mattwie.be archives

Three years of blogging are now behind me, which I suppose some would call an accomplishment. This blog hasn’t turned into a conversation hub, nor has it sputtered out and died like so many of my friends’ blogs have.

Not having a “following” has been very liberating. There are people who read this thing—some even do so consistently—but I’m not worried about hanging on to a readership by continuing to churn out the same type of writing. If there has been one constant in my blog thus far, it has been change.

My blog, like much of the rest of my life, is a very solitary endeavour. With one exception: this blog has a potential audience of the entire planet. A very odd position for an introvert to be in.

Now, for an excuse to dig into my stats: this is my 364^th post in the three year life of this blog, meaning that I’ve averaged a post every three days. In the past year, I’ve had 9527 visitors and 14,322 pageviews. My most popular post published in the last year was On Valedictions, which currently appears as the result #14 on a google search for valedictions.

81% of my visitors use Windows, 16% use Mac, and 1.7% are on Linux. Firefox beat out Internet Explorer 45% to 43% for browser share, with Safari finishing a distant third at 8.2%. 51% of my traffic arrives via search engines, with matt wiebe, valedictions, and variations on “modern day parables” being the top keywords used to arrive here.

USAmerican visitors make up a whopping 55.6% of my visitors, which means that I should try harder to hector them. Fellow Canadians finish a distant second with 23.2%. The Philippines won out for non-English-speaking countries with 1.1% to finish in 5th place. All told, I’ve had visitors from 116 countries.

Well, that was a bunch of numbers. Expect more words in the following year. Hopefully some of them witty, some of them challenging, and some of them profound. Likely many will be garden-variety ignorant. This blog is a work in progress, and to whatever readers are out there with me, thanks for putting up with me. Here’s to another year.