This post is mostly for me to see what’s happened to the blog last year. I planned on taking it much more seriously. I did but only for a while.

Quantity

Published 32 items. wc -w gives a total of 12347 words but that’s slightly inflated because of markdown syntax and YAML front matter.

Biggest posts are “Ant colony optimization”, “Redesigning Selangkah” and “You can’t fork a company”.

The average number of words is 385. If the top three posts are excluded that drops to 302. Accounting for non-word things such as front-matter and the tags that’s probably closer to 250-275.

For instructional posts that might be fine but I think that’s not enough to elaborate on a more complex topic.

Structure

I noticed that I don’t follow a very consistent or strong structure to the posts. They’re not incoherent but they could do with a better flow.

Topics

I mostly put posts into product and technical categories accounting for 25 out of 32 posts. product however overlaps relatively often with ethics so perhaps it should be removed. ethics is a new category for me. I did notice that ethical conduct both in work that I do and in companies that I support has become significantly more important to me.

The rest of the posts are relatively evenly distributed across opinion, rails, society, management, design, press, development, etc.

Popularity

The top posts are about Devise, Flutter and the uploading a file in cucumber. Those instruction technical posts have been popular for quite a while.

The posts published during the last year that preformed best are “What did you do during the lockdown”, “Redesigning Selangkah” and “Ant colony optimization”.

“Redesigning Selangkah” also ranks highly for the search term. It is also linked somewhere with ?hcb=1 param that I haven’t been able to track down.

These three posts also had the most positive reactions on LinkedIn so their popularity makes sense. The traffic also mostly came from LinkedIn with some follow-up traffic from search engines.

Drop-off

I pretty much stopped writing near the end of June when I decided to move. I also didn’t publish any of the ready posts. That’s a shame because there were a couple of posts that were ready but didn’t get published.

The blog in 2021

So, with that in mind, in (the rest) of 2021, I’ll:

• Publish 50 posts with an average of 600 words
• Follow a better structure
• Have at least 5 dominant categories rather than 2
• Have at least 1 new post be in the top 3 pages of the year
• Have at least 2 posts in every month of the year (made possible by the fact that I published in January posts that have been ready for a long time)
• Keep track of, and regularly publish, posts that are complete

(I originally wrote this in the middle of February but didn’t publish it till much later.)