January 1, 2014

2013 in Review

Last year I wrote a post about the JS Playground in 2012, and I thought it would be nice to write a similar one reviewing 2013.

So, I delved into Google Analytics and did some snooping.

Visitors

The site had 153,771 visits, from 109,282 unique visitors. This is slightly more than in 2012, which had 104,280 uniques, but then again the site only existed from April 2012, so it's not exactly fair to compare.

There were 221,217 pageviews, which is actually less than the 246,878 achieved in the 9 months of 2012. This reflects the fact that the posting rate has dropped significantly in 2013, for reasons I'll discuss later. 70.25% of the visits were new visits.

Browsers

Unsurprisingly given its content, Chrome was the most popular browser by some way. Of the 153,771 visits, Chrome made up a huge 104,169 of them. Second was Firefox with 25,654, then Safari with 13,927. Internet Explorer accounted for just 3,886 visits.

Blogging

There were 31 new blog posts in 2013. This is down hugely from 44 in 2012, and is a large reason in my mind that the site hasn't quite continued to grow as I would have liked. I put this down partly to writing a book, although that was finished by February 2013, and down to transitioning at work into doing a lot more Ruby work (I was primarily a Ruby developer), and doing little JavaScript daily. This didn't give me tonnes of ideas for content. In the second half of 2013, my University studies really took over any time I would usually dedicate to JavaScript Playground.

Back in 2012 I said I was hoping for 4 posts per month in 2013, which I fell well short of. I am hoping that 2014 should be a bit calmer, but given that the first 6 months will be spent finishing a Computer Science degree, we'll see.

Thanks and Goals

As always, a huge thanks to everyone who shares the articles online, it's hugely appreciated. I've also managed to get some other people to contribute to the post, so thanks to Tom Ashworth and Gabor Javorszky for their contributions. I would like to have more guests writing in 2014 (partly to try to up that blog post rate!), so if you'd like to contribute, please drop me a line.

Thanks also to the duo of Ben Howdle and Martin Bean, who were responsible for the lovely new design. Ben did the design, and Martin converted it into HTML and CSS. Many thanks to the both of you :)

As for goals, the main one is to hit 500,000 visits before the JavaScript Playground turns 2 years old, which is on April 8th. The site currently sits on 460k, so I hope that if I can get a few posts out we can hit 500k+.

Most Popular Posts

The posts that got the most visits in 2013 were:

Topics

As always, I am always more than welcome to suggestions for topics, a particular library you'd like me to write about, anything that you're struggling with or something you'd like to see clarified. Please get in touch, and here's to 2014! Thanks as always for reading.