State of the Blog 2018

I am, for the third year running, 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 remains an outlet for me, and I have continued to exploit the pipeline of posts to ensure that I can write on my own schedule, rather than scrambling to get new posts. Since December, I’ve had no less than three weeks of pre-loaded material, and at most a buffer of eight weeks.

On the analytics side of things, Monthly readership has increased, though I am unsure of why, although I will note that I generally see a bump in the first half of the year and a dip in the second half of the year. The bump is larger than what I’ve seen in years past, however, and time will tell whether this represents a lasting change. At any rate, I write first and foremost for myself. Although a high monthly readership is nice, it’s not crucial, and its importance has been reduced even more since I demonetised the blog. What impact that has in the long term remains to be seen, but as this is being written, I am not seeing a significant change.

As always, I want to have a look at the readership data I see; here it is:

• Monthly readership: 5’300
• Return visitor rate: 6.3%

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

1. United States (30.5%)
2. India (9.5%)
3. United Kingdom (8.5%)
4. Canada (5%)
5. Australia (5%)

From a blogging point of view, the first half of 2018 has been pretty good. It represents a good mix of how-tos and opinion pieces, as well as my second ever guest post. Guest posts are not something I necessarily aim to have on the blog, but which I will use when someone has written well on a subject where I have strong feelings, and where my rehashing their work would pale in comparison as derivative.

The title and tagline introduced back in the first half of 2016 has become part and parcel of the identity of the blog, and informs what pieces I choose to work on and keep in development. One practical upshot of this is that I have posts that have been in development and revision for some time that are getting close to being ready for publication.