Category: Administration – Announcements

I has been some months now since Google has announced the end of Google Reader.  I have gone through many of the stages of grief (getting stuck at “Anger” for a while) and am now entering acceptance.

Personally, I have no problem with Feedly or one of the other readers.  But there is another aspect of Google Reader that seems harder to replace.  On my blog, I have two sidebar entries:  a “From the OR blogs”, giving recent posts from the OR Blogroll, and a listing of the OR Blogroll itself.  I think both are pretty useful since they given automatic visibility to new (and existing!) blogs in OR.  I don’t think they get a ton of use, but they are nice to have.

Google Reader provided scripts for both the recent posts and the blogroll.  I need  a replacement that

1. Allows easy addition/deletion of blogs
2. Show recent posts from all the blogs
3. Can also act as my personal reader

The last requirement precludes most of the wordpress scripts (I use wordpress on a local machine to handle this blog).  I do not want to keep, say, a feedly list of blogs along with a separate “ORBlogRoll” within wordpress.

Anyone found a Google Reader replacement that can do this?

This blog was begun on October 24, 2005, so it had its fourth birthday a couple of weeks ago.  As my family knows, I am not great with birthdays, so I managed to forget it.  But, better late than never, Happy Birthday to Michael Trick’s Operations Research Blog!

Here’s what I wrote last year about the statistics on the blog:

I posted 133 times in the year (up from 83, and well past my goal of 2/week).  I’ve had 237 comments in the last year, up a lot from 69, so you too have been much more active!  I get about 3500 visitors per month (up from 2000), and, new this year, Feedburner tells me about 450 people subscribe through google reader and other rss feeds (that don’t typically hit my server).  Spam is running at about 10/day, but my system catches it, so it is no big deal.

Number of posts in the last year was 134 (my goal was 150, so I fell a bit short).  The blog got 420 comments, so you all are doing your job!  Spam is up to about 35 or so per day, with a peak of 560 on one day in early October.  I’m up to 11,500 visitors per month, with a peak day in October of 5300 visitors (due to a nice posting on reddit).  Feedburner gives me about 850 subscribers through rss feeds.

Thanks to all of you who read the blog and commented on it.  It is encouraging to get feedback about what I write.  And thanks especially to all those writing away in the blog-OR-sphere:  it is great to be part of this community.  Here is to another year of exciting news from the world of operations research!

For the most part, I don’t live or die on the number of readers of this blog.  I’m not making money off this, so extra readers don’t  have a direct effect.  Of course, I am gratified that people want to read this:  since one of my goals is to make operations research more famous, it helps if there is a readership!  And I greatly enjoy it when people comment on my posts (something that is happening much more often):  that can’t happen without a readership.

Determining the readership of a blog is kinda tricky.  Some people wander by through the web, or have the page bookmarked, or search on a term that occurs in a blog post, or otherwise access the blog as a web page.  Somewhere around 150 or so people a day see the blog that way.  Of course a number of people are searching for “sex market” or some such, and hit a post from my past entries that includes those words. In fact, now that I have included that phrase here, they may end up on this page.  If so, then welcome:  this probably isn’t what you were looking for, but there are some fascinating posts, so browse around for a while!

Another group subscribes to the blog through RSS readers, like google reader.  They may not hit my website directly at all, but read the postings through their reader.  Feedburner tells me I have about 700 subscribers that way.  This number is an estimate, but presumably all of these subscribers are actually interested in operations research.  This is the way I access blogs:  I subscribe to all of the operations research blogs listed in the right hand column of my front page, and I subscribe to an additional twenty-five blogs that are not operations research but have caught my interest.  I also subscribe to about dozen blogs on operations research that appear to be inactive:  if a post comes through on one of those, then I can move it over to the active list.

Putting things all together, I put my readership at about 1000 people truly interested in operations research, which is a gratifying number.  I certainly have not given a technical talk in front of 1000 people (the recent EURO conference was perhaps the largest, but it was not 1000 people).

Once in a while I get a spike, due to an entry on other sites.  I have never had a successful entry on Digg or Slashdot, which is probably just as well, since my poor server probably couldn’t stand the strain.  But my recent posting on “P=NP (or not)” did get some play on Reddit (thanks cavedave for the shoutout), which resulted in a spike in usage (up by a factor of five or so).   It was great to see the spike, but it will be even better if this results in more permanent subscribers and more interest in operations research.