This blog began on April 1, 2005–five years ago.
Well, technically, it began earlier, but the first post appeared on April 1 (thanks to WordPress’ postdating feature), so that was the official launch date. Not by accident.
To date:
- 1,134 posts–which is 140 more than on April 1, 2009, but that’s a little misleading, since I deleted some posts earlier in March (posts that mirrored those on another blog and had to do with a former place of work…no content was lost in this operation). It appears that there have been 189 new posts over the last 12 months.
- 3,435 comments, up from 3,022 last April 1–413 for the year, which is down about one-quarter from the previous year. Remarkably, the long-term ratio of comments to posts is still 3:1, although it’s much lower than that (2.2:1) for the past year.
- FeedBurner shows 860 feeds as of right now. (That figure drops every weekend, then comes back, sometimes a little higher, by midweek. Hey, it’s Google: Numbers are always approximate, right?)
- Sessions: Due to server changes, I can only go back to mid-November 2009. For the four month period November 30, 2009-March 30, 2010 (Urchin tends to run a day late), I see 186,675 sessions (1,543/day average); multiplying by three (and traffic’s been pretty consistent over the last four months, so that may be legitimate), I get 560K for the year–a 14% increase over the previous year, which brings things back to 2008 traffic levels.
- Pageviews: 492,683 (4,072/day), which extrapolates to 1.48 million for the year–29% up from the previous year.
- IP Addresses: 16,490, a little over one-third of the previous year–and I don’t believe it’s reasonable to triple that figure.
“Make of those numbers what you will” continues to be good advice. In March-May 2009, among the 514 liblogs studied for But Still They Blog, Walt at Random was 59th most prolific (58th in 2008), 32nd most verbose (24th in 2008) and 29th most commented-on (56th in 2008)–and had the 74th longest posts and 80th most comments per post. Hard to say what, if anything, to make of those figures.
As noted last year, given full-text feeds (and server changes), “most popular posts” is particularly meaningless, but here they are anyway, for the four-month period November 30, 2008-March 30, 2009, omitting overhead pages:
joshing-spoofing-and-damage 1,985
mystery-collection-disc-2 1,979
citizendium-and-the-memory-of-water 1,970
cites-on-a-plane-2-this-time-its-for-keeps 1,019
cites-insights-78-available 1,017
liblog-landscape-opinions-requested 1,014
library-blogs-and-newspaper-columns 1,011
one-small-new-years-resolution-thanks-dorothea 1,002
bloggers-salon-palisades-not-avila 999
reading-level 994
ragged-preliminary-thoughts-on-conversations-and-unhermiting 985
of-chaos-and-stability-two-minor-mini-posts 979
almost-there-trimming-the-sidebar 966
responding-as-politely-as-possible 953
the-long-and-short-of-blogs-but-still-they-blog-4 857
lita-at-midwinter-2010-a-publicity-update 769
ebooks-outsell-pbooks-my-own-story 760
back-in-the-market 721
That’s a mysterious list–particularly since it includes a couple of very old posts, including one with no meaning whatsoever in this time period (“bloggers salon palisades not avila”–which was relevant for the 2008 ALA Annual Conference!). The boldface items are posts that actually appeared within the past year.
Here’s what I said near the end of last year’s egopost:
Still blogging, still random, still with more readers than I’d expect.
Since this blog began, I’ve gone through three employers, two jobs, a new home (that we really love) and new city (that we also love) and more disruption than I’d have chosen…but that’s life.
Congrats, Walt! I remember that 1st post well.
That was BIG (and welcome to may of us!) news back then in the biblioblogosphere; back when there *was* news in the biblioblogosphere. [Whew! Been a while since I typed that word.]
Here’s hoping life settles down for you a bit more over the next 5!