ChristianBlog.Com - Looking Back On 2008 And Forward To 2009!
Hello Everybody and Welcome To 2009!!
Well 2008 has passed away and we are looking ahead to a new year with joy and peace because we can rest assured in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour and His Grace and Salvation - Amen!!
There are a number of things that ChristianBlog.Com has gotten to experience during 2008, and I'd love to be able to share some of them, and to share how ChristianBlog.Com has grown this past year, and share where ChristianBlog.Com is focusing on things for 2009, now that it is here!
A Look Back - Some Amazing Testimonies!
I have tried to keep track of some of the amazing testimonies we have seen here at ChristianBlog.Com, and I'd love to share them with you!
We have seen at least half-a-dozen babies born by members of ChristianBlog.Com!
We have seen people freed from cancer!
We have seen people freed from depression!
We have seen people given new jobs when none seemed obvious and were in great need!
We have seen people find freedom from the worldly ways and find assurance in Gods ways!
We have seen people totally turn away from non-Christian internet usage and totally devote themselves to Christian internet usage!
We have seen people get married!
And two of my most cherished goals in this adventure that Christ has allowed me to put together:
We have seen people realize that Christians across theological viewpoints can join together in fellowship and become true friends!
We have seen people realize that Christians do not always have to fight with each other and that Christians can strive together to be blessed and bless one another!
A Look Back - ChristianBlog.Com 2008 Features & Changes!
In 2008 ChristianBlog.Com saw some amazing new features added, a few removed, some major policy changes, and a whole bunch more!
Here are just a few of the highlights!
Without a doubt our biggest change in 2008 was a major upgrade of our Global Policies which allowed ChristianBlog.Com to greatly streamline our policies, make our policies easier to understand, reduce our policies by 65%, provide publishers the ability to control their own publishing licenses, provide us better legal standing to enforce abuse, and overall just create a platform for us to be able to look ahead without so many constraints.
Reporting System. Our reporting system got a couple of major overhauls in 2008. We developed our autonomous and AI-based system that allows us (actually, the website software itself) to highly control the suspending of content and people who setout to cause harm. We also made our reporting system much easier for people to understand and use. These changes resulted in a 200% increase of usage of our reporting system - and helping ChristianBlog.Com remove bad content!
ChristianBlog.Com saw two different redesigns of our Blog creation system. From our original method to a method developed by 100% feedback from our members, to our newest system that is one of the easiest method of blog publication anywhere on the internet!
The removal of 'adult blogs' and 'private blogs' - both of which were removed because they did not fall in line with the goal of ChristianBlog.Com, which is to be a family friendly website where people are blessed and bless others.
Featured Blogs -- The Featured Blogs is a truly amazing feature of ChristianBlog.Com that allows our Premier/Gold Members the ability to keep one of their blogs highlighted for an entire week! This was a community suggested and supported feature! Almost 100% of the effort of how the Featured Blogs system works was developed by ChristianBlog.Com Members! So, thanks to those of you that helped me with the input and suggestions!
Discussions -- The Discussions feature of ChristianBlog.Com has been an amazing success!! I had personally dreaded putting this feature together, but our members have proven to me once again just how amazing it can be when Christians come together in unity and with a desire to bless one other - and not cause strive and conflicts! Without out a doubt the Discussions feature has been a major platform for other new features added, and features we will continue to add to the website.
My.Blogs -- I was not sure how well the new "My.Blogs" page would go over... but it has been a huge success! It has provided our members a single page to completely manage all of their blogs!
The ability to set your blog as 'no comments allowed', at the time of blog creation, was removed. This went against the spirit of our "open community" here at ChristianBlog.Com and has allows us to continue to be a website where our blog publishers realize that being here at ChristianBlog.Com is not like being at other websites -- our focus is on growing as Christians, blessing others, and being blessed!
We moved the website to a new server in June. This resulted in a 10-15% increase in the time it took to load the website.
On March 19th of 2008 I posted the "Top 25" changes that were coming to ChristianBlog.com Here is how things look at the end of the year.
1. Creation of a "Groups" feature. (12/28/2008 - finished everything!)
2. Bulletins Improvements (ignore list, open discussion) (04-18-2008 - finished everything but the "ignore" feature)
3. Bio/Profile Speed Improvement (03-24-2008 - also revamped the layout of the profile page)
4. Friends Improvement (03-24-2008 - completely new my.friends system!)
5. Manage Account Revamp (completely new management system)
6. Manage Blog Entries Revamp (completely new management system)
7. Chatroom Chatter - to be removed (03-24-2008)
8. My Surveys - either revamped or removed. To be determined (03-24-2008 - decided to completely remove this feature)
9. Friends (Closest Friends) -- list your 12 closest friends in your bio/profile (03-24-2008)
10. Premier Membership Payment History
11. Premier Membership Pricing Structure
12. Make the process of having Blog Entries be "Private/deleted" easier to do. (removed this feature)
13. Revamp of the Blog Entries "Linkbacks" system.
14. Revamp of the Blog Entries "Archive" system.
15. Termination of the "remote.ChristianBlog.Com" third-party service. (sorry everybody) (03-24-2008)
16. Termination of the "Top 100 Blogs" third-party service (sorry everybody) (03-24-2008)
17. Chatroom Upgrade (upgraded twice this year)
18. Improvement of the Badword Censor System. (our censor system has received numerous updates this year)
19. Revamp of the Report Content System. (04-22-2008 - our new system is about 80% in place... and it rocks!)
20. Reinstate Email Notifications of Blog Entry activity (Premier/Gold Members only)
21. Faster Search Engine listing of new Blog Entries. (entire new search engine developed)
22. Revamp of the My.Videos System. (04-23-2008 - decided to completely remove this feature)
23. Gallery Report Feature (04-20-2008 - got this working now folks!)
24. Email Address Update
25. Improved Search System (entire new search engine developed)
I had really wanted to get #20 and #25 finished this year, so kind of bummed I didn't get them finished. However, I will have them at the top of the list for our 2009 list (see below)
A Look Back - ChristianBlog.Com Growth!
Everybody (ok, actually almost nobody - lol) likes statistics, right! So, here are our very own statistics for 2008, in all their glory!
Number of Unique Visitors: 294,976 (that is an average of 808 people visiting ChristianBlog.Com each day)
Number of Visits: 597,248 (all put together the 294,976 unique visitors visited ChristianBlog.Com this many times)
Number of Pageviews: 17,751,050 (all put together the 597,248 visitors viewed this many page at ChristianBlog.Com - wowzer!!)
Bandwidth: 176.32 GB (how much data transfer it took to keep ChristianBlog.Com online)
Time on Site: 6:54 minutes (average of how long each visitor spends while visiting ChristianBlog.Com)
New Visitors: 72.11% (how many of our visitors have never visited ChristianBlog.Com before)
People from 205 countries visited ChristianBlog.Com this past year (that is 205 out of 231 recognized countries - amazing!!)
ChristianBlog.Com had 3,726 new members join in 2008 (from 5,113 members to 8,839 members)
ChristianBlog.Com had 5,295 total blog entries published in 2008 (from 4,992 blog entries to 10,287 blog entries)
Since ChristianBlog.Com went online we have had slightly over 58,900,000 verified pages views!
Top Countries To Visit ChristianBlog.Com:
1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. Canada
4. Australia
5. Philippines
6. South Africa
7. India
8. New Zealand
9. Malaysia
10. Singapore
A Look Forward - Where ChristianBlog.Com Is Heading!
Here are this years Top 25 changes we are planning (and can publicly share) - but do not promise we will get to.
1. Email Address Update
2. Reinstate Email Notifications of Blog Entry activity (Premier/Gold Members only)
3. Premier Membership Payment History
4. Premier Membership Pricing Structure
5. Revamp of the Blog Entries "Linkbacks" system.
6. Revamp of the Blog Entries "Archive" system.
7. Groups - Integrate Groups into Profiles
8. Groups - Category Restructuring
9. Groups - Better Administrator Permissions
10. Groups - Discussions (maybe)
11. Groups - Featured Groups (maybe)
12. Blogs - WYSIWYG
13. Blogs - Polls (maybe)
14. Blogs - Tags (Premier/Gold members only)
15. Blogs - Increased Stats
16. Profile - Activities
17. Profile - RSS Pulling
18. Profile - Status UI Revamp
19. Gallery - Better Navigation/Interface
20. My.Tracker - More Emphasis on this feature
21. Prayer - Personalized Prayer Tracker
22. Music - Finding More Reviewers so we have more reviews!
23. Mobile - Develop a full-scalled iPhone application
24. Messages - Delete Messages (maybe)
25. Chatroom - Invest in better software
When I first setout the blueprint for where I would like to see ChristianBlog.Com be at (in regards to features) back in 2007, I provided myself some lofty goals that I was not sure if I could actually accomplish. Amazingly, it seems I have reached them!
With the recent public release of the Groups section of ChristianBlog.Com, I have pretty much been able to provide to the ChristianBlog.Com Community EVER feature I had originally planned to develop! While there have been a lot of features added along the way, my own personal goals have now been finished! It will be an interesting year as I try to envision and develop additional features - of this I am sure!
Other Notes:
In late 2007 I posted a Blog entitled "ChristianBlog.Com - A Look Forward Into 2008" in which I mentioned a few things worth noting, now that we have reached the end of 2008.
It looks like we hit the "Projected Growth" we set out for in 2008. I had hoped to hit 17-million unique page views by the end of Q4, and we reached 17,751,050!
The Reporting System I mentioned has started to be grasped and utilized by the ChristianBlog.Com Community! This is a great thing for us here at ChristianBlog.Com, because those few individuals who are "Live Moderators" cannot possible have eyes-on ChristianBlog.Com 24/7 - and thus we need the help of our Community to help us continue to keep ChristianBlog.Com safe and clean!
The Donations for ChristianBlog.Com have gone up by 3x the amount of last year! Wow, thank you everybody! ChristianBlog.Com needs your financial support to stay alive! Unlike every other social website, ChristianBlog.Com is not filled with advertisement that helps them generate revenue! ChristianBlog.Com runs in the red every month, so any donations from our members help us a great deal. Do not forget that a GREAT way to help support ChristianBlog.Com AND BLESS somebody else is through the "Gift The Gift of ChristianBlog.Com Premier Membership" that allows you to buy somebody else a Premier Membership - and help cover our financial expenses!
In Closing:
I would like to thank everybody that is a member of ChristianBlog.Com! All of you mean a great deal to me and I am proud that the Lord has allowed me the opportunity to continue to minister to all of you via this website!
May the greatest riches and blessings from upon high be upon all of you this year!
For Christ's Ministry,
John B. Abela
Founder/Owner, ChristianBlog.Com
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Author: abelajohnb
Location: California USA
Gender: Male
Age: 36
Blog Entries: 160 (archive)
Blog Comments: 624
raised in a private christian school until his senior year, mr. abela has been around the christian faith nearly his entire life. at the age of twenty-two mr. abela was called to the ministry as a lay-minister where he served as a youth minister for nearly seven years and then...
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Blessings to you brother John!
