The JavaScript Weekly Effect

21 Sep 2013

On Monday we published our first BladeRunnerJS (BRJS) blog post. It provides an overview of what BRJS is, why it was created and why it's being open sourced. We saw a nice spike in traffic and I was thinking about ways I could try to sustain that. I decided not to take any action (e.g. submit for consideration in JavaScript Weekly) for two reasons; we'd publish plenty more posts over the coming weeks and we don't have any source in github right now. It would therefore be much better to focus on getting traffic when there's actually a solution that people can download and try out.

Then, on Friday, JavaScript Weekly issue 148 came out.

The Stats

Some stats for 20th - 21st September, covering around a 24 hours period after JavaScript Weekly came out are as follows:

  • 1248 Unique visits
  • 29 mailing list registrations
  • Around +6 github repo watchers
  • Around +10 github repo stargazers

Now, I'm not saying these are absolutely amazing stats.

BRJS Google Analytics

But, a 2% converstion of site hits to mailing list registrations for a project with only a single blog post, an empty github repo and a landing page available, is actually pretty good. Hopefully it also means the post was quite interesting too!

BRJS signup notifications

Beyond that, the other 964 visitors developers who have an interest in JavaScript toolkits and frameworks will have at least heard of BladeRunnerJS now.

We now need to build on that by - primarily - open-sourcing a quality solution, and then demonstrating its value by continuing to publish interesting content (tutorials, updates and through provoking JavaScript software engineering practices) on our blog.

The JavaScript Weekly Readership

I've had a few links published in JavaScript Weekly and I've always seen a tremendous amount of traffic and signups/conversions from the newsletter. I believe that's because it has a readership who are used to receiving a highly focused and well-curated service. Kudos to Peter Cooper and Dr. Axel Rauschmayer for keeping the quality high and for managing to track everything that's going on in the seriously fast moving world of JavaScript.

Note: I've just realised I've probably upped the prices we'll have to pay to advertise in JavaScript Weekly :)