State of the Blog

Hard as it may be to believe, this blog is coming up on its 11th anniversary. In other words, I’ve been blogging for more than a third of my life, and all of my adult life. Of course, the blog has seen varying levels of activity over the years, but has remained remarkably consistent over the past few years, largely due to my Sunday/Wednesday schedule. Anywho, I thought I’d take a look at the past year of statistics and see what that shows me. Some generic stuff:

• 36,815 Visits
• 54,408 Pageviews
• Approximately 75% of traffic comes from search engines (approx. 62% of total site traffic comes from Google)
• The remaining 25% are split between referring sites (13%) and direct load (12%)

Now, I have set up my analytics software to ignore me, and this is mostly successful, though there are definitely times when the cookie gets cleared somehow, so I’m sure some of the above is me. But you’re not seeing the full brunt of my obsessive site-checking.

So what are the most popular pages?

• Weblog main page is obviously the biggest winner here, with 18% of pageviews
• Time Travel in Donnie Darko seems to be the most popular single entry on the blog. Google seems to be the biggest referrer, though I do frequently see people coming from facebook.
• Samoas vs Caramel DeLites is also quite popular. The interesting thing about this one is that it only really gets traffic in January, February, and March (i.e. when Girl Scout cookies are sold). Facebook and other referring sites seem to make up a bigger percentage of the referrers for this one…
• Sins of a Solar Empire: Lessons Learned, Sorta is a funny one to be popular, as I suck at that game. It’s what’s known in the biz as a “PC ass PC Game”, meaning that it’s ridiculously complicated, with a huge learning curve and a crappy tutorial. Apparently this post has a great google ranking for people looking for a guide to the game (of which the post really isn’t).
• Cowboy Bebop: The Ending is also a popular post, presumably because I’m so brilliant.
• A Reflexive Media gets a bunch of traffic as well, usually from folks looking to understand Reflexive Documentaries.
• Bear Pajamas gets a ridiculous amount of traffic given the trivial nature of the post (about how a character in an Anime wears Bear Pajamas)
• Neal Stephenson Category Archive gets a nice amount of traffic, which isn’t all that surprising.
• Interrupts and Context Switching gets some love too, which is reassuring, as it’s one of my favorite posts.

Mind you, those are only blog posts I’m referencing. Older stuff from the pre-blog days still gets a lot of traffic too, most notably my in-depth review of Hitchcock’s Rear Window and my Guide to Isaac Asimov (which I wrote when I was a teenager and should probably revise at some point, as it’s pretty embarrassingly bad).

I’ve definitely settled into a bit of a groove on the blog, and I can tell you that I spend less time writing posts these days. I have mentioned a few times that I need to shake things up a bit, but I have had limited success with that. I’ve generally noticed that my posting goes in waves. Sometimes I’ll be inspired and have no problem writing new, interesting stuff. Other times, not so much (which is when you get simple posts like a link dump or something). Yeah, this isn’t exactly an earth shattering observation, but still. In reality, I tend to be pretty hard on myself when I’m in the midst of writing – I’m usually not super happy with a post when I publish, but if I revisit later, I’m often surprised by what I wrote. I usually like it a lot more after the fact. Go figure. In any case, the blog must go on, even if it does get stuck in a rut every now and again (hopefully, it’s at least an entertaining rut!)