My wife’s new blog

My wife’s school has been closed (as all schools have been locally), and has moved to remote education.  My wife is trying to replace as much of the library time as she can with a new blog: Spring Hill Library. If you have preK–6th graders at home, you can safely point them to her blog.

I helped her produce her first video yesterday (using iMovie, because Premiere Elements seemed too complicated for the simple task needed), and I helped her set up her first blog tonight. She plans to do a video a day and several blog posts a day for as long as the school is closed (which probably means the rest of the school year).

I may start blogging more often again myself, as I won’t be teaching the second half of my electronics course until Fall. The logistics for running the lab remotely were a bit too daunting for the BELS staff and me, so the lab was delayed until Fall quarter (and I’m swapping sabbatical quarters, taking sabbatical at home this Spring instead of next Fall). If we are still forced to be doing remote education in the fall, at least there will be time to figure out the logistics far enough ahead to be prepared.

Today I should have been grading, but I spent most of my time doing tasks as undergraduate adviser: faculty meeting, updating proposal for our new major, informing students of cancelled lab courses and increased capacity in other courses, trying to get additional courses scheduled to start on March 30, getting approval for our plans to let students substitute other courses for the cancelled lab courses (if they are graduating in Spring 2020), approving student petitions for substitutions, trying to get independent-study forms to not require wet signatures, …

Despite being on sabbatical for Spring, I’ll continue with my administrative tasks as undergraduate director and as a member of the Committee on Courses of Instruction.

I do have to get back to grading tomorrow, as I still have 24.5 design reports still to grade in the next week, and they are taking me about 2 hours each to grade. My wife and I will probably be taking turns on the big-screen iMac, though, as neither the video creation nor the grading work well on the 11.5″-screen laptop.

Blog stats for 2017

According to WordPress.com, my blog had 60,609 views and 35,810 visitors in 2017 (down from 68,443 and 42,499 in 2016).  The reduced viewership is not too surprising, as I posted only 114 blog posts in 2017, rather than the 200 of 2016.  (My biggest year was 2014 with 116,359 views and 69,179 visitors.)  I don’t know how much the decline in my readership is due to a general decline in how much people read blogs and how much is specific to my blog—I’ve not been able to find good statistics on the readership of “average” blogs.

Here are my year’s most-viewed pages (almost all of which are from previous years):

2017-01-01 to 2018-01-01

Title	Views
Home page / Archives	19,956
Where you get your BS in CS matters	1,820
Making WAV files from C programs	1,601
Tools and parts list for Applied Electronics W2017 and S2017	1,387
Algorithmic vs. Computational thinking	967
Sum of probabilities in log-prob space	800
How many AP courses are too many?	632
Journals for high school researchers	606
Problems rewriting the Class-D amplifier lab	497
Pressure sensor with air pump	442
Getting text from Amazon’s “Look Inside”	438
Conductivity of saline solution	407
Where PhDs get their Bachelors’ degrees	401
Installing gnuplot—a nightmare	371
More on automatic measurement of conductivity of saline solution	365
Circuits course: Table of Contents	361
Why Discrete Math Is Important and The Calculus Trap	354
Lying to my students	341
Pressure and volume lab	334
labhacks — The $25 scrunchable scientific poster	315
Pullup vs. transimpedance amplifier	312

I think that there are several reasons that old blog posts dominate my views:

• Most of my viewers (other than subscribers, whose loyalty I really appreciate) come via search engines. Of the 60,609 views, 33,202 were search-engine referrals (55%). Search engines will favor long-established pages that many people have clicked on in the past.  My next highest referrer is Facebook (which I don’t use) at 195 viewer—a tiny number in comparison.
• My recent posts have been more specialized than older ones, so have a narrower audience.
• I’ve been less active recently in calling attention to my recent posts on mailing lists and blog comments.

One good trend is that the most popular posts are now mostly contentful ones, rather than ones that are just links to other sites.

I don’t get any revenue from my blog (but I don’t pay anything for it either).  The clicks from my blog mostly go to other of my blog posts (1259), Digikey (1229), AliExpress (179), and LeanPub (175).  The average cost per click for advertising is 50¢–$2, so Digikey and AliExpress probably should be paying me, but they aren’t.  (Of course, the click rate would probably drop way down if I was being paid to push products, rather than just providing links to things I have bought and used or am thinking about buying.)

My top commenters (based on the last 1000 comments, so several years’ worth of comments) are

Commenter	Comments
gasstationwithoutpumps	399
CCPhysicist	114
gflint	50
xykademiqz	31
mathproblemsolvingskills	26

My comments are mostly pingbacks caused by links to older posts for continuity, though some are replies to other commenters. I’d like for my comments to be about 25% of the total, rather than 40%, but I’ve not had much success in getting my lurking subscribers and followers to say anything. If each of my followers made just one comment a year, the number of comments would quadruple. Questions, corrections, and suggestions for blog posts are particularly welcome.

I admit to being somewhat envious of bloggers who have active discussions among their commenters—my readers don’t seem to have formed that sort of on-line community, perhaps because my posts are not open-ended enough or because I wander over many different topics rather than staying focused on a specific niche, so the readership may not share many interests with each other.

For those who have been commenting—thank you! It really helps me to know that people are reading my blog (and raw numbers don’t really do that—I can’t really tell whether viewers coming in from search engines are reading what I have to say, or just clicking on a link and deciding it was a mistake).

Spike in views on Monday

I had double my normal readership on Monday 18 Sept 2017, which surprised me as I had not put out any posts recently.  I checked the statistics and found that the bump was mainly from one post: Engineering vs. Science, which got 173 views on Monday and 185 all week.  The referrals were from classroom.google.com, so apparently someone required reading the post for a class—I’ve no idea who, as the classroom links are somewhat anonymous (I have links, but would need to be in the class to follow them).

Because of that class assignment, the  Engineering vs. Science post is my most viewed site this week and this month, though not for the quarter—three others still beat it:

• Making WAV files from C programs
• Algorithmic vs. Computational thinking
• Where you get your BS in CS matters

It always surprises me which of my posts become the most popular.  The top 10 for the past year were

Home page / Archives	20,144
Where you get your BS in CS matters	1,775
Making WAV files from C programs	1,655
Tools and parts list for Applied Electronics W2017 and S2017	1,387
Algorithmic vs. Computational thinking	986
Sum of probabilities in log-prob space	706
How many AP courses are too many?	687
Journals for high school researchers	565
Getting text from Amazon’s “Look Inside”	547
Pressure sensor with air pump	435

The “home page” hits are large because all new posts read by subscribers get counted there. The next 9 are all posts with original content by me (unlike some of my all-time most-viewed posts, which were mainly pointers to other things on the web).

Suki’s blog posts from Home Education Magazine

Suki Wessling has started reposting articles she wrote for Home Education Magazine, now that they are defunct, as blog posts.

Here is one in which I am quoted: College Prep Unschooling

Her articles are generally worth reading, and I recommend that home schoolers add her to their blog roll.

 

International Blog Delurking Week

Delurking badge, copied with permission from http://www.stirrup-queens.com/2016/01/international-blog-delurking-week-2016/

Thanks to xykademiqz’s post, I just found out about “International Blog Delurking Week”, which runs 2016 Jan 3–2016 Jan 9. The tradition seems to have started in 2005 (at any rate, there are a lot of Google hits for “delurking week” and 2005, but all the top ones for “delurking week” and 2004 are from later years).

The idea is a simple one: ask lurking readers to step out from their silence to make a comment, even an inane one. Like most blog writers, I get few comments, and it sometimes feels like shouting in a large empty building—there are a lot of echos, but no one there to hear what I say.

Many of my views come from search engines and people passing on links to specific posts, but I don’t really know who is coming to my home page or reading on an RSS feed, aside from the handful of folks who comment regularly. (And a big thanks to them—it helps me believe that my audience contains real people, and not just spider bots crawling the web to link to my posts.)

Tell me something about yourself: are you a student? a faculty member? a home schooling parent? an electronics hobbyist? …

What would you like me to write more about in the coming year?

You can post anonymously if you are shy—I don’t need to know who you are in real life, just who you are as my blog audience.