Page Views!

In June I was excited about the then new Recent Contributors box on AboutUs.org. Now it's the new Page Views feature that has me jumping up and down.

The premise is pretty simple. Pages on AboutUs now show the number of times that particular page has been viewed since the page was created. (You can check this by viewing the page's history, and it will be sometime between June 2006 and today.)

Look for the Page Views count in the box to the right of just about every page on AboutUs.org.

Whether a particular page has been viewed more than you expected or less than you would hope, editing the page to make it prettier and have better content is a great way to attract more viewers and to get them to stay awhile.

Recent Contributors!

This new feature on AboutUs is so exciting for me! It makes the history of each wiki page leaps and bounds more transparent and personal by showing a Recent Contributors box to the right with portraits of the most recent editors to the page. (Contributors who have not yet uploaded a portrait are indicated by a question mark, and a page that has yet to be edited invites the person viewing the page to be the first contributor.)

Check it out! Go to any page on AboutUs and see how it looks. Then edit the page and watch yourself get added to the first slot in that page's Recent Contributors box. (If you aren't seeing your photo upload it this way.)

Universal Edit Button

The concept is simple. It is to have one standard icon and button to indicate that a page is editable. Much like the orange RSS Feed icon that we have all grown accustomed to, there is now the same sort of icon indicating a page that you can edit (9 times out of 10 a wiki page). Moreover, clicking this "universal edit button" functions just like clicking "edit" on the page. This blog post from SiliconFlorist.com probably sums it up the best, and also see UniversalEditButton.org for more info.

So far more than 20 wikis have jumped on board and you can download the Firefox extension and visit a wiki (like AboutUs) to see what's it all about.

RecentChangesCamp here we come!

So I'm off to RecentChangesCamp this weekend in Palo Alto (San Francisco), California. (If the name of the event is unclear, "RecentChanges" refers to the page on a wiki where all edits are logged. For example, see AboutUs.org's RecentChanges.) Several of us from AboutUs as well as wiki enthusiasts from Portland/Corvalis/Eugene are going down in a "WikiVan" today to spend the weekend at this unique conference of sorts. See our weblog post for more. I should be back in Portland on Monday sometime and I look forward to the ride, event, seeing the sun, and bumping into people.

AboutUs.org and Alexa

At AboutUs.org we were delighted to discover our Alexa ranking had jumped to 1,255 this week. It appears that this is the reason for the change, and the fact that we now receive 5 million unique visitors each month also helps. (To rewind, Alexa is in general a traffic ranking system for websites with 1 being Yahoo.com all the way down to Joe Schmoe's website in the millions.)

I invite you to take a tour of AboutUs, which is the wiki website I work for in SE Portland. Also, you can connect with AboutUs on MySpace and Facebook.