The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here are some excerpts:
This blog was viewed about 110,000 times in 2012.
In 2012, there were 420 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 929 posts. There were 282 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 34 MB. That’s about 5 pictures per week.
The busiest day of the year was May 14th with 705 views. The most popular post that day was 2011 AP Exam Score Distribution
Some of your most popular posts were written before 2012. Your writing has staying power! Consider writing about those topics again.
Click here to see the complete report.
I’m a little surprised that I managed to average 1.15 posts per day—I knew I’d been spending too much time on the blog, but … I’ve been getting a lot of views (for an unaffiliated academic blog), over 8000 every month since March, despite my obsession since the middle of June with the design of the Applied Circuits course (98 posts and pages so far, and the course doesn’t even start for another couple of weeks).
I’m rather lax about posting pictures, so I was surprised to see the number up to 282 (and averaging 123kB each—I do use Photoshop Elements to crop, touch up, and downsample images before posting them). I suspect that a lot of the “pictures” are actually circuit diagrams and gnuplot graphs, which would be much smaller if WordPress.com would allow a vector graphics format like SVG rather than insisting on raster graphics like PNG and JPG for everything. I guess they feel they have to support obsolete browsers, like Internet Exploder, that still don’t support SVG.
Here are my top-viewed posts for the year (over 300 views):
People coming to the home page are still the biggest single group, but overall, more people are finding my pages through search engines than by other means. It is a bit disappointing that two of my top pages are just pointers to someone else’s collection of AP exam score distributions, and another two are for middle-school students looking to cheat on the West Point bridge design contest (which apparently some schools assign as homework).
The gnuplot post is mainly used by people looking for a way to install gnuplot on Macs. I think that the gnuplot community really needs to get their act together and put up a proper binary installer for Mac OS X. They need to stop pretending that everything is fine if you can dual-boot your system or put up a 2Gbyte Linux-lookalike environment on your Mac.
There is now an ok USB oscilloscope for the Mac, though the code is still clearly beta-release quality. I posted about it in FET threshold tests with Bitscope.
A couple of the popular posts are mainly fluff (the mammoth post and the Green Beard joke picture).
A lot of my most-viewed posts are technical ones on electronics, computer engineering, robotics, or physics, though more at a teaching or hobbyist level than professional, cutting-edge stuff. I’m fairly happy with that, as I’m turning more into a teacher than a researcher over the past couple of years—I’ve always enjoyed creating new courses, and I’ve been putting a lot of time into that lately. My more philosophical musings have had less readership, perhaps because they are harder to find in a Google search and are less likely to be searched for.
I’m still not seeing many comments (about 2.4/post and 40% of the comments are by me). I’d like to have more feedback from my readers, but with so many of them being one-time viewers who came via search, I can’t really expect much conversation in the comments.
I’ve seen a strong weekly periodicity in my viewership, with dips over the weekend (people must be goofing off at work when they access my blog). The plot is particularly clear when I look at the Google Webmaster tools, which has minima on Saturdays:
As much history as Google’s webmaster tools is willing to show me. It would really help to have the clicks and impressions on a log scale, so that the clicks didn’t have just a one-pixel fluctuation. I suppose it is too much to expect Google to be willing to provide free tools that are actually well designed for geeks like me. My overall click-through rate of 4% is decent, I suppose,
My university web pages have a higher number of clicks, but 57% of them for the soda-bottle rocket launcher plans and the mead recipe, neither of which are related to my professional responsibilities. The next few are for handouts from tech writing course I taught in 2003—I’ve not really been putting much of general interest on my University web pages lately.
Quantcast.com estimates my 2012 page views for my blog as about 103,000 (a bit less than WordPress.com number, which is more directly measured), but Quantcast also estimates the number of visits and people as about 55,000 and 43,000 respectively, so people are viewing about two pages per visit. Somewhat surprisingly, given my age and how many of my posts are about educating my son, my demographics skews towards younger adults without kids. Less surprisingly, given the technical content and academic tone, my demographics skew heavily towards people with graduate degrees.
Not visible to the outside world, I also have 169 draft posts (usually just a pointer to a web page I planned to comment on, or a couple of lines of notes) and 71 tabs in Firefox for web pages I planned to blog about but haven’t even gotten into draft posts yet. So I have material for a couple hundred more posts, if I can remember what it was I wanted to say. If I ever go through the lot of them, I’ll probably throw out ¾ of them as being no longer relevant or interesting—they weren’t compelling enough at the time to make me write the post immediately.
Overall, I’m fairly pleased with my blog this year, and hope that next year will continue to be successful—maybe I can get the draft-post backlog whittled down a little (though to-do lists always seem to grow rather than shrink, no matter how many things I do).
Gas station without pumps 
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