23 years of blogging
Posted on 12/31/2018 in misc
I started this silly little site on 12-31-1995. It's older than my daughter, by about a month. I'm not going to repeat the full origin story. Hit that previous link if you don't know the story.
The 31 post December makes this my most productive year of blogging in many years. I'll have more to say on the December challenge in my next post. I had a specific thing in mind when I did it, and I want to talk a bit about what that was and whether or not I achieved what I set out to achieve.
Traffic was pretty much consistent with 2017. Interestingly, the 31 post outburst in December seems to have had a negligible impact on my traffic. Granted, my stat program isn't picking up feed readers, but what weirdos still use those? ;) I think the dramatic drop in traffic in July was probably an update to the stats program that filtered better. I don't think my actual readership really changed that much. Although Medtronic did finally fix their website to work with Safari in the Spring, so that could also be at least partially reflect my most popular blog post for the year becoming obsolete.
My most popular post (by a country mile) was the MacOS workaround for Carelink. I received several emails from people claiming that Medtronic support said they couldn't tell them how to make the site work on a Mac, but if they checked out my site they would find an answer. Gotta love FDA regulations that treat a website like a heath care device. That post was about 20% of my page views. The rest of the top 5 were:
- My hurricane recipe
- A Puerto Rico vacation post from 2015
- My college scholarship post from 2014
- A 2017 post on how to install a SSL certificate on Webfaction hosting
If there is any takeaway from that list it's that I've written a few things that people find useful. So good on me I guess?
The least viewed post was this book review, which still had 121 views.
So that's a wrap for 2018. See y'all in 2019.
This is entry #31 in my (successful!) attempt at 31 days of blogging for December 2018. I've haven't posted here daily since about 2007, so this should be interesting.