I’ve taken a small break from blogging last year (and the year previously). The previous “stats” in this blog dated back from 2010, so it’s time for an update and some self-reflection.
While the year technically hasn’t ended, the off-by-one (day) statistics won’t make that big of a different.
I started blogging actively again since October this year, the peak is very visible in the graphs. In total, I had 144.978 sessions on this blog which resulted in 170.951 pageviews, or around 1.18 pages per session. This is to be expected, as most of the traffic to this blog comes via Google for very specific search terms. Either the page the visitor lands on provides the solution, or it doesn’t – there’s very little navigation.
In terms of pageviews, the graph looks like this.
The same October peak is clearly visible. Compared to the previous year, I can see a decline in the first months (since I wasn’t active then) and a revival near the end of the year (orange = stats from 2013, blue = stats from 2014).
Most of my visitors are obviously technical, I don’t blog about anything else (mostly) on this blog. So it doesn’t surprise me to see the Chrome and Firefox browser share take up a combined 80% of the stats. I did have to google Maxthon, though.
Those numbers did make it easier for me to implement custom CSS and JavaScript, as it limited the number of browsers I needed to test.
So which were the most viewed posts? Here’s the top 6.
- 6.601x: How To Reset A (Administrator) Password On A Windows Server 2003
- 6.400x: A better way to run PHP-FPM
- 5.590x: Increase A VMware Disk Size (VMDK) Formatted As Linux LVM without rebooting
- 5.050x: MySQL: “Table ‘mysql.plugin’ doesn’t exist” after MySQL Upgrade
- 4.862x: Patch your webservers for the SSLv3 POODLE vulnerability (CVE-2014-3566)
- 4.160x HHVM versus PHP-FPM 5.4 vs PHP-FPM 5.5: performance comparison
I’m sad to see the old Windows 2003 password post still in the top, especially since the content of that post is … well … outdated, and not even very helpful. I’m also glad to see some of the newer posts jumping to the top of the list, especially the HHVM vs PHP-FPM performance benchmark (which is the reason I made it a top 6 list, instead of a top 5).
My recent rant on switching software stacks even got Theo de Raadt to comment, It’s just a shame he disagrees with all I say. But that’s what opinions are for.
I’m happy with these numbers and equally happy with the increased responses I’ve received on this blog. This year, I changed the layout of the blog to be more minimalistic, switched domains from mattiasgeniar.be to ma.ttias.be and went full HTTPS on the site, with all the troubles that come with it (and the surprising act of “mixed content handling”).
At the same time, I moved away from the /YYYY/MM/post-title URL scheme to a more simplified one, without the date structure – just /post-title URI’s. Those changes will surely have had a negative impact on the SEO (even with 301 HTTP redirects). I’ll see how the stats progress throughout 2015.
Since I’ve found new joy in blogging and figuring out technical topics to write about, I think my new years resolution will be to keep blogging actively!