy graphics decorating the sidebar with minimum complains about the loading speed.

Regarding the location of my visitors, as most other blogs around, I do get a huge number of visitors from different parts of the World. However, I would request you all not to jump the gun whenever you see a foreign location. My friend FadeNoMore works in Convergys, a BPO in Bangalore. Whenever he visits or comments, his ip address shows “Cincinnati, Ohio, USA” which is probably where it is routed back (Convergys Head Office). Similarly, when some of my visitors from AOL Call Center in Bangalore visit my blog, their ip addresses show “Dulles, Virginia, USA”.

For those of you at home with your own net connection, it is also very important to “ignore visits” of your own ip address. Sitemeter offers that option. Even though I update my blog 4-5 times a month, I frequently log in to my template to change a thing or two every now and then. Every time I do that, it counts as a visit. Hence I simply ignored the visits from my own ip address so that my actual number of visits does not get tampered.

Other important factor not to miss: Know where most of your visitors are coming from. This is from my Google Analytics report.

Where does the referral traffic come from?

Again, Google Analytics answers [in order of percentage, top 20 only] :

01. orkut.com
02. mbaleague.blogspot.com
03. sunshinenjoy.blogspot.com
04. anuragjain.blogspot.com
05. mybookmarks.com
06. mybloglog.com
07. whymba.blogdrive.com
08. misual.com
09. mariuca.blogspot.com
10. desipundit.com
11. lawrkhawm.com
12. dignifiedcow.blogspot.com
13. mutiny.in
14. sekibuhchhuak.blogspot.com
15. e-pao.net
16. technorati.com
17. carpeimperiummundo.blogspot.com
18. chandoo.org
19. shutterspeedchronicles.blogspot.com
20. suyogdeshpande.net

Thank you so much for the referral, everyone. Nice to see 4 Mizo sites (misual, lawrkhawm, Sundancer and Seki) among the list too. Ka lawm e!

Many of my articles have appeared in various National magazines and newspapers like Midday, Times of India, Jesus Calls, Telegraph, Business Today, Newslink etc. They’ve also been cross posted at popular sites like desipundit.com, pagalguy.com, e-pao.net, misual.com, lawrkhawm.com, zawlbuk.net, youthim.com, zoram.com and various Mizo Association websites. Since it is difficult to conclude which are the most popular posts (one man’s thingie is another man’s thungie), I am displaying the 25 top views of my posts according to Google Analytics. (Note: Google Analytics started calculating the page view only from Oct 2006. The views before that are not recorded; hence, the result may not be that accurate).

01. Chp 085. A "new" discotheque called "Poison" (2020)
02. Chp 094. Racism I: Chinky - What me insult? (1011)
03. Chp 092. Arsenal: New signings, new formations. (912)
04. Chp 079. Underworld 3 : The Movie (interracial perspective). (784)
05. Chp 077. Manori Beach > Palm Beach Resort. (782)
06. Chp 116. Christianity & Culture: Wearing “puan”. (655)
07. Chp 039. Sonargachi! (599)
08. Chp 022. Love, jealousy & ex-girlfrens : A Valentine's Day Special. (531)
09. Chp 117. Impression of a Christian (505)
10. Chp 089. Mumbai Cable TV and the Ban (467)
11. Chp 108. A special Valentine's Day post (419)
12. Chp 073. World Cup: Of women folks and football. (337)
13. Chp 106. A blessed long distance relationship (316)
14. Chp 050. Of older women n younger guys (301)
15. Chp 111. To Nepal, with Love. (293)
16. Chp 096. "AGAPE" Gospel Rehab Camp (215)
17. Chp 113. A poem for women (194)
18. Chp 030. Anara CD controversy : My take. (191)
19. Chp 054. Inter-racial relationships (176)
20. Chp 124. The Ironies of Love (172)
21. Chp 100. The Christian Life (167)
22. Chp 086. What really happened in the IIMB Campus (133)
23. Chp 093. I'm horny, you're horny. (128)
24. Chp 095. Mizoram, My Mizoram! (115)
25. Chp 049. Tuscan Verve (111)

13 of my posts which I wrote before I activated my Google Analytics (before Chp 95.) appeared among the top 25! Since there was no record before October 2006, the mentioned 13 posts would definitely have a much higher rank had I activated Google Analytics earlier. It also feels wonderful to know that 7 of my Gospel posts appeared among the top 25. Longest run at top 25: 5 posts (Chp 92, 93, 94, 95 & 96).

If in case you are jobless with nothing to do except read some “new” stuff then please do go through some of my Top 25 posts mentioned above while I’m gone (Oh! Shameless me!!!!)

And of course before saying goodbye, something I’ve always been meaning to do for a very very very long time. An award to my MBL friends!

This goes out to all you MBL folks who have not just become mere “blog buddies” but very personal friends within time. You’ve shown me the true value of friendship and support, even though we are all miles apart and most definitely will never meet in our entire lifetime. Yup this award goes out to you Bobby, Marzie, Jesse, Jean, Janice, Christy, Emila, Zublin, Barrett and in cinq (dear Lord, I hope I didn’t miss out anybody).

Even though they know I don’t do tags and memes because my blog is article based, and that I want to maintain the “brand image” of that, these people still tag me, meme me, and award me! Most people do that so that they will be linked back so as to push up their ranks, but these people on my list do it purely out of love.

I’ve been awarded so many times too, by these very same people. So, since this is my last post for the time being, I thought, why don’t I design my own award for these wonderful people? Something that I can personalize so as to fit them exactly… I thought and thought and thought… most of the awards that best describes them are already there… and then it struck me. There was one very important quality all these bloggers had in common: They make me smile.

Be it Bobby’s knowledgeable insight on the nuts and bolts of blogging, or Marzie’s extremely “feel good” posts about everything, or Jesse’s yet another attempt at registering at yet another blog promotional site , or Emila’s wonderful illustration that has an aura of placidity and serenity around it, or Janice and her two marvelous kids who you wanna nibble and pinch and chew forever, or Jean who is all sweetness, niceness and sugarness all rolled into one, all these people and the wonderful ones not yet mentioned (because I will go on and on and on if I point out all the wonderful qualities of everyone) have always made me smile and feel good about the fact that I’m alive. They have been a part of my life for the past 1-2 months now, and my life has indeed been more cheerful since.

Hence, here is the award I have specially designed for you guys, straight from the heart. It's the "Thank you for making me smile" Award

With that, I begin my sabbatical. Of course I will still visit other blogs occasionally, but there won’t be any updates here for the next 2 months. And about the comment moderation, that is still activated, but my girlfriend will be manning my account everyday as usual, accepting the comments (insightful ones, criticisms, supportive, agreements, disagreements, argumentative etc) while rejecting the spams & occasional racial abuses my blog is still a target of. God bless you everyone!