Rick-Ross.com

It’s been on my to do list for a while and I finally made the time to look into RSS (if you’re looking for more information on RSS, a good tutorial is located here). Needless to say, I’m hooked. An addict. So much so, that I plunked down hard earned cash and purchased Bradbury Software’s FeedDemon! FeedDemon is a great product and I highly recommend it. So why I’m I hooked? Let me explain.

Before using FeedDemon, I would frequently visit numerous sites everyday to see if there was anything new published. This task was cumbersome and time consuming. Furthermore, I needed to either remember the sites I wished to visit, bookmark the site, or add a link to my own website. Most often I would simply type in the website I wished to visit. Some of these websites would be updated several times a day. On average, it would take me about 45 minutes to an hour to visit all of them. Adding new websites to my internal list happened rarely, unless they had awesome content.

After firing up a demo version of FeedDemon and setting up the list of channels I wanted to read, I was ready to explore this new world of syndicated content. The first time through, I needed to mark most the news items are read, since I had already read them online. Once this initial prepration was through, I quickly learned how much time I would be able to save. Instead of taking 45 minutes, I was now able to read the same number of websites, plus a few more in about 15 minutes! Wow! Most of the time savings was from not needing to visit places where there was nothing new published. I was also able to quickly scan news items to determine if there was something I wanted to read in more detail.

Being a consumer of RSS content, I’ve learned a few things.

1. I’m constantly looking for good, technical content available via RSS
2. If you have a website that publishes content frequently, you need to have RSS
3. You better grab my attention in the title or the first two or three sentences or I’ll skip your content
4. I would love to see an RSS discovery protocol so I don’t have to search so hard to find content (Disclaimer: I haven’t researched this aspect yet, so something might already exist)

Bottom line, if you want to save time, use an RSS Reader.

Since moving my domain, I’ve had the luxury of monitoring all sorts of cool statistics found in my web server’s log file. Using Webalizer, I’ve had the opportunity to see how my website is being used. Now that I have a full months worth of data, here is some interesting results:

Monthly Statistics for March 2004
Total Hits	20756
Total Files	17905
Total Pages	6167
Total Visits	3828
.	Avg	Max
Hits per Hour	27	141
Hits per Day	669	1241

The top four URLs for March are:

1. The home page
2. Deploying Kylix 3 Applications
3. Writing Distributed .NET Applications
4. RSS 2.0 for my website

The top three search strings for March are:

1. Rick Ross
2. delphi 8 examples
3. kylix

This has certainly been an enlightening experience for me. What I particularly found interesting was a couple of things. First of all, I’m my best referrer by a large margin, although google has been moving up a bit. Second, some of the search terms that were directed to my site seemed to indicate that there is still interest with Kylix. Finally, there quite of few people interested in RSS content.