Exactly one year ago today, on the 13th of February 2013, I published my first ever blog post. Since then 85 posts were written and published, this is number 86.
Time to look back to one year of blogging.
My initial intention was to have about one post per week. Even that I was not really sure I could manage. I tought being happy if I got to about 50 posts per year. Reality was a bit different. Indeed, it started a bit hesitant with 3 posts per month, but around post 35 I got the hang of it. It was at the time that the IPCC report came out and for a limited time I started to churn out posts almost daily. This eventually culminated in a steady pace of about 10 posts per month from October till now. I found a rhythm. Posting more frequent would be not practical, unless I make my posts smaller (I think I make my posts much too long).
I didn’t make it myself easy by writing in a language that is not my mother tongue and although I work in an international environment which demands switches from one language to another on a frequent basis, details can get lost. Although I use a spell checker to filter out errors, mistakes like quite/quiet, where/were will keep popping up. In my focus on the contents I gloss over them, so does my spell checker. I keep on finding such mistakes in older posts, even now. But on the positive side, it improved my knowledge of English spelling tremendously.
The number of views is nothing to write home about, but it is getting better. Since November 2013 there is a steady increase and February started rather strong. So there is hope this trends continues. On the other hand, I have the impression that not all visits are recorded. I sometimes find posts shared without being viewed yet or post with more shares than views. Readers probably view posts in the WordPress Reader and share and/or like from there.
Most popular post (besides the home page and About) were:
- The making of The Hockey Stick (April 17, 2013)
- (Over)blowing in the wind (February 13, 2013)
- Attribution certainty differences between AR4 and AR5 (September 30, 2013)
Most of the views came from United States. Somewhat more than half from United Kingdom. Half of that from The Netherlands. About the same from Belgium (but most are mine while exploring WordPress functionalities). The rest is far away from that, but Canada and Australia are rising strong in the last months.
I also see the presence of my posts in aggregator blogs like for example The Climate Cult, where visitors can view all my posts without having to visit this blog. There were also 3 reblogs of a post on other sites. So I have still some hope that there are more people reading my post than what I can see.
To my surprise, there are now 22 followers. Didn’t see that coming. The same thing with the number of comments. I never anticipated so many. Thank you all.
Also a big thanks for the likes. These were the most comforting when it got though in face of the limited views and they gave me the courage to go on.
For those who are reading, thank you for passing by and I hope you will come back in the future.
Trust, yet verify 