Recently, I received a notification from WordPress, alerting me that I’d just had my 8th anniversary with the service. It’s true. I recall moving my blog from LiveJournal to WordPress in the months before the Little Man was born. I decided to look at some of the stats for the blog, both before, and after its conversion to WordPress. Here is what I found.
- There is a total of 6,170 posts going back to November 2005.
- Those posts add up to 2.3 million words. That’s the equivalent of 23 standard-length novels.
- I moved to WordPress in January 2009. Since then, I’ve written 3,066 posts totaling 1.5 million words.
- If you do the math, the average length of a post here is just under 400 words.
- It takes me about 20 minutes to write a 500 word post. If you do that math (and I hesitate to do this), you’d find I’ve spent somewhere around 64 days in the last 11+ years doing nothing but writing blog posts.
Since I was looking at these stats, it seemed like I should take a look at what the most popular posts of all time have been on this blog. Here, then, are the top 10 most popular (by views) posts on the blog:
- Going Paperless
- 5 Tips for Getting the Most out of a FitBit Flex
- Main home page
- Going iPad, Part 2 of 5: Writing on the iPad with Scrivener and SimpleNote
- FitBit Experiment: Measuring Battery Life from Low to Empty
- Three More Tips for FitBit Flex Users
- Going Paperless: How I Simplified My Notebook Organization in Evernote (Part 1)
- Does a FitBit Accurately Track Your Steps if You Walk with Your Hands in Your Pockets?
- My Shared Templates Notebook for Evernote
- Going Paperless: Tips for Organizing Your Digital Filing Cabinet
Many of these posts have several hundred thousand views. Some of them are what SEO experts call “evergreen” posts—posts that are useful for long periods of time. This wasn’t intentional. My SEO abilities are limited, and my interest in SEO is nonexistent. Still, it surprises me to see that some posts I’ve written have staying power.
For instance, back in 2014, when I was reading a 3-volume biography of Winston Churchill, I wrote a post called “The Death of Marigold Churchill.” It was a post about how moved and sad I was when learning of the death of the Churchill’s young daughter. Now, one-off posts like that usually get just a couple hundred views. But this one was different. It has accumulated over 14,000 views. To this day, people still come to it. I can’t explain why.
The blog has had its ups and downs. It’s best year, 2014, saw more than 1.3 million views. It is down substantially from that, but I am still having fun, and love the kind of writing I am doing for the blog, even if not as many people are reading it.
On February 13, 2013, the blog saw the most views it ever had on a single day: 14,047. That was the day that I was featured on Lifehacker’s “How I Work” series. All told, there have been about a dozen days where the views have surpassed 10,000.
These days, though I have a lot of fun writing for the blog, I often worry I get repetitive on some topics. I wrote a lot about going paperless, and a lot about quantified self. You may have noticed I’ve been steering away from these topics recently. I want to avoid being repetitive as much as possible. With more than 6,100 posts, however, there are plenty of subjects that I have beaten to death over the years.
Including posts on my blog stats.
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