Mhambi has been redeployed.

Thursday, July 03, 2008

Mhambi.blogspot to move to Mhambi.com

It's been a great two and a bit years since I started this blog.

Because of the Blogger platform limitations I decided a while ago to switch to a self hosted version of the open source Wordpress platform. But the longer I wait the harder this will be to do. No least since all the Google Pagerank juice I have acquired.

So this is my last post. I will keep this blog, and definitely link to it, but all new writing will go onto the new site.

So how popular was Mhambi?

Here is a pic of my Google analytics stats from April 2006 to now. (My tracking code was down for a month but the figures are still more or less correct).



Not bad hey. 24,371 Absolute Unique Visitors. Lets break this down a bit. How many people came how often?



Unfortunately almost 70% came but once, and never again (A number I hope to improve on with a Wordpress blog).

But quite allot (more than 3500) of people have visited the site more than 9 times. A whopping 470 people have visited the site more than 200 times. Whey! Want to buy Mhambi t-shirts guys?

Content

So what's my most popular posts? Well that's a bit unfair, some posts have been out there for more than 2 years, while others are barely a month old.

Still its quite interesting.



The General De La Rey's music video trumped all. I suspect that most of those visitors that came once came for that.

Two of my better posts, His big white self and Quito: A background to a battle are in the top 10.

Other posts I rate like Are Afrikaner's the planet's worst racists?, The unbearable whiteness of being, and De la Rey the left wing icon also has done well.

Some posts that I would recommend you read if you have not includes Afrikaner vs Cuban: the irony of Cuito Cuanavale, Of generations, arseholes, Israel and volkstate and Apartheid reporting and moral double standards. It was written before the well publicised xenophobic violence.

With regards to this recent violence I am particularly proud of the analysis I did in The rainbow racists are nationalistic and not that poor and Mbeki's ANC is Africanist not Nationalist.

A number posts with racey pictures or about sexuality have done well, much better than they should have.

But when MP Andries Nel responded to a post on my blog, I decided its time to clean up and get serious - Mhambi has entered high society.

(I also noticed my older sister had subscribed via email ;) ).

Where did all my traffic come from?



Besides the obvious candidate, Google, a surprising amount came via Blik.co.za, the Afrikaans link recommendation site.

Amatomu
, the South African version of Technorati has not been that great at all at driving traffic, that's despite Mhambi being in their top 30 South African political blogs for ages.

Other sites of note that drove traffic to me is Pierre De Vos's Constitutionally Speaking blog and Moneyweb who featured one of my articles, as well as a Dutch TV station's site.

As soon as my new site is live I will let you know.

In the mean time, a 25 part documentary series on the Angolan Border War called Grensoorlog starts on Sunday on Kyknet. It features over 200 interviews with ordinary grunts (including the very first Swapo insurgent), the operators like Jan Breytenbach, to the big boys like Pik, Chester Crocker and Gorbachov.

You can watch it over the Net at Kuduclub. I directed two episodes and researched and help write the program structure. Watch it if you can you'd be surprised how compelling this part of South African history really is, and how much of what happened you don't know.

And yes there's a whole two programs dedicated to Quito Cuanavale.

Mhambi

Sphere: Related Content

3 comments:

Mike said...

Congratulations on what was indeed a good 2+ years of blogging. For one thing it gave me the blogging virus as well. Ah, so that's why the pictures disappeared! The Google Analytics info is very interesting and I'm proud to see inside-south-africa.blogspot.com features at number 23 in your top referrals list! I'm keenly awaiting your continued blogging on the new site. I have in fact already subscribed to its feed. Good luck!

I'm also looking forward to Grensoorlog!

Daniel Waweru said...

Congratulations. I'm not really a fan, since it seems to me that you've too often come too close to being an apologist for Afrikaner racism. Though this is the first time I've commented, I've been a reader for some time; it's been educational.

Wessel said...

Thanks Mike, and thanks for your comments, always well thought out. And thanks for the traffic!

Hey Daniel, thanks for your post and thanks for reading even if your not a fan. Next time when feel I'm doing that, let me know.

In some cases you might be right, perhaps I have been too lenient on the Boere. It's something I'm acutely aware of when I'm writing.

Alleman, another blogger I rate, and an Afrikaner has said a similar thing, that I see them with Rose tinted glasses.

Where you from?