Being Social

The Rocky Mountaineer in Kamloops, BC

Hi, just a quick update on my social networking scene. In general I am active on Facebook and Instagram, somewhat active on Google+, barely active on Twitter and I have a pulse on Flickr. I used to be a lot more active on G+ but I've found the interaction has diminished there somewhat. Facebook is great for railfan groups.

I'm really enjoying the train photos on Instagram. My post on Instagram for railfans is one of the most popular posts ever on my blog, amazingly enough!

I think Facebook has really taken over from the railfan mailing lists of yore. The RailsNB mailing list was deleted a few months ago because the Facebook group has become so popular.

Here are my statistics:

• Facebook page: 196 followers (hoping for 200 by the end of the month! Like me! :)
• Instagram: 328 followers (read more about Instagram)
• Google+: 21,759 followers (not a true measure of active followers)
• Twitter: 175 followers
• Flickr: 158 followers (go follow George Pitarys!)

I have a tumblr account as well but I'm not on there very much at all.

Here's a little secret. I'm not on Flickr or tumblr much but I post there all the time. How? I use the IFTTT service. This is a great service that basically allows you to create actions based on other actions you take. I have recipes there that repost my Instagram photos onto Flickr and tumblr, so they get updated with new photos with no additional effort on my part. Magic!

I suppose I also have accounts on tsū and ello but I hardly ever look at them, to be honest. Those social networks haven't really taken off.

So... where are you social? Comment below!

PS - notice the photo in this post, a sneak peek of upcoming content!

PPS - want to know how to get Instagram followers, ethically?

Web site statistics

As a web site owner, I have access to more data and statistics than I can ever hope to digest. Most of them have no bearing, anyway, as I'm not doing this for profit but for a hobby and to provide information. I will share a few statistics with you, just for (my?) fun.

In the past month, theboykos.com has had 3,304 visitors who viewed an average of 5.25 pages. On average they spend about two and a half minutes on my site. 45% of those visitors were new visitors.

How do visitors get to my site? 52% type the address in or have it bookmarked. 20% come from Google searches, 6% from Yahoo! searches, 4% from MSN/Live searches, 2% from Google Image searches, and the rest from a variety of other places.

Feedburner tells me I have 11 subscribers to my RSS feed, on average.

What does all of this tell me? A lot of people come to visit often, have a quick look, and leave. This is not surprising to me, as I expect a lot of those visitors are people who come to look at this blog, see the new stuff, and go somewhere else on the Internet.

All I can say is: I'm glad you're reading. Welcome. And feel free to comment on anything you've read or would like to see.

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Search Engine Watch

I thought I'd check in again to see how well the search engines were indexing my blog. The results are varied and interesting (to me, at least).

Google has indexed my blog up to the morning of November 10, with this post on the CBC War Brides map. One problem with Google's indexing is
that they generally only point to the main blog page, not the archived posts.

Yahoo is the farthest behind, only indexing up to my November 4 post saying I was going to chase the War Brides train. They also include a bunch of spam pages, which steal content from my web site and others in order to get included in search pages. The worst part is the spam pages get indexed faster than my own! I won't link to them because I don't want to boost their ratings, but I suggest you search for "CN GP9 units in Saint John as yard switchers". My blog post doesn't even come up but the first four entries are spam pages with the first paragraph from this blog post in them.

Live.com aka Microsoft is totally up to date with the last post of November 13. They also index the individual post pages, which is great.

Live.com definitely is the most up-to-date and indexes my blog the best.

It's almost enough to make me want to switch to them from Google... almost.