In the What a Difference a Year Makes (or Doesn’t) Department:
Julie took the kids out to South Jersey’s fabled Storybookland last week.The funniest discovery were the pictures that matched those from Theo’s class trip last year.
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We all went together on a family trip this weekend to reacquaint ourselves with one another: our schedules haven’t been syncing well lately. Julie picked a farm B&B out in Lancaster County full of chickens and goats and an easy commute to Strasburg PA, a good place for those who like to look at trains, trains, and trains, then drool over trains, trains, trains, and trains (we haven’t seen trains or trains up close yet). Pictures from around the B&B are here; strangely we forgot the cameras on our steam-powered outings so you’ll have to look at old pics. Here’s a shot of the kids on top of the playhouse barn’s slide:
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
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Working with Pipes #2: A DIY personalized community with Del.icio.us, Flickr and Google Blog Search
March 17, 2007
It’s
not necessary to develop your own Web 2.0 software infrastructure to
create an independent Web 2.0‑powered community online. It’s far
simpler to set a standard for your community to use on exisiting
networks and then to use Yahoo Pipes to pull it together.
I decided on about a dozen categories to use with my DIY blog aggregator (QuakerQuaker).
I only want to pull in posts that are being generated for my site by
community members so we use a community identifier, a unique prefix
that isn’t likely to be used by others.
This post will show you how to pull in tagged feeds from three sources: the Del.icio.us social bookmarking system, the Flickr photo sharing site and Google Blog Search.
Step 1: Pick a community designator
I’ve been using the community name followed by a dot. The prefix
goes in front of category description to make a set of unique tags for
the aggregator. When someone wants to add something for the site they
tag it with this “community.category” tag. In my example, when someone
wants to list a new Quaker blog they use “quaker.blog”, “quaker” being
the community name, “blog” being the category name for the “New Blogs”
page.
Step 2: Collect the community prefix and category name in Pipes
You begin by going into Pipes and pulling over two text inputs: one for
the community prefix, the other for the specific category.
Step 3: Construct these into tags
Now use the “String Concatenation” module to turn this into the
“community.category” model. The community input goes into the top slot,
a dot is the second slot and the category input goes into the last slot.
Now, when you have a tag in Flickr with a dot in it, Flickr automatically removes it in the resultant RSS feed.
So with Flickr you want your tag to be “communitycategory” without a
dot. Simple enough: just pull another “String Concatenation” module
onto your Pipes work space. It should look the same except that it
won’t have the middle slot with the dot.
Step 4: Turn these tags into RSS URLs
Pull three “URLBuilder” modules into Pipes, one for each of the
services we’re going to query. For the Base, use the non-tag specific
part of the URL that each service uses for its RSS feeds. Here they are:
Del.icio.us | http://del.icio.us/rss/tag |
Flickr | http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds |
Google Blog Search | http://blogsearch.google.com |
Under path elements, put the correct tag: for Del.icio.us and Google it should be the community.category tag, for Flickr the dot-less communitycategory tag.
Step 5: Fetch and Dedupe
Fetch is the Pipes module that pulls in URLs and outputs RSS feeds. It can also combine them. Send each URLBuilder output into the same Fetch routine.
Since it’s possible that you’ll might have duplicate posts, use the “Unique” module to deduplicate entries by URL.
Through a little trial and error I’ve determined that in cases of
duplicates, feeds lower in the Fetch list trump those higher. In the
actual Pipe powering my aggregator I pull a second Del.icio.us feed: my
own. I have that as the last entry in the Fetch list so that I can
personally override every other input.
Step 6: Sort by Date
With experimentation it seems like Pipes orders the output entries by
descending date, which is probably what you want. But I want to show
how Pipes can work with “dc” data, the “Dublin Core” model that allows
you to extend standard RSS feeds (see yesterday’s post for more on this).
Google Blog Search and Del.icio.us feeds use the “dc:date” field to
record the time when the post was made. Flickr uses “dc:date.Taken” to
pass on the photograph’s metadata about when it was taken. Pipes’
“Rename” module lets you copy both fields into one you create (I’ve
simply used “date”), which you can then run through its “Sort” module.
Again, it’s a moot point since Pipes seems to do this automatically.
But it’s good to know how to manipulate and rename “dc” data if only
because many PHP parsers have trouble laying it out on a webpage.
Update: it’s all moot: according to a ZDNet blog, “Pipes now automatically appends a pubDate tag to any RSS feed that has any of the other allowable date tags.” This is nice: no need to hack the date every time you want to make a Pipe!
Step 7: Output
The final step for any Pipe is the “Pipe Output” module.
In action
You can see this published Pipe here, and copy and play with it yourself. The result lets you build an RSS feed based on the two inputs.
Add Quaker Blog Watch to your site
August 16, 2005
A few months ago I started keeping a links blog that evolved into the “Quaker Blog Watch” (formally at home at “nonviolence.org/quaker” though included as a column elsewhere). This is my answer to the “aggregation question” that a few of us were tossing around in Sixth Month. I’ve never believed in an uberBlog that would to supercede all of our individual ones and act as gate-keeper to “proper” Quakerism. For all my Quaker Conservativism I’m still a Hicksite and we’re into a certain live-and-let live creative disorder in our religious life.
I also don’t like technical solutions. It helps to have a human doing this. And it helps (I think) if they have some opinions. When I began my list of annotated Quaker links I called it my “Subjective Guide” and these links are also somewhat subjective. I don’t include every post on Quakerism: only the ones that make me think or that challenge me in some way. Mediocrity, good intentions and a famous last name mean less to me than simple faithfulness to one’s call.
There’s no way to keep stats but it looks like the links are being used (hours after I stumble across a previously-unknown site I see comments from regular Quaker Ranter readers!). Here’s the next step: instructions on adding the “last seven entries of the Quaker blog watch to your site.” I imagine some of you might want to try it out on your sidebar. If so, let me know how it works: I’m open to tweaking it. And do remember I’ll be disappearing for a few days “sometime soon” (still waiting, that kid can’t stay in there too long.)
Friends Familiar with My Struggles
May 5, 2005
A Guest Piece from ‘Quakerspeak’ C. Reddy.
On April 23 I flew to Oregon to serve on an editorial board for a book that QUIP is putting together of young Friends’ experiences of Quakerism. After arriving in Oregon but before I met with the editorial board for this, I served on a panel with the other young Friends on the editorial board in a QUIP meeting (as we had arrived at the end of a QUIP conference for our meeting) about how media, printed or otherwise, inspired us spiritually. As we related our experiences as young Friends (and growing up as Quakers), a number of issues surfaced rather quickly.
As young Friends move through high school and enter the [young] adult world, there is often a general lack of communication between young Friends and adults in Meetings, as if there’s some tension about it. Personally, as a young Friend in Durham Friends Meeting (NCYM(Cons.)), I’ve found that I know certain adults — ones with whom I have interacted more specifically over the years as I have grown up. Often these are parents of other young Friends in the Meeting or people who have been involved in youth group events. What’s missing is the connection to the rest of the adults in Meeting; I’ve been attending Durham Friends Meeting since I was born (with a period during middle school where I was mostly absent, but for the last few years I’ve been quite regular in attendance) and I feel like most of the meeting has no idea who I am. In addition to that, I’ve not known how to communicate my involvement and dedication in various national Quaker communities, such as being chosen as one of six co-clerks of the HS program at FGC Gathering this summer, my participation in Young Quakes, my attendance at a Pendle Hill Clerking workshop last fall, my involvement in this QUIP book, or how I have been reading many Quaker books over the last few months, all of which have been VERY integral in my spiritual development. Even Friends in Durham Friends Meeting with whom I do converse sometimes after Meeting do not know of all these things with which I am involved.
Also, when I stopped attending First Day school in January of my junior year in high school (a little over a year ago) and began attending the full hour of Worship, I spoke to two youth leaders about it briefly so they would understand, and then there was no further response. Looking back on this, I feel that the Meeting should be more involved in such a transition for all young Friends — not just those adults directly involved in the youth group/First Day school, but everyone should be more aware and attentive of the young Friends in Meeting and their involvement in Quaker communities outside of Meeting.
One thing that each of us felt is very important yet very lacking is mentorship within Meeting for Worship. There need to be adults who are not necessarily First Day school teachers, youth group leaders, or parents who are willing to have a relationship with a young Friend as someone who has had more experience with Quakerism and can nurture a young Friend’s spiritual development. A young Friend who was in Oregon with me related her experiences with a mentor she has at Earlham (she is a second-year there, currently), and how she sees him about once a week; often she even receives books to read from him.
As the only active young Friend at my school (I’m sort of the ‘token’ Quaker around), I usually do not have anyone to talk to about my spiritual findings and leadings. As I have continued to develop spiritually, I find more and more I need other Friends to talk who are familiar with my struggles.
These are issues not only within Durham Friends Meeting, but in Meetings across the country. I recognize that there are efforts to improve youth programs everywhere, but it never hurts to start locally.
As a graduating senior this year, and as an involved Friend, I would like to improve my relationship with the Meeting as a whole and make way for better relationships between members and young Friends in the future. This, however, needs to be fully a double-sided effort.
FGC Gathering program is up, whew…
March 23, 2005
Thank you to everyone who refrained from commenting after 9pm last night. I finally slogged through the work of putting the FGC Gathering program online in my role as FGC webmaster. Whoo-whee! For those who don’t know, the Gathering is a week-long conference held at different locations each summer: this year’s takes place Seventh Month 2 – 9 in Blacksburg, Virginia.
Now I guess it’s time to think about workshops. Zach Moon and I are offering up one called “Strangers to the Covenant” but then you know that already. Liz Oppenheimer aka the The Good Raised Up is leading one called “Quaker Identity: Yearning, Forming, Deepening” that I suspect will be informed by her “own experience of stepping into a Quaker identity”. There’s also an exciting history workshop being led by Betsy Cazden, “Dilemmas from Our Quaker Past” (I have to admit when I saw the listing I wondered if I should call Zach up and assure him he’d be fine doing the Strangers workshop on his own so I could take Betsy’s). Other mentions: my wife Julie really liked the Lynn Fitz-Hugh workshop she took a few years ago.
As always there are workshops whose leaders I know to be more solid and grounded than the workshop they’re proposing; conversely, there are workshops that sound more interesting than I know their leader to be. Like always there are plenty whose appeal and/or relevance to Quakerism I just don’t comprehend at all, but that’s the Gathering.
Any recommendations from the peanut gallery? I should say that I’d like to refrain from ridiculing all of the workshops that beg to be made fun of. It feels as if this would edge too close to detraction. We will only get to Kingdom by modeling Christian charity and wearing our love on our sleeves.
Nonprofit Website Design and Measurement
October 30, 2004
A 2004 Denominational Website Report
When I wrote this in the Fall of 2004, I was working as the webmaster for Friends General Conference, the US/Canadian denominational body for the liberal branch of unprogrammed Quakers. As webmaster, I felt that one of my most important responsibilities was to understand how religious seekers use the internet and how our nonprofit organization could benefit from understanding these patterns.
My 2004 report on the three FGC websites touched on a lot of these issues. I offer it here because I hope it can give other nonprofit and denominational websites some ideas about how to measure their site’s use. Too often we put up websites without any follow-up analysis of their use. You just can’t make an effective website like this and if your work is ministry you don’t want its reach constrained by minor navigational design issues. Please feel free to use the comment page to start a discussion on any of these issues.
State of the Websites
Report for FGC Central Committee, October 2004
By Martin Kelley, webmaster
It’s important to start off with a little editorial about why we need reports like this. We put up a website and we know people use it. Why bother spending time collecting data?
The internet is simultaneously vague and precise. We can say definitively that the FGC website received 114,097 “unique visitors” in the past fiscal year. But how many people does that represent? Is that a high number or low number? How did these users react when they came to the site. Did they think to themselves “whoops, not what I want” and leave, or did they go “wow, what’s this FGC?, hey this is great.” LESSON: We need data to know if the site is being used well.
Everyone who reads this report is by definition an insider. None of us are able to step into the shoes of an unknowledgeable seeker. In my study of usage patterns, I have found that the differences in website use between Quaker insiders and seekers is so great that they might as well be looking at different websites, if not different media altogether (see How Insiders and Seekers Use the Quaker Net.
Because of this gap we cannot design the site based on whims or personal preferences. It is incredibly difficult to imagine how newcomers might navigate the site. We can only consider the design of the site after we’ve examined in usage, both in detail (actual users moving through the site) and in aggregate (pages and links visited over periods of time). See also: How to measure the peace movement. LESSON: We can only effectively design the site if we incorporate sophisticated and detailed data about how the site is being used.
Part 2, Googlization
By far the most significant change in our websites over the past year has been the “googlization” of Quakerbooks and Quakerfinder, both of which now have over four times the visitors they were getting last year.
The Google Problem: Both Quakerbooks and Quakerfinder have had great content from their start. The former lists the entire inventory of FGC’s bookstore, along with book descriptions and reader commentary. The latter has our list of meetings – addresses, worship times, and contact information. But on both sites the bulk of the content was locked up in databases. Before users could benefit from the sites, they had to find them. This limited much of the use to people who already know about FGC and our resources. Because internet search engines can’t search website databases (a problem known as the hidden or deep web), they could index only a limited number of pages on these sites and they made referrals on only the most generic search phrases (e.g., “quaker bookstore” “quaker meeting directory”).
We made various changes to both sites (technical details below) that have made them searchable by Google and the other search engines, which now return our sites for very specific search queries, e.g., “Quakers in conflict Ingle” and “Quakers Poughkeepsie”.
A Wider, More Inclusive Audience: What’s great is that this has given us not just a bigger audience, but our target audience. Most of these visitors don’t know enough about how Friends are organized to even know where to look for information. With Quakerfinder and Quakerbooks, we’re now be visible on their terms.
We’re giving them the basic information they’re seeking and we’re doing it when they are actively seeking it. This last point is important. I spend a lot of time watching how people use websites. If you email someone out of the blue with a link to a website, they might follow it but only half-heartedly. They might be doing five other things at the same time and they rarely stay to full use the website’s resources. When someone comes to a site via a search engine they’re much more likely to look around: this is the visit that they are initiating because they have something specific they’re trying to find.
Having a “googlified” Quakerfinder means we’re actually reaching people who are ready to try out a Quaker meeting and we’re giving them that most basic information that’s often hard to find. With a searchable Quakerbooks we’re selling books to people who might not even have thought about Quakers as a possible spiritual path. I suspect that both sites are doing more outreach about Quakerism than any of us expect.
Update, 11/29/04: I recently met someone who came to Friends after reading the Quaker entry in Wikipedia. He had gone through the list of religious denominations in the U.S. till he found one that spoke to his condition. In the past month FGC has gotten 57 visitors from Wikipedia.
The Fixes
In the official committee report I tried to steer clear of too many technical details since I wanted people to read it. So I’ll expand on them here on the website version.
Unique Domains: I don’t think it really helped to give Quakerfinder.org and Quakerbooks.org their own domains, at least initially. In last year’s report I noted that most of the traffic to those sites came from the main FGCQuaker.org site and that the separate domains weren’t particularly useful. Now the sites do have their own sort of identity, thanks to the “googlization,” which was a different process for the two sites.
Quakerbooks.org: Visitors to the Quakerbooks.org site are given session IDs to allow us to follow along with them as they make their selections. Since some users don’t allow cookies, this ID sometimes appears in the URL (it appears as something like “?sessionid=1514” appended to the end of the address). Google really hates session IDs because its automated software doesn’t know if the different URLs are different pages (to be indexed separately) or merely different sessions looking at the same page. So Googles just ignores anything that looks like this. The easiest fix is to have the software look to see if the visitor is Google and take of the session IDs (Google is okay with this workaround; I also used this method to allow them to index my Nonviolence.org discussion board.)
Quakerfinder: On Quakerfinder.org, the problem was that visitors had to type in a zip code to get to any of the content. Google’s not that interactive and only follows links. Until recently, it thought there was only three pages to the site. To fix this we set up an alternative way to navigate the site: from the homepage you can now follow a link to lists of Quaker Meetings by state. The zip code lookup is so much more convenient that we don’t suspect many live people will look up by state, but Google will and because of this it now lists 808 pages on the site. Now Google acts as a alternate lookup service, one that doesn’t depend on people finding our site beforehand.
Part 3, Comparing the Sites
Visitors
The basic measure used to measure website traffic is that of the “unique visitor,” which counts user sessions. Here are this year’s comparisons to last year’s. Numbers represent the monthly average “unique visitors” to each of our three websites.
Site FY 03/04 total FY 02/03 total Increase FGCQuaker.org 114,097 82,747 38% Quakerfinder.org 48,084 23,964 100% Quakerbooks.org 69,924 19,332 262%
The last two sites have truly remarkable jumps. The numbers are a little misleading, however, as the increase in traffic hasn’t been gradual but sudden and climbing. Compare the last full month (September 2004) with the same month the previous year and all three sites have higher jumps.
Site Sept 04 Sept 03 Increase FGCQuaker.org 9459 8254 15% Quakerfinder.org 8782 1997 340% Quakerbooks.org 7498 1611 366%
While the internet grows in use every year, the increases on Quakerfinder and Quakerbooks represent a quantum leap over that incremental increase. They represent “search engine optimization” of those sites, or what we all refer to the “googlization” of the sites.
Links:
One way of measuring the visibility of a website is to count how many other webpages link to it. Here are
Site October 2004 October 2003 Increase FGCQuaker.org 496 396 25% Quakerfinder.org 196 46 326% Quakerbooks.org 151 96 57%
For comparison: Quaker.org is up to 11,900 links, Phila. Yearly Meeting is 248, PendleHill.org is 420, FCNL.org is 10,200, Nonviolence.org is 20,900 and AFSC.org is 21,800. See Miscellaneous & Notes at end to see how numbers were obtained. See How Can We Measure the State of the Peace Movement? for more on this method of measurement.
Part 4, The FGCQuaker.org Site
Visitors
Use of FGCQuaker.org continues to grow at a good clip. We have a 38% increase this fiscal year compared with last’s. The site received over 114,000 unique visitors from October 1, 2003 to September 30, 2004.
To the right is the chart showing unique visitors by month for the past three years:
Referrers: Where did visitors come from?
In September 2004, there were 9459 “unique visits” to the FGCQuaker.org site, still our most-visited site. Here’s where they came from.
1021 from Quakerfinder.org. One surprise this year is the jump in Quakerfinder-referred visits. This is due of course to the phenomenal visibility of that site. In a recent one-month period, FGCQuaker received 983 visits from Quakerfinder links, two-thirds of which came from the “googlized” Quakerfinder pages. About one in ten visitors are now coming to FGCQuaker through Quakerfinder. Up 288% from last year.
842 from Google. We get a lot of Google traffic because we have a lot of content on our site: dozens of pamphlets, years worth of FGConnections, large parts of the old Fostering Vital Friends Meetings resource binder. Visitors via search engines often don’t know FGC exists but they want to know about our programs and work. Because FGC does such great work (and because we publicize it online!), many of our resources answer questions people have. I think this is great outreach.
Here’s an example. This Spring I noticed that we were getting visits on fairly generic searches for racism. Here’s a list of search inquiries that brought people to the CMR pages on FGC:
“ending racism”
“racially diverse communities”
“quaker racial diversity”
“diversity in friends”
“ethnic diversity”
“responsibilities to racism”
“pastoral care racism”
“activities for ending racism”
“testimonies racial unity”
This is a fascinating list precisely because these are generic searches. People aren’t looking for “Quakers ending racism,” they’re looking for anyone “ending racism” and Google is bringing them to us (we’re number 6 on that search term). This is surprising: I would think the much bigger denominations would all have committees ending racism that would come up higher just because of their larger institutional clout. That we are so high suggests that this work is not as common as I we might hope and that Friends might have the opportunity to play a role in larger faith dialogues.
When people use search engines, they get results from all over the FGC website. Searches might pull up some four-year article on FGConnections, or one of the “Friends And…” pamphlets that we’ve put online. Google up 12% from last year. There were about 83 more visits from regional Google sites.
434 from Quaker.org. Most of these people are coming directly from the Quaker.org homepage to the FGCQuaker.org homepage. I estimate that about 60% of these visitors leave the FGC site without clicking on any links. They’re probably just superficially curious about us, but not enough to look around the site. Up 39% from last year.
253 from other search engines: 118 from Yahoo (118), MSN (74), AOL (42), Ask (19).
81 from Beliefnet. Beliefnet has a popular “Belief-o-Matic” quiz that will magically tell you what religious faith you should join. It’s rigged in such a way that a lot of people unexpectedly come up as Quaker. The qui zthen directs people to an information page on Friends, which includes some links to FGC. Most of the Beliefnet visitors are coming from that information page directly to the FGC homepage. Up 200% from last year.
69 from UVa’s Religious Movements site. This is a pretty good description of Quakerism
60 from Quakerbooks. Our own bookstore website attracts a lot of new people who aren’t part of the established Quaker networks and many of them first learn of FGC this way.
53 from Religious Tolerance. A popular website from a Canadian Unitarian that profiles religions..
52 from QuakerInfo.org. This is the Philadelphia Quaker Information Center, a joint project of a number of Quaker organizations, including FGC.
Where did people go?
Top Destinations in September 04:
* To the homepage: 2396;
* Library’s “Welcome to Quakerism” pages: 463;
* A&O “Resources for Meetings”: 320 (prominently linked from Quakerfinder);
* Gathering pages: 309;
* “Silent Worship Quaker Values” tract on the Library section;
* Gathering’s pictures from last year: 149;
* Religious Ed: 149;
* FGConnections articles: 129;
* Ideas for First Day School”: 127;
* Advancement & Outreach homepage: 124;
* Young Quakes: 118;
* Publications: 100;
* Development 97.
These are pretty typical numbers. The only significant variation over the year comes in Spring, when traffic to the Gathering pages goes up. In May 2004, 961 people visited the Gathering homepage, and 355 visited the workshop listings.
Forget the Aggregates: How Do People Use the Site?
So far I’ve looked at tallied-up numbers: how many people visited, how many pages were looked at. The problem with this sort of statistic is that it doesn’t give us a feel for how individuals are actually using the site. Looking at usage explodes the preconceptions that many of us “Insider Quakers” might bring to the web.
The first lesson: most people don’t come into our site via the FGC homepage. Even more shocking: close to half never even see the homepage!
This blew me away when I first realized it. We spend so much time designing the homepage and wondering how we’re going to direct seekers from it but a lot of this work is in vain.
Of that 45% or so that enter the site via the FGC homepage, most of them leave the site immediately without following any link whatsoever.
Let’s splice this another way: 70% of the people who hit our site (wherever they enter) don’t look at any page other than that first one. They don’t click on anything but the back button.
What are some of the lessons on this: one is that content is all important. Those majority of visitors who bypass the homepage to parachute directly inside the site are coming for specific information. Many of them don’t know anything about FGC and most of them don’t care to learn about FGC the organization. They’re looking for some specific piece of information on Quakers (“painting of Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society Quakers” and “Quakers prison reform”), or on religious education in general (“religious meeting”), or on how churches are dealing with racism (“racial diversity” and “do blacks worship with only blacks”). These are all search phrases that have brought visitors to FGCQuaker.org. So it’s great that we have our pamphlets online and FGConnections and RE materials and A&O brochures.
There are hundreds of pages on our site, most of which we probably forget are there, but Google knows them and will display them up when the query is right.
Another lesson is that we shouldn’t rely on our homepage to help visitors navigate. We shouldn’t even worry much about using how its design will work for both insiders and seekers: most of the seekers never even go there. Most of the people coming to the FGC homepage are looking for FGC the organization.
Committee Page Case Study: One committee, Advancement & Outreach, is considering redesigning their committee page. In preparation I’ve looked at the usage and I think it makes a good case study. The A&O committee gets the most visible link on the FGC Homepage (top left, it gets this position because the committee list is alphabetical). Despite this prominence, almost no visitors actually follow this link. Only 1.5% of visitors to the FGCQuaker.org site ever get to the A&O homepage and even at that it’s the most visited committee page on our site!
Most of the visitors that did get to the A&O page
left without clicking on anything. It is safe to say that most of those
visitors didn’t thoroughly read through the page. The most-followed
link is the first one, for the “Inreach/Outreach” review. In the one-month period I examined only 9 people followed this link! This doesn’t mean A&O material isn’t used: Quakerfinder is very successful and the pamphlet “Resources for Local meetings” is popular. And over 300 people in this month came to some part of the A&O site. Committee pages are useful for the relative trickle of Quaker insiders who visit the page, but we should focus more on the content committees are producing.
The lesson is clear: visitors are primarily looking for 1) good useful content from the “Quaker Library” resources and 2) practical information about the Gathering. Pages about committees and internal FGC workings are not well used. We need to continue the focus on practical resources. We also have to accept that people will not be looking at what we think they should be looking at. Through these visits we will slowly build up FGC’s reputation but many people only dimly know what they’re looking at.
What I didn’t say in the report
In my official FGC report, I only hinted at the differences between institutional websites and focused online new media sites.
One surprising find that didn’t make it into the report is that the three most-viewed pages on my own Quaker Ranter site were seen by more people than all but the two most-viewed FGC pages. The most viewed pages on FGCQuaker are the homepage and the Welcome to Quakerism page. Three of the pages on “Quaker Ranter” are seen by more people than any other page on the FGC website. FGC’s Religious Education and Advancement and Outreach and Publications pages all are more obscure than my homepage or my “resources on plain dress” directory.
Institutional websites by their very nature have too many conflicting audiences and too timid a voice to act as much more than a reference resource. The Friends General Conference website is probably more friendly to seekers than most other institutional websites out there but even it gets a lot of people hitting the “back” button as soon as they hit the homepage.
Religious seekers are looking for individual voices with something to say and I suspect new media seeker websites will only become more important as time goes on. I suspect this will come as a surprise to institutional insiders as it happens. Sort of relatedly, see my Peace and Twenty-Somethings for some of the generational aspects of this shift. My Books and Media section collects similar sorts of essays.
One more piece in this: the FGC websites didn’t get a lot of blog traffic. If all I were was the webmaster of Friends General Conference, I’d assume that all this blog talk in the media was hype. But as the “Quaker Ranter” I know that a popular blog and/or personal site can get a lot of readers. The lesson here is that there’s little cross-over. Blogs seem to send little traffic to institutional websites and vice versa (actually institutional websites can’t really send people to bloggers for a variety of reasons). I’ve had a number of people read my blog and declare they’ll be coming to the next FGC Gathering so I know personal blogs can help raise organization profiles but that interest doesn’t manifest itself as an immediately-followed link. I suspect the community being formed by the blogs is far more important than the raw number of referral links.
Part 5, Quakerbooks.org and Quakerfinder.org
Quakerbooks.org
The first of our two sites to be “googlified” was Quakerbooks.org. I had long hoped to have our book listings show up on the search engines, especially since we carry a lot of hard-to-find ones. I had opened up the discussion board of my peace site to Google and been happy with the results.
Back in early 2003 we installed new software by Steve Beuret to power the bookstore website, one that would allow easy transfer of information between the website and our inventory program. The website could now list whether a book was in stock, and orders would go directly into the system (no more retyping them!). Once the new system was running smoothly, I emailed Steve about optimizing it for Google. There were two parts to this: having the books show up (Steve) and linking them in such a way that Google would index them properly (me). It took awhile to get ito all working but on December 17, 2003 Google came through and indexed the site.
The most visited pages are the introductory ones:
- Welcome to Quakerism
- Becoming a Member
- Basics for Everyone
The search phrases that are bringing in visitors used to be generic (“quaker bookstore”) they now are very specific. September’s list is typical:
- crash by jerry spinnelli
- Andrew Goldsworthy
- celebration of discipline
- the misfits by james howe
- rufus jones
I knew we’d show up high in the Google rankings for obscure books but I’ve been pleased that we’re right up there with Amazon and Barnes and Noble even with mainstream books.
Our online best sellers are pretty
- Grounded in God: Care And Nurture In Friends Meetings
- Friends for 350 Years
- The Quaker Way
- Philadelphia Faith and Practice
- Listening Spirituality Volume 1
- Silence and Witness
- The Journal of George Fox
The bookstore inventory software is not very good at pulling marketing statistics. While it’s very good at telling us what books have sold and what books need to be reordered, it won’t tally up things by type of sale (phone vs. web vs. mail-order). The bookstore report should include more information on actual web sales.
Anecdotally it appears as if about half our web orders are new customers. Many of them are from geographic areas which are not traditionally Quaker. A&O has produced a flyer which goes into orders for new customers.
Quakerfinder.org
After we saw how successful the “googlization” of Quakerbooks was, I thought we should try it for Quakerfinder. It took a little seasoning to get everyone on A&O to sign off on the project but I am delighted to say they saw their way clear. The result has been nothing sort of amazing. Use of the site has grown by 340%. But the actual numbers are even more important: by my best estimate, over 6000 a month are using Quakerfinder who would not have even found the resource if we hadn’t made it search engine friendly. That’s 72,000 people a year – twice FGC’s membership, and these are the EXTRA people coming. Altogether at our current rate, this site is being used by over 100,000 unique visitors. Even if only one in ten of them make it to a Meeting, that’s a lot of people.
In last year’s report I pointed out that most of Quakerfinder’s traffic was coming from the FGC site. At that point, it didn’t looking like giving the location look-up utility it’s own domain name was paying off in any tangible way. Now it’s clearly worth it. Just the extra 600 or so visitors Quakerfinder is throwing to FGCQUaker.org site makes it worth it! Horray!
Twenty Times the Google-Linked Visits: I compared two typical months, one before and the other after the “search engine optimization.” In May 2004 Quakerfinder received 241 visitors from Google searches (footnote 1). In September, it received 3813 visitors – that’s over twenty times the visits. Overall visits almost tripled, from 2292 to 6037, with 60% of those extra visitors directly attributed to the Google bounce. The chart to the left shows daily Google-referred visits since the middle of March.
More Than Just Google: Other search engines were affected too: all together search engine visits went from from 311 in May to 4134 in September. For those interested, the top five search engines for Quakerfinder traffic are:
- Google.com 83%
- AOL: 5%
- Google Canada: 3%
- Yahoo: 1%
- Comcast: 0.8%
As you can see, Google far overwhelms everyone else, which is why we often just call this “the googlization” of Quakerfinder!
Part 6, Miscellaneous and Notes
Miscellaneous
Mailing Lists
Late in the fiscal year, we purchased bulk email software. No, we’re not going to try to sell Viagra or a new home mortgage. This program will help us get information out to our bookstore customers and committee lists. Our occasional bookstore emails (“Book Musings from Lucy”) have been very well received, with only a tiny fraction of recipients asking to be taken off the list.
Web Host Changes
A big project, though not very exciting, is that we’re changing our web hosting company. FGCQuaker.org is with the new company (OLM) and Quakerfinder.org and Quakerbooks.org will be moving shortly. The new company organizes our accounts better and we hope that their service is better. (We’d recommend avoiding Data Realm also known as Serve.com.)
Notes
Programs I Use to Collect Stats:
- For overall numbers, I used a extremely-common program called Webalizer, which gives useful monthly summaries.
- For details I used a program called AXS Visitor Tracking Program, which lets me watch individual users as they navigate the site. With AXS I can also get details on where visitors to specific pages come from.
- I have a list of key words which I watch on Google; every few weeks
I record where our sites stand on those phrases and watch how
navigational changes I make affect our Google rankings. - I also use Google to see what other websites are linking to us. I
look at what they link to (often not our homepage) and how many sites
there are linking. - I also follow links using more specific search engines such as Technorati, which indexes blogs (“web blogs” or personal diary-like sites).
Measuring Links:
I use Altavista’s search engine to measure how many links a site has. For good reasons, Google doesn’t list obscure websites and also counts how a site’s links back to itself. Here’s a sample Altavista query:
Unique Visitors:
The most standard measure of website usage, here is a definition: “A real visitor to a web site. Web servers record the IP addresses of each visitor, and this is used to determine the number of real people who have visited a web site. If for example, someone visits twenty pages within a web site, the server will count only one unique visitor (because the page accesses are all associated with the same IP address) but twenty page accesses.”
Scandal du Jour: Vice President leaking CIA Names
October 2, 2003
In the last year scandals seem to follow a curious pattern: they rise up, get a lot of talk in Washington but little elsewhere and then disappear, only to come back three months later as massive public news.
Back in July, we posted a number of entries about White House dirty tricks against a whistleblower’s wife. For those who missed the story, diplomat Joseph Wilson had traveled to the African nation of Niger to investigate the story that that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from it. Wilson easily determined that the story was a hoax and reported this information back to Washington. Despite the debunking, President Bush used the allegation in his State of the Union address and Wilson later came out and told reporters the President knew the information was false. A short time later someone in the White House let a conservative columnist know that Wilson was married to an operative for the Central Intelligence Agency, exposing her name and endangering both her mission and the lives of those helping her.
We called this a treasonable offense but the news blew over and few people outside Washington seemed to follow the story. Last week it blew up big again and it’s been creating headlines. Rumor has it that the White House leak came from very high up in the Vice President’s office and the questions have mounted:
- who leaked the information?
- what did the Vice President know?
- what did the President know?
- did the President and his advisors know the Niger story was false when he addressed the nation and use it to call for war in Iraq?
The in’s and out’s of the renewed scandal are being ably tallied by Joshua Michal Marshall’s Talking Points Memo. He’s situating the leak in the backdrop of an ongoing war between the Vice President’s office and the CIA. As we’ve been documenting for a year now, the Vice President has been pressuring the CIA to skew their findings to suit the political needs of Administration. Most of the pre-war reports from the CIA found no evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, for example, which made Vice President Dick Cheney furious and he was somewhat sucessful in getting them to rewrite their story. Now of course we know the CIA was right, and that Saddam Hussein didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction.
We have independent intelligence services precisely so we will have the best information possible when making decisions of national security. To politicize these services to serve the agendas of a pro-war Administration (who salivated over an Iraq invasion long before the 9/11 bombings) is wrong. It’s the kind of thing a banana republic dictator does. It’s not something that the American people can afford.
It will be there in decline our entire lives
August 1, 2003
A lot of the generational problems I see affecting Quakerism are not unique to us. The values of the Sixties generation have become the the new oppressive orthodoxy. In Quakerism, our “freedom from” (the past, Christianity, the testimonies understood as the reflections of faith) has become nearly complete, which means it’s become boring, and stifling. There’s a refusal to take responsibility for matters of faith and so all truth is judged by how it affects one’s own individual spirituality (we’re all Ranters now, hence my website’s name). Where Friends once talked about the death of the rebellious self-will and the bearing the cross, we now endlessly share self-absorbed stories of our “spiritual journeys” (does it really matter, hasn’t Christ gotten us all here now and isn’t that the point?), while we toss out pseudo-religious feel-good buzzwords like “nurture” and “community” like they’re party favors.
I often feel like I’m talking to a brick wall when I talk about these issues (can’t we just all be nurturing without being told to, simply because it’s the right way to be?). Fortunately, there are some fascinating sites from thirty-somethings also seeing through the generational crisis affect Christians. Right now I’m reading Pastoral Softness, a post from Jordan Cooper, a pastor in a community church in Saskatchewan, and this paragraph just hits me so hard:
The modern church is not going to listen to us, it won’t affirm us, or give us any of its resources there is no point anymore in letting it get to us. It will be there in decline our entire lives and will probably go down fighting and wasting a lot of lives and money but to let that define us spiritually will be an even bigger loss. We can’t blame it for being what it is and if we are going to have a long term future in serving God, we need to stop looking at our environment and instead in our hearts.
Serious stuff, indeed, and I suspect some Friends would elder me for even repeating it. But its really the same message that Christ gave a young man 350 years ago:
When all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could I tell what to do, then, oh, then, I heard a voice which said, “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition”; and when I heard it, my heart did leap for joy. Then the Lord let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak to my condition, namely, that I might give Him all the glory. (Journal of George Fox)
Everyone knows the first part but it’s the last sentence that’s been speaking to me for at least the last year. Does Christ make the insitutions fail us just so He can direct our gaze to the true Source? And isn’t this what Quaker simplicity is all about: keeping our minds as undistracted as possible so we can see the real deal?
Cooper did an interview with Robert Webber, an author I know nothing about but who’s apparently written a few books dealing with the new generation of Evangelicals. I sometimes stumble across people and wonder if there’s not some kindred culture out there that’s just out of reach because it’s supposedly on some other side of an theological rift. Anyway, Webber says:
The pragmatic churches have become institutionalized — with some exceptions. They responded to the sixties and seventies, created a culture-driven church and don’t get that the world has changed again. Pragmatics, being fixed, have little room for those who are shaped by the postmodern revolution.
A lot of these evangelicals are reaching for something that looks very much like early Quakerism (which self-consciously reached toward early Christianity). I’d like to think that Friends have something to offer these seekers and that there could be a dynamic re-emergence of Quakerism. But to be honest, most Quakers I know don’t have anything to offer these wearied seekers except more of the same hashed out institutionalism, with different flavored toppings (differences of social stands, e.g., pacifism, attitudes towards gays). I know John Punshon’s been talking a lot about Quakers’ possible intersection with a larger renewed evangelism but I’m ashamed to admit I haven’t read Reasons for Hopeyet. I’ll do that soon.
Update:
Comparison chart of traditional, pragmatic, and younger evangelicals from Robert Webber by way of Jordan Cooper. Very interesting.
More Online Reading:
Leading Dying Churches
Jordan Cooper
The Ooze
“Indieallies” Meetup to connect with local readers of these sites