State of the Blog 2017

As I did last year, I am writing a retrospective article for the summer. These are meant to be the summer counterpart to my end-of-year roundup series, which means that some information will be duplicated across the two series of posts.

Blogging has continued to be an outlet for me. At most, I have had ten weeks’ worth of articles pre-loaded, which has left me a comfortable buffer in which to ignore the blog completely – should I so wish. I have not had to scramble to add new material, and have been able to establish a pipeline of posts and post ideas which has meant that I have been able to write when I have found the time and energy.

The pipeline has also allowed me to write a proper post series on my workflow for video editing. As you will see in the analytics section, the monthly readership has declined a little, while the return visitor rate has increased somewhat. Correcting for the former, the latter has declined a little, but less so than overall readership. I am still using the same theme, and have generally been very happy about it; it does what I want it to, in that it showcases the text, with very little in the way of fluff around it.

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: 4700
• Return visitor rate: 7%

As for geography, the top five countries from which my readership hails are:

1. United States (26.5%)
2. India (11.5%)
3. United Kingdom (10%)
4. Canada (5%)
5. Australia (5%)

From a blogging point of view, the first half of 2017 has been OK. I have gotten a number of bigger pieces out, and a couple of longer opinion pieces which I have really enjoyed writing. Some of them are the condensed and revised forms of discussions I have had elsewhere, while others are simply “Here’s how I work; have a look – you might find it useful.”

I feel that the new title and tagline is at present more aspirational than descriptive, and would like to get more ideas out into the blog. Getting there is something that will take a concerted effort, and I wouldn’t expect to see that happen too soon.