I experimentally updated a post here to see how it would affect the MT front page update list.

It was immediately visible there, and stayed on their front page for just over 35 minutes. One site visitor came here from there in that time.

Although I know that updating their full donors list (a donation enables the update list there) is not at the top of the giant list of things they have to do, there are about 430 donors appearing on that list, at $20 (minimum) each. That’s a mere, if estimated, $8.6k. Not chump change, surely, but, my goodness, Movable Type is such an awesome piece of software I’d really have expected more.

Interestingly, if we assume that all 430 donors update their blogs on average once a day (obviously a shaky assumption), and further assume that those updates are evenly distributed over any given 24-hour period, then we can predict than in any given hour, about 17 blogs will rotate through the list of ten most recently updated blogs.

Which means that on average, the front-page link should last a bit longer than half an hour. Exactly what I observed.

In practice, of course, the updates aren’t evenly spread out over 24 hours. Since I’m on the left coast and tend to publish the next day’s entry at bedtime (11:30 to midnight, give or take), and the majority of MT’s users are probably located in the US, updates come slowly after that time of night, and my recently updated link tends to stay up much longer overnight.

And in fact, last night I had site visitors via that link from Japan, Hawaii, and Australia, as well as two nighthawks from Vanderbilt University and Baltimore over a three-and-a-half-hour window.

All of which I find interesting in a musing kind of manner.

So: Oz, I say “G’day” to ya!

Nippon, “Yo-koso!” (which, I sure hope. means “Welcome!”)

Update: Kiyo, via a comment on this entry, corrected my mis-spelling, which was “Yu-koso”. I corrected it, and (ahem) arigato, Kiyo-san!

http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/japan/
will provide a handy link which should translate my site into kanji, I think.

Thanks for visiting! I hope I can be of service, or something.

3 thoughts on “update experiment

  1. Thanks for the interesting calculation. I enjoyed it a lot. Though I’m not the one who came here from Japan “last night”, I’m glad to see the words “Yu-koso!”, oh, it’s not “Yu”, but “Yo”. 🙂

  2. well, you’ll see another japan entry tonight (look for .plala…). thanks for the tip on the Japanese-English Dictionary Portal, tried it on your site and it actually worked, albeit awkwardly.

    (ps. came here from MT’s site, must’ve been the right 35 min 🙂 )

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