Jon On Tech

She’s got everything she needs,
She’s an artist, she don’t look back.
- SHE BELONGS TO ME

Baaaah. I said I wouldn’t write this post, and a few people advised me not to. “Don’t Look Back!” they cried. But, dear readers, some of you begged for it. More importantly, I’m doing it for me (thanks Finnur) as a record. So if you don’t like these Blog Year In Review posts, stop reading now. Bye bye, and Happy New Year.

The Numbers

I finally started this blog in March 2009. The main reasons were a) I was up most of the night anyway due to baby’s sleeping habits and b) I was forced to take some holiday in March. I was never expecting anyone to read it, so a huge huge thank you to those that did, and helped me get some traffic love juice. I also got lucky with my timing as the infamous CMS Vendor Meme started just when I did. In 10 months, I’ve done:

• Real Life beers with about 30 or 40 people I’d never have met if I didn’t start this blog. You know who you are.
• According to Alexa, a mere 700,000 sites are more popular than mine. I’ve got a Page Rank of 5, although these don’t mean anything any more.
• 65 blog posts (34 in the long gone super-keen first 3 months). So averaging 1.5 posts per week. Each post has lyrics from a different Bob Dylan song. I’m aiming for 100 before a theme change.
• 571 comments (just over 8 per post). Probably 100 of these are from me!
• 5,224 spam comments that Akismet has saved me from
• 21,700 visits, or 45,500 page views, according to Google Analytics

My biggest day ever was about 400 visits. A shitty weekend is about 30. The traffic numbers have actually stayed reasonably constant since I started, although the frequency of new posts has dropped enormously.

Most Underrated

These are the 5 posts I liked most that never even made the Top 20. Please read them and tell all your friends. The poor guys never stood a chance.

Most Read

Here is the obligatory Top 10 by traffic. I’ve used number of unique visits as my metric.

Best Traffic Sources

Here is just a summary of where the traffic came from. Again, a massive thanks to those that lowered the tone of their sites by linking to me.

• 25% of my traffic was from search engines. Google is the only one that matters sending about 95% of these.
• 30% of the traffic was “direct”. I never bothered to set up tracking from Tweets but I’d bet the majority of these came from Twitter clients like Seesmic or Tweetdeck. Which means I get much more traffic from Twitter than Google. The other 45% of the traffic is from referring sites.
• Twitter was my top referrer by miles, with 25% of my direct visits.
• Second, third and fourth were all very close – cmswire.com, cmswatch.com and jboye.com. Eighth went to cmsreport.com
• FaceBook, LinkedIn and Delicious made the Top 20.
• The blogs in the Top 20 referrers were julianwraith.com (6), asserttrue.blogspot.com (7), reddotcmsblog.com (9), 2020visions.wordpress.com (13), sala.us (14), ecmarchitect.com (15), tristanrenaud.jahia.com (17), irinaguseva.wordpress.com (19) and persuasivecontent.com (20)

Well, that’s that. If for some reason you’re interested in a stat I didn’t share, ask in the comments. Be excellent to each other, and I’ll see you on the other side of the noughties for that beer. It’s been real.