Belated Blogging Celebration – Cotton Anniversary

I managed to miss the second anniversary of this blog earlier in the week (the 22nd).

While I have some basic understanding, via WordPress statistics, that site views have improved this year over last, it’s hard to be terribly confident in the strength of those numbers.  There’s always a fair amount of referral spam, and WordPress doesn’t give an easy means of counting the hits via feed readers and other syndicated means.  I can do it for individual posts, but not for any day-to-day (or week-to-week) comparisons.

I still haven’t grown to the level of any of the major players or collections of bloggers.  That’s going to take either a long time or some kind of partnership.  Twitter has helped, but it’s been a nudge rather than a push.  Two of my biggest referrers are strongly connected to my past blogging – Prometheus and Roger Pielke, Jr.’s blog.  ScienceBlogs sneaks into the top three on the strength of the linkage to TFK.

The best indicator of how small-time I am is what happened last December, when Thoughts From Kansas over at the ScienceBlogs mothership linked to one of my posts.  Traffic exploded that day and that month, and the post is one of the top four viewed posts as of the end of my second year of blogging sole proprietorship.  The top quartet:

• Newton’s Third Law of Funny
• Seriously, Don’t Put Words in the Mouths of Engineers. Don’t Even Imply It.
• Commerce Department Names Members of National Innovation Council
• The Newest Superbug Laughs at Your Hand Sanitizer

For comparison, the topics of this crop of top viewed posts bears little resemblance to last year’s.  This bunch ranks high in part because of the broad appeal of the first and fourth entries.  Apparently trying to find Newton’s laws demonstrated visually is often done via a search engine.

Plans for this next year?  Nothing concrete just yet, outside of redecorating the place (that should be done in time for the 1500th post).  I keep toying with the notion of editing series of posts into longer form pieces, but without a sense of where to publish them (besides here), that’s likely to remain on the back burner.