يوميات معاذ - حيث تجد #حديث_الأربعاء وقصصًا أخرى

Category: page views (Page 1 of 3)

Reaching 500,000 views on my blog

2020-04-11 / / 0 Comments

I know, I know! I’ve said that I am on hiatus and that I won’t blog until further notice (still displaced by the way, thanks for asking!). But this is too much of an update to pass! Half a million views on my personal blog.

Steps building up to this moment

I’ve always celebrated these milestones on my blog.

And here we are..

The now and then

Wow, to think that my blog (in all of it’s iterations and different directions) was viewed half a million times. That’s unthinkable and out worldly. Not even in my wildest dreams have I thought such thing was possible. Yet it is.

Things aren’t exactly what they seem

I’ve learned that Blogger’s stats aren’t the most accurate. Some would go as far as saying that they aren’t a reliable way to track views of your blog. A sudden realization, yet an enlightening one.  I’ll take them for what they are, with a grain of salt.

How was this supposed to be?

I had some great ideas. To have a give away to increase my reach and fan base. It was going to be big. Sadly with everything I’m dealing with in my life. I couldn’t bring myself to follow through with these plans. Things have been overwhelming for a while now.

A change of pace

Effective immediately, the stat widget is no longer displayed on my blog. I won’t talk about any further stat related milestones (well maybe the 1 million mark would be worth celebrating). This is the day I say goodbye to the numbers. Did they ever matter?
Thank you for reading this update and being a part of my blogging journey.

I reached 300,000 views on my blog!

2017-08-06 / / 0 Comments
Today I celebrated a significant milestone on my blog, as I reached the 300,00 view mark!

It’s been quite the journey, like the life we live it’s been a series of ups and downs. But I’m glad with the result.



It took me a while to reach this milestone, a little faster than I expected, but my blog isn’t doing as good as I hoped for, I guess the gold age of blogging has turned away for good.

My site had a boom a while ago at the heat of the passport crisis, now it seems like things got better because it’s not drawing as many readers as before (I measure the severity of the crisis by how many readers view the post over a period of time). As the views dropped to the way it used to be before I started blogging about passports.

For my next milestone, I’m aiming for 400,000 views on the way to half a million views (it has a good ring to the ear doesn’t it).

I noticed that I don’t blog as often, I don’t have as much time or as much subjects to talk about as before. I’ve done experimenting with software and I’m trying to settle with a set of tools and master how to use them.

 A quick reminder of what I use on daily basis: I use GNU Linux Kubuntu 16.04 as a daily operating system with LibreOffice as my productivity suit. I also use Zimwiki as my personal database to collect data and snippets from all over the web. Android has proven to be a good choice for a smartphone so far.


I’m on vacation for the next few weeks, it’s not like I have anything to do or anywhere to go, I do visit the bank regularly to try and withdraw some cash (the liquidity crisis continues for the third year on a row) and with the daily power cuts and heat, it’s a tropical paradise indoors! (Power cuts affect the Internet and thus makes blogging more difficult).


I try to mix things with the Arabic posts which has attracted a slew of followers! I actually have subscribers on my blog now, which is pretty nice!

I will continue to blog tho as there will always be something to write about.

What I like about blogging is that the page views increase everyday, there is no way that the stats will go down, and no one can take the progress I made away from me.

Have you reached a milestone on your blog? How long did it take you to reach there?
Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

A rather delayed update!

2017-03-26 / / 0 Comments
It’s been sometime since I’ve written a proper post in English! Like I said before I’ve leaned on Arabic way too much in the past few weeks, being a bilingual blogger is like having two wives and I need to be fair with both of them (the languages and not the said wives!).

A bit about my life right now

It’s the juicy details that bloggers share about their daily life that make following them so much fun, well I’m going to disappoint you there!

If you have been following my blog for the past six months, then let me tell you this: Things are a bit of the same old, nothing has changed, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It depends on how you look at things and what is your perspective on life.

The blog

If you have been checking my blog in the past few days you would notice that I have been trying out many themes and going back and forth between them, I have standards and if a theme doesn’t match it, then I simply drop it.

My standards for themes are rather simple

  • Shows similar posts.
  • Has adsense support.
  • Simple, not the magazine type.
  • I can add the basic widgets I use like archive, search and blog stats.

Blogger’s new themes

It all started when blogger added some new themes, and I had to try out the shiny new toys, but alas! They don’t live up to my standards, and they had to go!


Custom themes give a wide range of customization (and I used my fair share of them), and they usually have everything I need out of the box, but they require adding links and what not, and usually have some items that can’t be edited, and they seem heavier and slower to load because of the junk code added by whoever made them, compare the number of lines between them and native ones to get an idea of what I’m talking about!

Similar posts widget

I’ve been using Linkwithin for quite some time to showcase some of my older posts on the new, it’s something I see in most of the blogs I follow and I’d like to have on my blog as well, but Linkwithin has two main issues that I couldn’t deal with!

Issues with Linkwithin

1. The custom domain issue

I had a custom domain for a while and I had Linkwithin on my blog at the time, and it seems that I used the custom domain to generate the widget, so after going back to a blogspot domain, I still get the old domain links (which are now dead links) and that’s bad for SEO.
Speaking of SEO, having an external site handle your similar content isn’t exactly SEO friendly, and it damages the site rank due to external referring (research the matter on your own time, I’m not a SEO expert).

2. No secure connection

Having the secure connection added to the site wouldn’t show Linkwithin, as it requires a regular connection to work, so if you want to keep Linkwithin, you will have to sacrifice the extra layer of security.

I added some code to my blog’s template manually and now it shows the posts without an external widget, it’s much better this way!

And don’t bother contacting Linkwithin‘s support site, I‘m still waiting on  replies from a year ago when the issue started!

Adsense

I’ve also added ads, and found a way to control the content so nothing indecent would be displayed on my blog (the main reason that prohibited me from adding them a long time ago).

So be kind and add my site to your ad blocker’s exception list, I’m trying to make some money here,Okay?

Views drop

The blog isn’t doing as good as it used to do (what is in this country anyway?) I used to get around 2000 views on Thursday alone -the passport zombie stampede day as I call it sometimes- and now it takes me ten days to get the same amount of views! I know I keep saying I don’t care, but I just got my Adsense configured, with this rate I’ll get the first payment in 2030!!

Settling down

I customized a simple theme, it looks nice and it has all the elements I think a blog needs, it looks great and I think it says a bit too much about me, but you have to look closer to be able to see it!

Things I like about this theme

What I like about this new theme I have is that it’s made by Blogger itself, it’s cleaner than the free themes available on the market, that is filled with malicious code that drags the blog down and referral links that steals your blog’s traffic, it is lighter and leaner and it’s everything I wanted in a blog put in one place!  
I hope you like it because it’s staying for a while!  This must be what a home owner feels like!

Cutting back on social media

A detox is a bit too extreme, but I think that taking some time off of social media every now and then is actually healthy, especially when it spreads nothing but negativity and bad news, that’s living in a war zone for you!

Which is why I write, I write to see things more clearly and to get things off of my chest, and it feels nice to know that someone reads this and connects with me (even as a sympathetic reader).

Final words

It’s a bit of a nostalgic fresh start, this theme is almost identical to the one I used back in 2012, and the views are low just like when I began. So it’s my chance to go back on top and even bigger as me.

Life is a series of ups and downs, I enjoyed my time on the top and now I’m sliding down, only to go back on top again! 

What do you have to say about this post? Please leave a comment and share on social media 🙂  

Total blackout in Tripoli, 200,000 views update

2017-01-15 / / 0 Comments
It’s no secret that the electricity in Libya is terrible, the company who is supposed to provide electricity to Libyans failed doing the one job it was supposed to do, the only thing they could do is make up excuses for failure..




Failure of the GECOL


In the last couple of years all they do is posting on Facebook saying how many hours of outage to expect, calculating Libya’s electric production and deficiency. These programmed power outages are meant to stabilize the power grid and to prevent blackouts. Many cities refuse programmed power cuts to stabilize the grid, so Tripoli takes most of the power cuts in the summer and in the winter, as if that wasn’t enough, some protesters closed a main gas line that fuels a major power station, threatening a blackout on most of Libya.

The blackout

We could tell this was different, usually the electricity goes off instantly, after 5 years of misery you start to get used to the outages, this outage on the other hand faded slowly, like a circle of darkness closing down on the center. As soon as the power went out communications said farewell, the dwindling Wimax service went down immediately and Libyana struggled to get a signal. Since it was night time, I decided to go up stairs and see the range of the outage, since controlled outages usually leave some places with power while turning off others, and there were some places that were “untouchable”, unaffected by the outages, so I looked for these first, but what I saw was completely different!!

I could see the stars! 

Stars usually disappear because of the city lights, but they were visible clearly that night (I haven’t seen stars this clear since the 2011 uprising when the power went off for 11 straight days). Darkness was all over the city, with some scattered spots of light here and there, I could tell right away that they were generators.


The nights stars are clearly visible thanks to the blackout


Why did it happen?

We learned that while trying to operate one of the power stations that was off, a huge power surge caused a blackout on most of Libya, even cities unaffected with the programmed power cuts, and while the power returned since dawn to most cities, Tripoli doesn’t have power,I’m using what’s left of the battery power to write these lines before the laptop goes into slumber.



Final words

The winter is still pretty cold, people are dying each day of cold and sickness in this cruel winter, when will this misery end?

On a brighter note, my blog reached 200,000 view, what a way to celebrate it, let’s put off a candle, or the whole country to celebrate!


Too soon?

Please share this post on social media, let everyone know what’s it like to live in Tripoli, and I use the word “live” loosely..

« Older posts

© 2026 يوميات معاذ – حيث تجد #حديث_الأربعاء وقصصًا أخرى