2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. You can access it below; here’s my thoughts on it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Overall, I enjoyed blogging a lot, but I must admit that’s in part due to my haphazard approach. I post what I want, when I want, and I don’t give a rat’s ass about producing high-quality content. I’m happy with a few nice pics and a few remarks on things that pop to the front of my mind when I take the photos. Also, I occasionally enjoy the ranting 😉

Because WordPress counts views via a blog reader separately per post and does not sum them up for the entire blog I can’t really say how many people have read my posts. On-site, the blog totalled some 70,000 views this year, an average of just under 200 a day. That may sound impressive, but compared to other people’s efforts (Dave Hone’s archosaurmusings comes to mind) it’s practically nothing. No surprise there! And I have to admit that the way I embed pictures leads to extra views counted if people click through to the larger size version. I want to know if people do, thus I keep this system in operation, but it does make my blog look more widely read than it is. So what?

One odd thing happened in August this year, during my blogging-kind-of-hiatus. A post from December 15, 2011(!) suddenly saw huge numbers of views. The title Theropod Thursday 5: Diversity! sounds impressive, but in fact all the post contains is a variety of photos of birds with some remarks on how remarkably diverse birds are. For some reason, 213 people checked it out in 8 days in August! A one-day 40 view spike occurred in October, and ever since it gets some 10 or so views a week. In fact, it is by now the most popular post of both this year and the entire runtime of the blog, pushing the informative, thought-out post Mounting a skeleton: bones or casts? to second place – and by a huge margin!1,233 vs 807 views this year, with only a month between them – and the bones or casts post sees an average of 2 views a week now. So what happened? Goggle didn’t help me, for once, and the pingbacks don’t tell me anything helpful either. Did some colleague (Tom Holtz is my prime suspect) give students the post link in course material?

Another odd thing is that despite higher quality posts starting this fall and promoting the blog on Facebook the number of visitors is in slow steady decline. No idea why, and tbh I don’t really care 🙂

For the next year I have tons of material to post, but same as last year I will barely find time for long and detailed posts. This means that a full report on my US visit this summer, including the awesome St. George tracksite in Utah, will probably take some time. Overall, though, I hope to post more dinosaurs, less mammals – or at least more mammal biomechanics!

Happy New Year to all 😀