On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 5:59 AM, Gabor Szabo <gabor@szabgab.com> wrote:
Hello there!
My worthless 2c:
Based on our experience with the Perl Weekly, people usually click on 1 maybe 2 articles. So I think it is quite unlikely many people will be able to follow the Advent calendars.
I also think it is quite hard to read so many articles in such a short period of time. Especially as several other Advent calendars are competing to our attention.
This isn't the only value in them. An additional value is being able to refer back to them, to pass them between us, to share. They can be later promoted into actual running code, into documentation, etc. They serve a lot of purpose beyond click counters.
Google Analytics of http://advent.perldancer.org/ tells me that most of the month the site gets about 1500-1800 visits / month In December 2013 it got 3500 visits, in December 2014 it got 4,400 visits. The http://perldancer.org/ site gets about 7-8,000 visits / month.
Instead of and Advent calendar in December, I'd suggest to spread out the 24 articles and have one published every 2 weeks during 2016. Though it does not need to wait till January. It could be started next week. Then we could include them in the Perl Weekly and other Dancer enthusiasts could also spread the links.
It's hard to maintain such an effort. As counter intuitive as it might sound, it's easier to maintain a consorted effort of writing a bunch of articles rather than having to write one every two weeks. You lose focus, you lose the drive, you lose the contributors. After you've written them, you can always then distribute them again in blogs and on other distribution channels like Perl Weekly. That option doesn't go away, such as the usefulness of an article past the "clickability" range of it.
I'd also suggest to publish the articles on the http://perldancer.org/ site and to move all the content from http://advent.perldancer.org/ to the http://perldancer.org/ and to create a unified table of context for all the articles, but that's a slightly different story.
I agree having it on the main website is useful. I disagree it should be completely removed from advent.perldancer.org. I definitely agree it's a [slightly] different story.