{"id":3271,"date":"2009-01-02T09:57:45","date_gmt":"2009-01-02T09:57:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2009\/01\/02\/2008-in-blogging\/"},"modified":"2009-01-02T09:57:45","modified_gmt":"2009-01-02T09:57:45","slug":"2008-in-blogging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2009\/01\/02\/2008-in-blogging\/","title":{"rendered":"2008 in Blogging"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Because there&#8217;s no better form of procrastinatory blogging than making traffic graphs:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/467\/files\/2012\/04\/i-05323c075d4a88ff94362377ed41607e-2008_stats.jpg\" alt=\"i-05323c075d4a88ff94362377ed41607e-2008_stats.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s how you know it&#8217;s Science!<\/p>\n<p>Unlike the last couple of years, 2008 did not see any gigantic spikes in traffic, despite a couple of posts that I thought would really have some juice. Shows what I know.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The first half of the year pretty much fit in with a steady upward trend since the move to ScienceBlogs (see below). In early June, though, it all got to be a bit too much, and I cut way back on posting (less than half as many posts in June as in the previous few months), leading to a major drop in traffic. Things more or less recovered toward the end of the year, but overall, traffic was pretty much flat for the year.<\/p>\n<p>The three highest-traffic weeks come in a clump in late March and early April. Sadly, much of that was for stupid reasons&#8211; the  only post that drew major hits that I&#8217;m proud of was <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/03\/what_everyone_should_know_abou.php\">What Everyone Should Know About Science<\/a> (the second-most-popular post of the year). The rest of the traffic came from <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/03\/talk_like_a_physicist.php\">Talk Like a Physicist<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/04\/the_framing_fracas.php\">The Framing Fracas<\/a> and subsequent posts, and <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/04\/john_scalzi_should_be_ashamed.php\">the &#8220;Vox Day&#8221; incident<\/a>, which was the most popular single post of the year. Whee.<\/p>\n<p>I <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/11\/best_blogging_of_the_year.php\">posted a list of my favorite posts of 2008<\/a> a while ago, and I don&#8217;t think there was anything in December that would knock any of those off the list.<\/p>\n<p>In the event that you&#8217;re interested in the overall traffic trend for the blog, here&#8217;s the graph of blog traffic from the very beginning. Like the graph above, it&#8217;s binned by week, because that seems to be about the right time scale for smoothing out completely random fluctuations while still keeping a reasonable sense of the variation:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/467\/files\/2012\/04\/i-225b699508ab99296be28fc54e425d04-2006-8_stats.jpg\" alt=\"i-225b699508ab99296be28fc54e425d04-2006-8_stats.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>And that&#8217;s where things stand at the start of 2009. I&#8217;ll post some less meta stuff next week, honest, but it seems like sort of a waste to put anything too heavy in the day between New Year&#8217;s and the weekend&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Because there&#8217;s no better form of procrastinatory blogging than making traffic graphs: That&#8217;s how you know it&#8217;s Science! Unlike the last couple of years, 2008 did not see any gigantic spikes in traffic, despite a couple of posts that I thought would really have some juice. Shows what I know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3271\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}