Wiki metrics

Some time ago I shared metrics from Google Analytics with you and as I found it really interesting I do it again. :)

TOP-10 countries (wiki visitors)
1. United States
2. Finland
3. Canada
4. Spain
5. United Kingdom
6. Netherlands
7. Germany
8. Australia
9. Denmark
10. Philippines

Are these the countries with most miniaturists also?

On average people stay 5 minutes in the wiki and visit 3.13 pages.

I started measuring the wiki in November and now there are 50 people who have visited the wiki 100-200 times during these months. Quite a lot :).

The most popular search phrase was ´how to make dollhouse from foam core´ so I made a new page for that.

The most popular wiki pages during the last 30 days were:

1. printables
2. main page
3. trash_minis - I am very glad about this since I am one of those miniaturists who love to turn trashes to treasures :)
4. diy - do it yourself is number 4 while shops are lower...
5. projects - my favorite page as I always want to do theme projects
6. hearts - well, we just had Valentine´s day :)
7. roomboxes - interesting, roomboxes are more popular than dollhouses...
8. shops
9. advent_calendar_2009 - people were still looking at our advent calendar and I am not surprised - it was very nice indeed, thanks again for everyone who participated :)
10. facebook - a new page I created to collect all those nice fan pages and groups there in Facebook for us miniaturists and doll lovers.

Top-10 sites bringing traffic to the wiki:
1. google
2.(direct) - via bookmarks
3. flickr.com - via our group I guess
4. nukkekoti.pbworks.com - this is my dollhouse wiki in Finnish
5. facebook.com - via our Facebook page I guess
6. bing
7. schifka.vuodatus.net - via Nanna´s blog
8. yahoo
9. ca.mc539.mail.yahoo.com - via Canadian Yahoo mails
10. hannajaleijona.blogspot.com - via Hanna´s blog

Nanna and Hanna both belong to a dollhouse discussion group called Nukkekotielämää which I started with my friends 7 years ago and now we are like one happy family with about 40 miniaturist (we are limiting the amount of members so that we can know each other). I am very happy to have them in this list :).

The more I study the results the better I can customize the wiki for you. I just wish I had more time for this...

Countries

Dollhouse hobby is so great. Let's say you have a country that you love. You can't afford to move or travel there but you can create yourself a piece of that country in miniature. To help you follow your favorite countries I created a main page Countries, from there you'll find pages e.g. for Finland and Spain. I was inspired to this by one Spanish lady - I'll tell you more about that later :).

Collecting miniatures

Collecting is addicting and many of us collect miniatures as well. Collectables is a new page in wiki for collecting collectables :). I'm collecting Re-ments and I have some Reutters as well but what kind of miniatures are you collecting? Tell! Or even better - show and tell :).

Do it yourself miniatures

Some of us are collecting miniatures while others like to do everything by themselves. And the majority of us do both. So it was about the time to start a page for instructions: DIY . What is your favorite technique? Do you modify your miniatures, create them out of trash, do you sew, crochet or saw? Tell me!

Wiki members

Mini treasures wiki - connecting dollhouse people

So how can a wiki connect people?
Well a wiki can't itself but it needs people using the wiki.
Just introduce yourself here. :)

Adding Flickr Photos to PBworks

I created my very first SlideShare presentation about how to add Flickr photos to PBworks. By doing this the valuable space in wiki can be saved :). So check out this:

Adding Flickr Photos to PBworks

View more presentations from jjanhone.

The presentation is also in the FAQ (wiki) page while the Halloween picture I added from Flickr is in Halloween page.

Have you made any Halloween miniature projects? Tell about them. :)

Museums, scales and wiki faq

I started my week by adding some new pages.

Museums - list of dollhouse museums all over the world (looks quite empty still but I know you can help in filling it)
Scales - a placeholder of the different scales used by dollhouse people. The sub pages are quite empty still, please contribute to your favorite scale page. :)
Wiki FAQ - do you have questions related to wiki usage? Add a question to this page.

PS. There are already 13 editors in the wiki, as many as followers in this blog. Are you the next one?

Popular culture projects

I have been editing the project pages. Little by little I keep adding new themed projects. When people think about dollhouses or miniatures in general they have no clue how much we are inspired by the culture around us: books, music, movies and tv series, e.g.

Beatrix Potter
Harry Potter
Lord of the Ring
Moomins
Narnia
Pingu
Gnomes by Will Huygen & Rien Poortvliet .


Do you have any pop culture projects on-going? Tell me and the rest of the world via the wiki (or by commenting here).

Projects - my favorite page

I just added the first version of my favorite page to wiki, projects. Like many miniaturists, I'm a collector and I have many miniature collections e.g.:
bags
cat figures and stuff
masks
food, especially fish
rubber ducks and Donald Ducks ...

When the collection has grown enough it's time to use them in a themed project. In a normal dollhouse you can't have that many cakes, but in a cafeteria you can. And if you collect paintings you could use them in an atelier. What is your favorite project and what do you collect?

Shops / Etsy

Creating the structure to Shops page is a challenge, there are so many shops out there - how to make a user-friendly listing out of them?

I guess I just need to start with it and then improve it later. :) The first page is for shops in Etsy, another one is for shops in Finland (which contains only links to Nukkekotiwiki currently but feel free to add more:).

FAQ added

A lot of posts today... I have added FAQ page - it is meant for all those big and silly questions you have always wanted to ask about dollhouses or miniatures.

Dollhouses by manufacturers (e.g. Lundby)

I added a new page for Dollhouses by manufacturers, see e.g. the page for Lundby. Do you have a Lundby? Do you have picturers of it in Internet? Tell me or add your links to the wiki by yourself, here are the instructions for editing.

Wiki calendar added

Yesterday I added calendar to Mini treasures wiki. It's empty now but as time goes by I'll add wiki happenings there. Also if there are any global dollhouse events (on-line) they can be promoted in it. For countries/regions please add a calendar of their own, see the example in Nukkekotiwiki calendar for Finnish happenings.

Dollhouse inhabitants

If you ask a passer-by who does live in a dollhouse they will answer: dolls of course. But since making miniatures is mainly about using your imagination you can do better than that, why not use teddy bears, mouses or giraffes? Go wild!

I created a page for dollhouse inhabitants and added some links to the pages I mentioned there. Who is living in your dollhouse or roombox, any surprises there?

Books and photos added

Updating the new wiki is rather easy, just copy-pasting from the old Finnish wiki. And then a little editing on both...

I added books. The only reasonable format of presenting this information is tables - too bad that editing them is not always so easy. I didn't want to translate the Finnish book reviews so I left most of the fields empty so that other users can fill them. I hope you do!

Then I added photo albums. Pictures are so essential in this hobby, we don't need to understand the language used but all of us understand the amazing mini pictures. I know there are thousands of photo albums available out there so I divided the photo albums by services: Flickr, Fotki, Gfoto, Kuvat.fi, Ovi Share, Photobucket, Picasa, Picturetrail, PixBox, Webshots. It seems that Flickr is the most popular right now but let's see what happens when you start adding links to your favorite albums. Photo albums of Finnish miniaturists are collected here, do you know if other nationalities have same kind of lists?

Promoting Mini treasures

Do you have any ideas how to promote the new wiki? I tried Wikipedia.org but the link was removed because the site is not mature enough, i.e. not long enough history and not enough editors. Well, it's almost 2 days old now and there has been 2 editors in addition to me, why that is not enough? ;) I've been telling about the new wiki to my dollhouse friends and some of them have forwarded the news to their friends. I'm also hoping that once people find out that they are getting visitors from my wiki they are eager enough to study it further.

But before starting the big wiki promo campaign I need more content. :)

I started with blogs but now there's pages also for:
forums
home pages
magazines and
printables .

In near future I'll add the shops but before that I need to figure out how I structure the shop pages, by countries, by languages, by continents, by names (alphabetically), by the way they are selling, by assortment... Any ideas for that?

PS. This blog has been added to Blogilista and Blogged.

Mini treasures wiki

I just created a new wiki called Mini treasures. The name miniatures was already taken and I didn't want to take dollhouse / dolls house because not all miniaturist have a house, they can do e.g. roomboxes or just collect miniatures one by one. So I used the Mini treasures name from this blog and thought that this will be the place where I post about wiki news.

The first thing I added there was lists of miniature blogs:
Dutch blogs
English blogs
Finnish blogs
French blogs
Italian blogs
Japanese blogs
Portuguese blogs
Spanish blogs
Swedish blogs