Ten years. I’ve been doing this for ten years.
The first post on Walt at Random appeared on April 1, 2005; the date was intentional.
Back then, I still worked at RLG. (Back then, there still was an RLG.) I was still writing two columns, one in EContent and one in Online. Cites & Insights was in its fifth year. And the blog seemed like a good idea at the time.
Since then? More than 2,000 posts (the dashboard says 1,990, but I’ve deleted some posts such as announcements of Lulu sales). 4,118 posted comments (almost none in recent years), plus 105,113 spamments and counting.
Here’s a look at posting frequency—counting only posts that are still available:
Maybe you can see a pattern in that graph, other than things completely falling apart in 2014. I can’t.
Major categories: Writing and blogging; Cites & Insights; Movies and TV; Books and publishing…and Stuff, which is partly posts I forget to categorize.
I’d link to the very first post, but I keep getting the fourth post when I try to do that. Not very interesting anyway.
Looking back ten years, I do notice one thing: there are several minor items I’ve thought about blogging about…and it turns out I already did. Ten years ago.
As for overall statistics: I haven’t a clue. (Yeah, I know, but also not about overall W.a.R. statistics.) The program that’s currently running only shows statistics for the current month. As of yesterday (when I’m actually writing this), March 31, 2015, at about 5 a.m., here’s what I see:
6.213 unique visitors. 2,2690 visits from people, with 57,291 pages. Another 183,181 pages (192,745 hits) of “not viewed traffic”—robots, worms, etc.
The summary does show other months for the current year; turns out uniqwue visitors is nearly constant, at 6,189-6,298 per month.
As for the most visited pages for March 2015? That’s an odd lot. Excluding overhead (/feed/ and the like):
- Signs of Spring (April 16, 2011), 2,420 views—a post about our photovoltaic system. Really?
- Post-OCLC: A midterm update (August 7, 2007), 1,359 views—now that’s just sad. (I should note that I got lots of kind words during the process, but also that there’s one library director I hope never to encounter again, as he made a point of saying how wonderful it was that RLG had been merged, resulting in my job loss—and that was all he—and of course it was a he—said. Apparently simply not responding wasn’t an option, where gratuitous salt-rubbing was.)
- The Open Access Landscape: 1. Background (March 3, 2015), 649 views—finally, a current post.
- The Open Access Landscape: 2. Agriculture (March 6, 2015), 415 views
And a mix of old and new with fewer than 400 views.
The #1 search keyphrase: “what is a peachcot”
Which seems like an ideal place to end this blogiversary post.
