August 17 2018
431,529 Views: A Decade of Blogging
Ten years ago today, I started this blog. It was a couple months after joining Retrospect, and I created a WordPress blog to collect various technical notes and thoughts.
In the last decade, I’ve written 160 posts–16 per year or more than once a month–and the site has received 431,529 pageviews, with the largest referrer being Stackoverflow at 6%. See the below screenshot of Google Analytics from 2008 to 2018. The spike is when Lifehacker reviewed Remind Me Later. That free app was a huge hit, racking up around 80,000 downloads.
Here are the top five most popular posts with their pageview percentages:
- 16% – Custom UITableViewCell from a XIB in Interface Builder
- 7% – Remind Me Later
- 6% – ibtool: Localization Made Easy
- 5% – Core Animation on the iPhone
- 4% – Converting MySQL from LATIN1 to UTF8
Of course, the most popular posts are useful technical how-to guides, not thoughtful posts. Here are my top five favorite posts and their pageview percentages:
- 0.04% – A Mac App Store
- 0.42% – Rails internationalization at scale
- 0.05% – Making Remote Work
- 0.11% – Novelty versus need – Fitbit and iWatch
- 0.01% – How we built a modern, responsive Retrospect.com
Given the recent rate of posts, I doubt I’ll match 160 in the next decade.
