Update 3/16: Hey everybody, the site has been purchased for an agreed upon amount (higher than the initial bid, closer to the BIN) so the auction is officially closed. Thank you for all the interest and support! I’m staying on to write a bit for the next 3 months plus the redesign is coming soon. Stay tuned 🙂
Since the inception of 9rules back a few SXSW festivals ago, my goal was to work on it full-time or nearly full-time as soon as it was possible. Over the past several months I’ve been slowly transitioning out of client work and doing more 9rules-related activities, and now I feel that selling Business Logs is the last piece of the puzzle that will allow me to do what I’ve always wanted.
To be honest, there’s another reason I’m selling the site and it’s that I’m burnt out with the Web 2.0 industry, or more specifically, writing about the Web 2.0 industry. For awhile I’ve felt that a lot of companies lack that “oomph” that will push them over the top, and instead of constantly being the devil’s advocate and harping on them, I want to spend more time putting my money where my mouth is and making sure that 9rules is a success. Talking through a new section of 9rules with Paul and Tyme is 100x more rewarding than writing a blog entry on venture capital, so that’s where my focus is going to go.
Traffic
As mentioned in the Sitepoint auction, this site gets more traffic when I write vs. when I don’t write (just like most blogs) and based on the last 12 months of pageview statistics, the average per month is 50k pageviews but will surpass 100k for this month easily. I’ve never been obsessed with traffic coming to this site, but considering I’ve only been writing a few times each month recently, I don’t think it’s too bad and could get a lot higher with some additional articles.
Free Redesign
Upon completion of the sale, I will be working with the new owner on a redesign that will most likely be more content-centric and less one-author-personal-portfolio style. I think it’ll be surreal to be redesigning this site for someone else, but I’m sure it’ll be fun 🙂
Most Popular Articles
- Mark Cuban Fined for Weblog Entry – One of my first tastes of viral linkage, this entry was written almost three years ago but continues to pull nice Google traffic (#3 for mark cuban weblog) and was linked from dozens of places including an ESPN.com article.
- Lean XHTML and Precise CSS – One of many CSS-related articles I’ve written over the years, this one happened to be the most popular. (Related: My 5 CSS Tips, another very popular entry.)
- iWeb-Generated Source Code is Awful – After iWeb was released by Apple, I stumbled upon the HTML it outputted and thought they could do a lot better. This entry was linked from a variety of Mac sites because I believe I was the first person to check out the source behind iWeb’s web wizardry and blog about it.
- Digg and YouTube Powering Atheism 2.0 – I had the idea for this entry kicking around for awhile, and once I wrote it, it was nice to see it got so much attention.
- Returning The Favor: The Toyota Mashup Challenge! – After learning that an ad agency that works for Toyota stole the 9rules logo I had some fun with their logo in return.
- Movable Type vs. WordPress, My Opinion – I’ve been an MT user for awhile, but because 9rules uses WP for parts of the backend I’ve recently had a nice mixture of both so I thought a comparison review would be helpful.
What’s Next
Lots of fun 9rules stuff. Oh yeah, and a wedding to pay for. Did I not mention that at the beginning? 🙂