2018 in review: state of the blog
Other parts of the 2018 review: analytic, reflections.
2017 review: analytic, narrative.
2016 review: analytic, narrative.
Writing
My favorite posts from 2018:
- Doing good while clueless
- Why I'm skeptical of cost-effectiveness analysis and its companion comment thread
- There's something good in coffee – coffee is good for you!
- A few drinks aren't that bad – moderate drinking isn't really bad for you!
- Giving more won't make you happier and its distillation
Most viewed posts in 2018:
- Scott Adams' persuasion tips – from 2017
- My bookshelf
- Two quotes from "The House I Live In" – from 2015
- What to do about consequentialist cluelessness? – from 2017
- Motorcycling: is it worth the risk? – from 2016
The blog's landing page was the most visited page of the site, as we'd expect. But the content of the landing page rotates (it always displays the most recent post), so this doesn't say anything about what posts were most popular.
The Scott Adams persuasion post was really popular, accounting for 12% of all traffic. I guess people are looking to grow more persuasive!
All the most-viewed posts in 2018 were published in previous years. I think this is because older posts have more time to get indexed by Google, so it's more likely that they show up in search results. (Just speculating here – I don't know anything about SEO.)
Statistics
I posted substantially more in 2018 than in previous years (2018: 141 posts, 2017: 41 posts, 2016: 35 posts). Most 2018 posts followed the trend that began to emerge in 2017 – short excerpts from things I was reading. (Pablo's notatu dignum inspired me to move in this direction.)
In 2018, 2,500 people visited the site – roughly 200 visits a month. That's up about 2.5x from 2017, when ~1,000 people visited. I think this increase is due to publishing more content in 2018.
(Note that these aren't unique visitors – if one person visits on two different days, that's counted as two separate visitors. However, if the same person goes to multiple pages during the same session, I believe that is recorded as one visit.)
My interest in this project is largely orthogonal to developing a big readership, but it's nice to see more people visiting.
Plan for 2019
I plan to stay the course in 2019 – posting interesting things when it doesn't feel onerous to do so. No one's paying me for this, so doing stuff that isn't fun would be besides the point.
This year, "post things when it doesn't feel onerous" cashed out to a high frequency of posting. Near the end of the year, I kinda got into a groove of making a post each day.
I make no promises that this cadence will continue in 2019 – trying to maintain a post a day would be Goodhart-ing myself.