Recently, I’ve had a couple big compliments on my writing here. Independents Hall co-founder Alex Hillman gave a nod on Twitter, encouraging his followers to follow my work in a similar way Comcast developer and Philly Future blogger Karl Martino did last summer.

Thanks to you both.

The online documentation of my pursuit of accomplishing items on a Life To Do List that I made as a kid has moved to a subdomain of this site, at list.christopherwink.com. I first brought it online earlier this year and have since updated it.

It gives me more flexibility, control and organization. I have no expectations or desire for that blog to be any regularly updated place, but rather a true chronicle of meaningful experiences. If you find that at all interesting for whatever reason, there is an RSS feed here and an email blast here.

A few good recent examples might be my post on attending the competitive eating Wing Bowl and being part of the Mummers Day and a review of backpacking Alaska. I have only posted four times so far in 2011, and I figure that’ll be about average.

Otherwise, I wouldn’t worry about it too much, as this here will remain my focus of professional work.

The old WordPress.com that I first shared in 2008 is now dead, though the experiment with distinctions between personal and private seems to be alive.

This is just about the last online piece of my January resolution to update my archives, which also included shifting over my college thesis to thesis.christopherwink.com and getting online my work from Japan. Those are just for archiving purposes, as those projects are finished.

Back in July 2008, I finally got around to updating a WordPress.com I had been using to track the work I was doing on my undergraduate honors thesis researching the future of the beleaguered Philadelphia Republican Party.

Two and a half years later, in looking to get a jump start on a 2011 resolution of ordering my online presence, I have abandoned the WordPress.com and brought that blog, its research and my final research paper to a subdomain here.

THESIS.christopherwink.com

I won’t be updating it. Rather, I just wanted a more stable, professional and suitable location to some dated work of which I am still proud and, believe it or not, I still get emails from people closer to what I covered than I certainly am.

Give it a look (perhaps most specifically the research paper from May 2008) and let me know what you think.

So, while I try to get better at making goals and sticking to them, I have an eye to my work here, because this has always been a place for experimentation and learning, where I develop my thoughts, my writing and my style.

So, like I did last year and the year before, I’ve looked at the 15 most trafficked posts I’ve written here.

Looking at the list I think there are two specific lessons to be learned:

• Original Reporting rocks — It’s just what I saw in Technically Philly’s roundup of top stories. In this list of 10, seven featured first-issue original reporting, two offered insider commentary and one offered a strong opinion. No aggregation, summaries or general perspective made it to the list, though I do all those kinds of posts too and those kind of posts dominated my 2008 list and had more influence on my 2009 list.
• Time matters — This site gets a relatively low-level of traffic (the top post on this list received fewer than 500 hits this year), so the sheer amount of time a post is up is magnified. With bigger traffic sites, the first week of traffic can largely overcome a long tail. However in my case, just one of the 10 posts was created in the last four months, and I don’t think that’s due to lack of relatively meaningful content. So, with lower traffic sites, the longer a post is up has a greater impact on its overall traffic than with higher traffic sites.

That said, here are the posts. Draw your own conclusions:

10. Newsworks: WHYY online news brand launching means a lot to these legacies — Nov. 22

Find the other nine below.

9. U.S. theatrical premiere, Madeleine Albright and what it means for local journalism — June 7

8. Inquirer: My first couch surfing experience — Apr. 16

7. Announced proposal for William Penn Foundation hyperlocal investment (Jan. 13) — On an initiative that just had its greater details released last month.

6. How to set up a freelancing sole proprietorship – Feb. 8

5. Welcome to Fishtown [Jan. 8] — In which I announced my home purchase.

4. Stories that never ran: What does a sex columnist look like? – Jan. 20

3. NewsWorks: WHYY will announce new hyperlocal news initiative for northwest Philadelphia (April 12) — In which I first wrote about the news initiative that was more recently detailed in the No. 10 post above.

2. Murder rates in Philadelphia and other cities are all marketing — July 2

1. Stories that never ran: ‘Can the Devon Theater survive in Mayfair?’ — Jan. 6

Any favorites? I was a little surprised by that top story.

Less trafficked, strong posts from 2010

And also, because it isn’t all about traffic, here are six posts that I think are among my best that didn’t get the most traffic:

• William Penn Foundation three-year $2.4 million investment in Philly journalism — Dec. 22
• If I had unlimited money to invest in growing Philadelphia journalism — Dec. 13
• Patch is about as evil as Starbucks (and that’s less than you might want to believe) — Nov. 8
• What the Knight News Challenge could learn from ABC’s ‘Shark Tank’ — Nov. 19
• Lessons I’ve learned on writing better ledes — March 1
• The Wire: yeah, the HBO Baltimore drama is mad decent — Sept. 17
• Ten things a journalist should never do — Jan. 27

Earlier this month, my friend Brian James Kirk hosted the fourth Story Shuffle, with a theme of SNOW.

Now, the audio from all 11 stories are up. Listen to mine here or find the others here.

My story was on attending a local high school basketball game where I grew up as an excited middle schooler. As a promise to myself, I prepared notes for my story the first time. I was interested to see if I felt it improved my storytelling, which was ultimately my goal in starting the event series.

So, I dashed down 10 bullet points a few hours before the event, gave it a once over and took to telling the story fresh and un-aided later.

One thing I learned in the ‘research’ phase was that the high school gymnasium of my childhood is named for a former coach and ‘the father of wrestling in New Jersey.’

In addition to the RSS feed, you can follow Story Shuffle on Twitter and Facebook.

Not long ago I celebrated the one-year anniversary of ChristopherWink.com. Well, really, I think we all celebrated that fine day.

This is the 500th post I’ve done here, some much better than others.

Today, why not cue up the video montage and look at the way we were.

Turns out I put out less than momentous posts on momentous days. It’s also great to see a lot more traffic has been developing, you know, so my posts today don’t often get 13 views – no, not unique views, but 13 page views! If you needed a lesson that blogging can develop through time, through patience, the virtue of the internet, here it is.

• #400 Learn to e-mail better
  Date: 2008/11/17 | Time: 8:34 am
  Category: Internetworking | Tags: Advice, Internetworking, Press Releases
  Views: 13 | Comments: 1
  

93 days in between 100 posts

• #300 Inquirer: Front page story on Harrisburg citizen activists
  Date: 2008/07/29 | Time: 10:41 am
  Category: Philadelphia Inquirer | Tags: Cover stories, Philadelphia Inquirer, PLCA
  Views: 31 | Comments: 1
  

30 days in between 50 posts

• #250 The Pennsylvania Legislative Correspondents’ Association: a brief history
  Date: 2008/06/29 | Time: 12:01 am
  Category: Journalism | Tags: Harrisburg, History, Newspapers, PLCA
  Views: 234 | Comments: 2
  

43 days in between 50 posts

• #200 Susan Barnett: bringing local news to CBS 3
  Date: 2008/05/16 | Time: 12:01 am
  Category: Philadelphia Business Journal | Tags: CBS, On the Job, Philadelphia Business Journal
  Views: 1,002 | Comments: 2
  

65 days in between 100 posts

• #100 Hillary at Temple, Barack coming next
  Date: 2008/03/11 | Time: 9:27 pm
  Category: Personal | Tags: Announcements, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Notes, Philadelphia, Temple University, The Temple News
  Views: 9 | Comments: 0
  

20 days in between 50 posts

• #50 We’re AFSCME
  Date: 2008/02/18 | Time: 10:30 am
  Category: Other | Tags: Funny, Video
  Views: 16 | Comments: 3
  

75 days in between 50 posts

• #1 An unannounced welcome
  Date: 2007/12/04 | Time: 5:45 am
  Category: Personal | Tags: Announcements, Greatest Hits, My Websites
  Views: 11 | Comments: 0

Thanks to those who stuck around.

Image from StateCounter.

Last week I wrote about my writing a letter on behalf of a mentor of mine. He is leaving my alma mater Temple University after being pressured out. This is a subject about which I have a personal investment.

All journalists should use their personal Web sites as a place to be as transparent as possible about just such an example of potential bias.

In their youth, newspapers were overtly biased, swayed by the political leanings of their owners. In the 20th century, the position of journalist became increasingly professional.

The 1970s and Watergate, like the digital revolution of today, changed the rules. There was no greater insult to a journalist than calling him “biased.”

So, we hid our biases. TV personalities brought back bias, but in a more open way. Still there are always new examples of journalists toeing that line.

Today we journalists have the opportunity to be as transparent as we can be. That is for the best. I think all journalists should post their potential conflicts of interest on their site. Newspapers should do the same for their reporters. Transparency is one way to gain popular trust.

My Disclosure page was in no small way influenced by Jeff Jarvis doing the same.

Do you have one? What do you think about it?

Image courtesy of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

The cover of a book I published with Blurb. Hire me to do something similar for your family.

Hire me to tell your story.

For a birthday, anniversary, wedding or another special event, let me tell your story. I will interview you or your family and compile a commemorative profile, just as it might appear in a newspaper or magazine. If you choose, it can be printed and framed in a variety of styles to your preference. I also could use a publishing service to create a book in a style of your choosing.

It is a unique gift idea that can last forever. See a family book I made for my own mother as a Christmas gift here (cover seen above).

My work has appeared in a variety of the country’s largest newspapers and other publications. Read more about my experience here.

Contact me here. See examples of my journalism here or other writing in the navigation bar above. This is one of several services I offer, part of my role as a freelance writer.

It would be unfair of me to not mention I delayed posting this after I read that Inquirer reporter Mike Vitez is offering a similar service.

Check the above tag bubble for this site. Looks very cool.

At Wordle.net, you can create beautiful tag clouds for any site or block of text. Give it a try.

Hat tip to 10,000 Words, through whom I found Wordle – very cool application.

Mark this off the list of simple things I wanted to get done for this site.

I made the above banner, though I don’t have plans for using it as a header. Rather, it’ll serve its purpose as a focus when I need one, in places like on my blogging experience page. Something that no site in the world needs but will get action if it exists.

That banner goes along with claiming my Web sites on Technorati and grabbing an OpenID – and then realizing I didn’t need to do so.

Additionally, I implemented WordPress.com’s new-ish option to develop a “blavatar” – blog + avatar – for this site. A favicon goes a little way to creating a brand. See mine at right.

I did the same for other Web presences of mine.

In this case, meet my blue outline. Surely it’s a nod to the other Chris Wink – the founder of the Blue Man Group and my competition for Web searches. Now my Blue Man is the icon for this site, for the time being.

Want to see the banners over which I chose the above one? They’ll serve no other purpose, so here goes:

No. 1: the Blue Man seemed lame and the text was deemed too cartoonish, and, yes, too pink.

No. 2: Not big enough a change from No. 1.

No. 3: Here’s where I decided the Blue Man really needed a blank face if it existed at all, but the banner was boring otherwise.

No. 4: I liked incorporating my navigation bar as a means of branding my services. This was my choice before friends coaxed me into bringing the Blue Man back into the game.

No. 5: Clean, my second favorite of these losers, but too plain.

OK, now tell me where did I go wrong? Any advice? Do you have banners, blavatars or favicons? What were your experiences?