Science-fiction writer and Evernote Ambassador Jamie Rubin loves stats, keeps track of them and manages to pull them together into meaningful and interesting slices of information for others, as well as for himself. Quite an achievement.
After reading a recent blog post of his Blog Stats for Q1 of 2014, I got interested in the idea of keeping track of how much I write, on this blog and elsewhere. Rubin has created lines of code that automate this process, but not being a coder I’ve had to resort to more primitive methods: a plugin. I just installed Word Stats (another overview over here), and so here we go.
Because in Japan the school and fiscal years begin in April, and as I live and work in Japan, I’m going to follow suit, so these are for last “year”, April 1, 2013 – March 31, 2014.
- 113 posts
- 42,454 words
- 376 words/post (average)
- 75% of my blog posts are at an intermediate reading level, 24% are at a basic level, and just 1% at an advanced level (must have been drunk at the time).
- just 2 of my posts were tagged “too long”, meaning they were over 1,500 words (this is the default standard for “too long”)
- 37 posts were tagged “too short”, being fewer than 200 words (this is the default standard for “too short”).
- My most prolific month was March 2014 (7,519 words) – not surprising as I almost no classes in that month, so had more time to spend on blogging.
- I blogged the least in the previous month, February 2014. Not sure why. Most of my classes finished in the first week of February. After that I was focussed on calculating final grades. I did get sick in that month, but that only lasted a few days.
Visitor Stats
My visitor stats go back to 2008, when I started this blog in November. I had 88 visitors that month.
- By 2010 I was getting 100-200 visitors/month.
- That all changed in March 2011 when the earthquake/tsunami/Fukushima nuclear meltdown happened, and I started blogging about that. In March I got 2,004 visitors.
- In April 2011 I got 3,203 visitors. Numbers dropped to below 2,000 after that until November (2,398) and then they went up gradually reaching a peak in February 2012 (5,195).
- Numbers from then on dropped slightly, hovering around +/- 3,000 visitors/month until
- May 2013 when they dropped below 2,500 and have continued to drop ever since, falling below 2,000 in August 2013 (for the first time since October 2011) and
- below 1,000 since January 2014 (for the first time since Feb. 2011).
The low numbers since Jan. 2014 are perhaps due to the fact that I have been blogging less since Dec. 2013.
- I wrote just 3 posts in February this year, compared to
- 13 in March, and
- 7 in February, 2013
- 39 in February, 2012!
So there seems to be a correlation between frequency of blogging and numbers of visitors. Tho it can’t only be that, because visitor numbers have not picked up even though I’ve started blogging more ( high word count), and more frequently.?
