At this time of year, WordPress.com posts some rather pointless “year in review” for the blogs they host: the one for my blog is at https://gasstationwithoutpumps.wordpress.com/2015/annual-report/.
Here are some of the stats from the wordpress stats page (which is rather difficult to get decent reporting from):
| 2015 | all time | |
|---|---|---|
| Posts | 205 | 1,653 |
| Comments | ? | 4,528 |
| Views | 101,150 | 513,069 |
I’m responsible for about 39% of the comments on my blog (pingbacks, replies to other commenters, and corrections to posts). The other commenters are a somewhat different crew this year, with CCPhysicist, xykademiqz, Michael K. Johnson, Erich Styger, and gflint having the most comments.
The most viewed posts and pages of the year are the home page and pages mainly reached through search engines:
Of the top 20 most-viewed posts, only the Plagiarism detected post was written this year, but the popular posts are mostly more contentful posts than in previous years, which often favored posts that were little more than links to other sites, though students looking for bridge-design contest cheats are still a large chunk of the searches. Two of my post popular pages (Circuits course: Table of Contents and Physics posts in forward order) are organizational aids to posts on the blog, and the circuits course page was updated 100 times in 2015, as 100 posts or pages were added to the blog for the applied electronics course (almost half the posts for this year).
I have no way of querying the WordPress.com stats for comments made this year—their stats are based either on the 1000 most recent comments or on all-time comments (it isn’t always clear which). The most commented-on posts based on whichever criterion they are using are also mostly not from this year (only the Why doesn’t anyone comment on blogs? post is from this year):
Other than internal links on my blogs, the biggest numbers of clicks were to Carol Dweck’s materials at Stanford, my web pages at UCSC, Wikipedia pages, Digi-Key product pages, and Art of Problem Solving pages.
Overall, I’m moderately satisfied with this year’s blogging. The variety of posts has been down a bit (more than half the posts have had to do with electronics or teaching the electronics course, and those posts are not as popular as what I was writing a few years ago), but I’ve still got stub drafts for over 200 more posts, and another 500–600 bookmarks that haven’t even made it to stubs yet, so I won’t run out of material if I ever get the time and energy to do more blogging.
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