For Auld Lang Syne

This just seems the way to celebrate it on a geeky, megalomaniacal blog.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!!

We’ll be back before you know it 😀

Image from Sexy Geek’s House of Swag

2014 Review, with Blogwanking

Since Luther and Sabina discussed their latest stats recently, I pulled a few of mine this morning. A lot of the info I usually talk about in these posts — top referrers, most popular posts, etc. — is covered in the annual reports, which I made public earlier today. In this post, I’m looking at how we did for traffic this quarter and how well we’ve accomplished our 2014 goals.

First, let’s take a look at Sourcerer’s month.

The big spike on December 12 represents 118 views and 79 visitors. That was a Friday. We ran an American Horror Story review and I announced the redesign. I’m surprised we didn’t take a bigger hit the last two weeks of the month. We even managed 42 views and 30 visitors on Christmas Day despite the fact that I forgot to tag my Christmas post.

I’m satisfied with our best ever day, total views, and comments. I’d certainly take more, but they are better than I thought they’d be at this point. I am especially pleased at our views-to-comments ratio, even when I account for the fact that almost half of those comments are responses from the authors of our posts.

Now our monthly views and daily averages since we started.

Our overall daily average hasn’t changed since last quarter, so that number has been rock solid for almost six months. Let’s take a stroll through the year.

• The massive January-over-December increase is not repeatable. We debuted our first four contributors last January. We also had a string of good luck that amounted to being struck by lightning three times in three weeks.
• However, given where we are now, 3,500 page views in January is doable if we can get rolling early enough in the month.
• I expect February though May to improve this year. We have a more solid contributor base, tons more friends, and an all-around better blog than we did last spring.
• June, our best month, was not a matter of luck. That was a solid 30-day run of good blogging and it was our first good month for search traffic. We can do that again any time we can get the blog firing on all cylinders, pick the right topics to blog about, and sustain it for a month.
• July and August only came out so well because I overextended myself. That won’t happen again, because you see the price we paid for it in September.
• I’m surprised we held up so well in November and December, especially given that both David and I went on vacation and ended up down sick for nearly a month each. We have Luther, Diana, Will, and Google to thank for those numbers.
• As I read the last quarter, if I am left to my own devices and have two or three top-notch contributors, this blog is good for 2,000 views per month just for posting every day. Obviously, more contributors, popular topics, and me having the time to do a lot of networking improves the numbers.

Just for the sake of comparison, here are Part Time Monster’s monthly totals and daily averages for the same period. The Monster is at 31,000 views and 5,126 comments as of this writing. Sourcerer is still keeping pace, and the Monster’s view-to-comment ratio is even better than ours.

2014 Annual Report

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog. (The highlight that tickles me the most is the 144-day streak from April to August.)

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 30,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 11 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.