Chasing Dragons

Happy Anniversary Chasing Dragons! One Year On and Growing...

The Chasing Dragons blog celebrates its first anniversary today! In terms of numbers, Chasing Dragons has:

• published over 200 posts

• been visited by over 6,000 unique visitors from 96 countries

• attracted nearly 12,000 page views in total (and rising!)

In the blogosphere, this is very very very small fry. However, in comparison to the audience sizes--and the immediacy of these audiences--provided by traditional means of academic communication, I'm really pleased with how things are progressing. It's really nice to have an outlet to share ideas in progress and short commentaries that would otherwise go unwritten with the knowledge that there are others who think that there is something interesting--or some cases fundamentally wrong--about your viewpoints. 

While I initially approached this project with some trepidation and angst, I'm really glad that I took this step forward. None of this would have been possible without the support--both personal and technical--of my wife Denise--design wiz and fashion blogger extraordinaire at theswellelife-- who encouraged me to make the leap into the great unknown of the blogosphere.  

I'd also like to thank my colleagues who have provided support and encouragement, particularly David Campbell, Martin Coward, Matt Davies, and Simon Philpott.

Last but not least, I'd like to express my gratitude to everyone who has visited, commented, and/or linked to Chasing Dragons over the past year. It's been a lot of fun for me and I look forward to building upon recent momentum in the months to come.

And if you are at all interested in how this started, you can see my first post--on military recruitment and video games--here.

Photo credit: dawn m. armfield

Step One For Your Blog's SEO: Switch Your Settings To Publicize !

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a big issue for those running websites these days. Having a presence at the top of related key word searches is a foundation of e-commerce success. Similarly, if you drop in the google rankings--or off them completely--your business is going to suffer dramatically.

Since I blog for fun rather than profit, SEO is less important to me. However, for the past few weeks I had been wondering why this blog hadn't been coming up directly in google searches for its domain name. I had submitted my site to google for consideration, verified my site with them, checked that I wasn't doing anything to run afoul of their guidelines, and had been listed on a few blog directories.

Finally, I mustered up the courage to ask the experts over in the google webmasters forums. And to my chagrin, the solution was the equivalent to calling in a repair person to fix a broken appliance only to find that you didn't have it plugged into the mains. So, to any bloggers out there struggling with the same issue, make sure that you have switched your blog settings to 'publicize'!

Many thanks to GeeWizz, Robbo, and JTB for the lightening fast help and support with my very dumb question!

Photo credit for 'Thank You': psd