Two Years of Blogging

Holy smokes! It has now been two years since I started this blog. It seems almost like yesterday when I posted the "A Year of Blogging" article. And now it's two! With this post I'd like to celebrate the 2nd birthday and share various interesting statistics that I managed to gather.

During this year (July 20, 2008 - July 26, 2009) I wrote 55 posts, which received around 1000 comments. According to StatCounter and Google Analytics my blog was visited by 1,050,000 unique people who viewed 1,700,000 pages. Wow, 1 million visitors! That's very impressive!

Here is a Google Analytics graph of monthly page views for the last year (click for a larger version):

In the last three months I did not manage to write much and you can see how that reflected on the page views. A good lesson to be learned is to be persistent and keep writing articles consistently.

Here is the same graph with two years of data, showing a complete picture of my blog's growth:

I like this seemingly linear growth. I hope it continues the same way the next year!

Here are the top 5 referring sites that my visitors came from:

• reddit (292,147 visitors).
• stumbleupon (69,575 visitors).
• hacker news (47,595 visitors).
• delicious (27,109 visitors).
• dzone (15,898 visitors).

And here are the top 5 referring blogs:

• Scott Klarr's blog (7,848 visitors).
• My Free Science Online blog (6,284 visitors).
• Eric Wendelin's blog (1,693 visitors).
• Andy Lester's PerlBuzz blog (1,356 visitors).
• Jurgen Appelo's blog (1,001 visitors)

I found that just a handful of blogs had linked to me during this year. The main reason, I suspect, is that I do not link out much myself... It's something to improve upon.

If you remember, I ended the last year's post with the following words (I had only 1000 subscribers at that time):

I am setting myself a goal of reaching 5000 subscribers by the end of the next year of blogging (July 2009)! I know that this is very ambitious goal but I am ready to take the challenge!

I can proudly say that I reached my ambitious goal! My blog now has almost 7000 subscribers! If you have not yet subscribed, click here to do it!

Here is the RSS subscriber graph for the whole two years:

Several months ago I approximated the subscriber data with an exponent function and it produced a good fit. Probably if I had continued writing articles at the same pace I did three months ago, I'd have over 10,000 subscribers now.

Anyway, let's now turn to the top 10 most viewed posts:

• 1. My job interview experience at Google (144,400 views).
• 2. A Unix Utility You Should Know About: Pipe Viewer (124,570 views)
• 3. Code Reuse in Google Chrome Browser (115,750 views).
• 4. Awk One-Liners Explained, Part I (87,721 views).
• 5. MIT Introduction to Algorithms, Part I: Analysis of Algorithms (79,536 views).
• 6. A Unix Utility You Should Know About: Netcat (51,354 views).
• 7. Sed One-Liners Explained, Part I (49,068 views).
• 8. Vim Plugins You Should Know About, Part I: surround.vim (41,388 views).
• 9. 10 Awk Tips, Tricks and Pitfalls (29,689 views).
• 10. Low Level Bit Hacks You Absolutely Must Know (22,916 views).

The article that I liked the most myself but which didn't make it to top ten was the "Set Operations in Unix Shell". I just love this Unix stuff I did there.

I am also very proud for the following three article series that I wrote:

• 1. Review of MIT's Introduction to Algorithms course (14 parts).
• 2. Awk One-Liners Explained (4 parts: 1, 2, 3, 4).
• 3. Sed One-Liners Explained (3 parts: 1, 2, 3)

Finally, here is a list of ideas that I have thought for the third year of blogging:

• Publish three e-books on Awk One-Liners, Sed One-Liners and Perl One-Liners.
• Launch mathematics, physics and general science blog.
• Write about mathematical foundations of cryptography and try to implement various cryptosystems and cryptography protocols.
• Publish my review of MIT's Linear Algebra course (in math blog, so the main topic of catonmat stays computing).
• Publish my review of MIT's Physics courses on Mechanics, Electromagnetism, and Waves (in physics blog).
• Publish my notes on how I learned the C++ language.
• Write more about computer security and ethical hacking.
• Write several book reviews.
• Create a bunch of various fun utilities and programs.
• Create at least one useful web project.
• Add a knowledge database to catonmat, create software to allow easy publishing to it.
• If time allows, publish reviews of important computer science publications.

I'll document everything here as I go, so if you are interested in these topics stay with me by subscribing to my rss feed!

And to make things more challenging again, I am setting a new goal for the next year of blogging. The goal is to reach 20,000 subscribers by July 2010!

Hope to see you all on my blog again! Now it's time for this delicious cake: