2016 roundup

Another year has gone by, the fourth one running in which I am writing a roundup article. While still not burdened with an overabundance of excitement, they are useful to me.

Like 2015, 2016 has been a year marked by change. In January, we moved out of our house, into an apartment, and sold the house. In June, I completed the final module for the second year of my Bachelor-studies with the OU, and I commenced studies for the penultimate module for the degree in October. I started a YouTube channel dedicated to my efforts within shooting sports, and have attended a number of matches. In August, our youngest daughter joined her big sister in kindergarten.

On the professional front, 2016 has been challenging. The Norwegian Institute of Public Health welcomed 250 new employees, and completed the reorganisation efforts started in Q2 2015, both of which I was involved in. The NIPH has also put a new collaboration and intranet portal into production, for which I was a tester. Early in the year, the Minister for Health and Care services decided that eleven bureaus and agencies under the ministry were to have their IT service provision handled by a shared services center to be established by Norsk Helsenett. This change directly affects my department, and I have been involved in some of the testing to support the upcoming move.

Change has come to the blog, too, in the form of a number of theme-changes. I’m pretty happy about the current theme, and expect to keep it for some time to come – don’t hold me to that though; I may not be actively looking for a new theme, but if I find one that ticks all my boxes, all bets are off.

January started with talk about our Tesla Model S, ending with two opinion-pieces about System 1 thinking. February had more talk about the car, and a few tips and tricks, which spilled over into March, when I also noted the passing of the five hundred post mark. April was fairly GoPro-centric, while May had some more GoPro-stuff, and a few more opinions. June had a fifty-fifty split of tips and tricks and Tesla-stuff.

In July, I introduced the summer counterpart to this post; the State of the Blog, and the month also saw tips and tricks and opinon-piecess. August saw the passing of the 10000 km mark for the car, as well as an argument in defence of encryption. September and October both had a good mix of opinion-pieces and tips and tricks, while November was mostly tips and tricks, but saw a rare departure from my posting schedule, in my eulogy for Leonard Cohen. December saw the passing of the 15000 kilometer mark for the car, as well as a few tips and tricks.

I find revisiting analytics to be valuable as well, and share it openly because I want to be transparent about what I see in my back-end tools. Here’s the data:

• Monthly readership: 5’654
• Return visitor rate: 9.9%
• Feedburner subscribers: 37

As for geography, that data looks as follows:

1. United States (26%)
2. India (12%)
3. United Kingdom (10%)
4. Canada (5%)
5. Australia (4%)

Compared to 2015, my monthly readership has been reduced by about 2000 readers, but I have a better return visitor rate, and there is an increase of about 400 monthly readers compared to the summer. Comparing the relative numbers, it seems that what has been lost is new visitors, not return visitors, which has remained more or less the same. As I wrote in my revisit of why I blog, the important thing is that I am happy. Posting these year in review posts is a way to look back, to see what I have accomplished, and to take stock. I am very gratified to see that my number of returning visitors has remained more or less the same, but most of all, I am happy to have been able to have a new post each and every week.

Although 2016 has seen its share and then some of challenges, it has all in all been a good year, and I am looking forward to seeing what 2017 will bring. As I have said more than once, on many different occasions, and in many differing circumstances: we live in interesting times, and they are unlikely to get any less interesting anytime soon.