2012 in Review
Chris Coyier over at CSS Tricks does a yearly post documenting stats on the blog from the past 12 months, and it inspired me to do the same, as much as anything to have an easy way to compare year on year how the blog has done. Obviously this post wont quite be 12 months as the site has only existed for 9 months, having started in early April.
So, I set the Analytics to show me from April 8th (Day One) through to December 31st, and here are the results.
Visitors
The site had 104,280 unique visitors, with 246,878 pageviews. Of the visits, 63% were new visitors, with 37% returning visitors.
Browsers
I was delighted to see that the most popular browser was Google Chrome, accounting for over 60% of the visits. Mozilla Firefox was second, with 19% of visits, then Apple Safari with 9% was third. Internet Explorer (that's all IEs combined) is just 2.17%, which accounts for roughly 3,500 visits.
If you break IE down, 52.55% of IE hits were from IE9, with 33% of hits coming from IE8. IE10 was responsible for 6.6% of IE hits, and IE7 responsible for 5.5%, about 200 hits. IE6 had just 1.12%, which works out as just 40 visits. I guess with this blog being very much developer focused, there was always going to be a bias towards "modern" browsers. When I redesign the site next - whenever that might be - I will continue to support IE8+ but not look below that.
Operating Systems
No surprise that Windows is the top OS used, with 42% of visits. However, I was surprised to see that Mac was 34% and Linux 12%, meaning between them the Unix OS's outnumber Windows. Again, this is perhaps down to the audience of the blog. iOS had 3.74% of views, Android 2.73%.
Of the Windows hits, 79% were from Windows 7, with 14% from XP and 3% from Vista. Just 0.52% came from Windows 8. On the Mac front, 58% were from 10.7 (Lion), 21% from 10.8 (Mountain Lion) and 18.6% from 10.6 (Snow Leopard).
Blog Stats
Lets leave the Analytics behind and move on to post statistics. I wrote a total of 44 blog posts in the 9 months of the site being in existance, which is just under 5 per month. It wasn't steady though, a lot of those posts were in the first 3 months, before I was approached to write a book. With the book taking up a lot of time, at times it was months between posts going live, which is a shame. With the book now out of the way, I'm hoping in 2013 to average at least 4 posts per month, and hopefully do a few more as well. 4 per month is my baseline though.
In terms of commenting, I recently swapped from the in-built commenting system to Disqus. This did lose a lot of comments, but Disqus is a much nicer system and allows discussions to form easier.
Thanks and Goals
A few thanks are required here before I end. Firstly to Toby Howarth, who provided me with the design you see right now when I was starting out. He's now available for hire, so if you're looking for a designer I'd recommend giving him a shout. I also want to thank the number of people who have posted links to blog posts on Twitter, Hacker News and so on, in particular Elijah Manor, who has tweeted most of my articles.
In terms of goals for next year, I've got a few:
- Average 4 posts per month minimum.
- Get better at posting code from blog posts - set up a JSPlayground account on Github for it all to go in.
- Make sure I reply to any questions in the comments as they come in.
- Look into a "pro" area, or some form of members area, to try and bring in a small amount of money in from the site (it's unlikely this will happen this year though to be honest).
- Continue to grow the blog, and aim to hit 500,000 page views in the year 2013 alone (essentially double what I managed in the past 9 months).
- Release more screencasts. I like doing them a lot, but I've only found the time to do two so far. Out of the 4 posts per month, I hope one of them can be a screencast.
Bring on 2013!