Technorati recently released their latest State of The Blogosphere report (renamed to something about the Live Web to avoid confusion with the Dead Web) chock full of statistics and pretty graphs.

This would be interesting, if I were interested in anything other than myself. No, I don’t care about how other blogs are doing. I only care about Me Me ME!

How is MY Blog doing?

To find out I could check on some external sources. For example, Alexa.com shows that my site has experienced steady growth in the past three years (click on the chart to see the actual report page).

Alexa Graph of Haacked.com over 3 years

But lest I let that go to my head, let’s compare my site’s reach with my friend Jeff’s using Alexa’s comparison tool.

Hmmm, it may be high time I contrive my own crowd pleaser FizzBuzz post.

Moving on, let’s see what Technorati has to say.

Haacked.com on Technorati - Rank 6358 (1276 links from 473 blogs)

Wow. 6358 is a big number! That’s good right? Oh, maybe not. But we can see that 473 blogs have provided 1276 links to my blog. I should hit these suckers up for a loan!

Let’s swing over to see what Feedburner says:

Subscribers: 3,339. Site Visitors: 1,334

It’d be nice to have just one score to look at. Let’s swing over to the Website Grader.

Website Grade: 97/100 Page Rank: 6

I could have saved some time by just going here first. Hey Ma! I got an A! Can I leave the cage?

Looking Inward

Well, if there’s one thing I learned about happiness it’s to look for it inward, rather than relying on external validation. That way, you don’t have to let reality intrude on your carefully crafted world view. So let’s look at some internal statistics.

  • Posts - 1322
  • Comments - 2510
  • Spam Comments - 9818 (which is low because I periodically clean out the table)

Hmmm… I wonder what are my five most popular posts based on Ayende’s formula.

Title Web Views
Video: The Dave Chappelle Show 169,398
PHOTO: When Nerds Protest The RNC 81,353
Year of the Golden Pig 60,316
Response.Redirect vs Server.Transfer 54,076
Using a Regular Expression to Match HTML 37,807

I won’t lie. It depresses me a bit to learn that my three most popular posts have nothing to do with technology. Not only that, the most popular post by a longshot is a skit about a family with an unfortunate last name. It’s a mispelling of a horrible racial epithet, which happens to bring alot of bad spelling racists in search of god knows what.

What the Numbers Don’t Say

Well all these numbers are fine and good, but they can’t measure the enjoyment I get out of blogging. Nor can they measure the satisfaction that some readers (any reader?) gets from reading my posts. At least not until someone builds Satisfactorati or Satisfactorl.icio.us.

The numbers may not support my complete self-centered ego-centric view, but when has vanity and a self-inflated ego ever been subdued with so called “facts”?

So what is the state of your blog?

This post is a refresh to my Blogging Is Pure Vanity post from way back when.